This reliquary casket, or châsse, was made to contain a holy relic of the English saint Thomas Becket (ca. 1120‒1170), an archbishop of Canterbury murdered by the knights of King Henry II. With his sainthood, Becket’s tomb became a center of pilgrimage, and dozens of caskets were made to hold his relics: bones, teeth, blood, clothing, and so on. These reliquaries typically took the form of a house with gabled ends, decorated in colored enamels with scenes of Becket’s murder and entombment. The relic this casket once contained is lost today.