Disir
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Life wasn’t terribly fair to Thomas Becket. In December 1170, after a lifetime of steadfast service as first chancellor to the king and then archbishop of Canterbury, the medieval Englishman was brutally beheaded by a troop of knights loyal to an embittered Henry II.
Nearly a millennium later, samples retrieved from a glacier in the Swiss Alps have revealed evidence of the squabble that hastened Becket’s demise: a plunge in the production of lead—a building material used in water pipes, stained glass and church roofs, among other architectural structures—borne out by the fallout between the church and the crown, which refused to support religious construction projects unless the archbishop accepted the king’s supremacy. After Becket’s murder, the ice reveals, lead use rose sharply again, testifying to Henry’s hasty scramble to redeem himself through the construction of a series of major monastic institutions.
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www.smithsonianmag.com
This is the part of this discovery that I like.
Nearly a millennium later, samples retrieved from a glacier in the Swiss Alps have revealed evidence of the squabble that hastened Becket’s demise: a plunge in the production of lead—a building material used in water pipes, stained glass and church roofs, among other architectural structures—borne out by the fallout between the church and the crown, which refused to support religious construction projects unless the archbishop accepted the king’s supremacy. After Becket’s murder, the ice reveals, lead use rose sharply again, testifying to Henry’s hasty scramble to redeem himself through the construction of a series of major monastic institutions.
The Fallout of a Medieval Archbishop's Murder Is Recorded in Alpine Ice
Traces of lead pollution frozen in a glacier confirm that British lead production waned just before the death of Thomas Becket
www.smithsonianmag.com
This is the part of this discovery that I like.
