On the back cover of the book that accompanies the British Museum’s exhibition Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint the eminent medievalist Christopher de Hamel is quoted: ‘A marvellous and consistently enthralling account . . . its realisation during the time of latter-day plague is a further miracle attributable to the fame of the saint’.
Five bronze and iron bells from estates and plantations in Indonesia, Curaçao, Suriname, Guyana and South Africa represent the many bells throughout the world, the penetrating sounds of which marked the beginning of another day in slavery – in some parts of Indonesia far into the twentieth century.