Office and Liturgy of St Thomas Becket (Sarum Use — Feast 29 December)
Officium Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris
Iacet granum oppressum palea, sed cribro mundatum fulget ut sol in patientia sua.
Our renderingThe grain lies crushed beneath the chaff, but cleansed by the sieve it shines like the sun in its patience.
What it is
Following Becket's martyrdom in 1170 and his canonization in 1173, a formal liturgical office was composed — probably by Benedict of Peterborough around 1173–74 — and rapidly incorporated into the Sarum Use, the standard rite of southern England. Henry II performed public penance at Becket's shrine in 1174, the most dramatic act of royal penitence in medieval English history, and every subsequent Plantagenet king was associated with the cult; every royal chapel would have sung this office at Christmas-tide. The liturgy draws on vivid imagery of wheat and chaff in its responsories, constructing the martyr's death as a purifying act rather than a defeat. Its influence extended across France and the wider Latin church, making it one of the most internationally distributed English liturgical texts of the Middle Ages.
Why it still matters
The Becket office is still used in Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communities on 29 December; its responsory imagery of the grain purified through suffering makes it an apt prayer for any season of personal or institutional testing, and the texts are accessible in modern editions of the Sarum Breviary.
Kept alongside
Orthodox Psalter (Chasoslovnyi Psaltyr)
Псалтирь
The complete Psalter, divided into twenty kathismata, was read through weekly at Orthodox services and served as the foundational personal devotional text across the entire Romanov era and the whole of Byzantine-Slavic Christianity. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich kept the Psalter among his personal desk-books alongside the Horologion, as documented by the Presidential Library of Russia. Empress Alexandra's Bible in Church Slavonic, recovered at Ekaterinburg with underlined passages and dried herbs pressed between pages, testifies to the Psalter's intimate daily use during captivity. The Psalter was also the primary text from which the Romanov children learned to read Church Slavonic.
Te Deum laudamus
The great Latin hymn of praise and thanksgiving, performed at Napoleon's coronation Mass by Paisiello on 2 December 1804, at his Italian coronation in Milan on 26 May 1805, and ordered sung in all diocesan churches after each major imperial victory. Napoleon issued formal letters mandating the Te Deum after key battles, and Jean-François Le Sueur composed a solemn setting for the imperial court chapel. The attribution to Nicetas of Remesiana, long standard, was conclusively challenged by Ernst Kähler in 1958 and the hymn is now considered anonymous; its late 4th-century date and Ambrosian stylistic milieu are not in dispute. The text moves from the praise of the heavenly court to intercession for the Church militant, ending with a sustained sequence of psalm verses.
Seven Penitential Psalms
Septem Psalmi Poenitentiales
The Seven Penitential Psalms are a sub-group of the canonical Psalter — Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 (De Profundis), and 143 — collected by Cassiodorus and declared a standard Lenten devotion by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216). They appear in virtually every surviving royal and noble Book of Hours between 1250 and 1550 as a fixed section following the Office of the Virgin, and were also recited publicly by penitents in church. They express the sinner's plea for mercy and forgiveness across the full range of human distress — sickness, sin, shame, desolation — and were believed to shorten souls' time in Purgatory, giving them urgent personal relevance for nobility who prayed daily for deceased family members. Their presence across every corner of medieval European devotional practice makes them the most universally transmitted prayer texts in the entire Books of Hours tradition.