Pilgrimage Shrines Destroyed

1538

Commissioners dispatched by Thomas Cromwell smashed the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, the greatest pilgrimage site in England. Gold, jewels, and the saint's bones were hauled away. Throughout England, images were defaced and relics burned. The medieval landscape of English piety was being methodically unmade. Becket's shrine, which had drawn pilgrims for three and a half centuries, symbolized the Reformation's assault on the medieval economy of sacred relics.