Edward Grim had fame thrust upon him. He was a visitor to Canterbury who found himself present in the cathedral on 29 December 1170. As the murderers bore down on Thomas nearly all his monks and clerks, including a number of his future biographers, fled in fear, but this visiting clerk stood by him. In attempting to block the first of the knights' blows he almost had his arm severed, and this act of bravery earned Grim a special place in the recounting of Thomas's martyrdom, and features in many pictorial representations of it. But Grim also made his own fame. His Vita S. Thomae, while neither the most valuable as a historical record nor as a work of literature, is one of the most important. It was written early, its first recension being completed by 1171 or 1172. Since Grim witnessed only the end of Thomas's life and depended on others for most of his information, his Life gives us a sense of how Thomas's life and death were being recounted in the immediate aftermath of the murder. Furthermore, Grim's Life was very influential, finding echoes in many of the Lives under discussion and providing the framework for those by Guernes of Pont-St-Maxence and Anonymous I. Neither of these writers knew Thomas well either, but both built on Grim's narrative to produce works which are in some ways superior: in Guernes's case by employing research and adding his own opinions, and in the case of Anonymous I by making Grim's narrative more fluent and polished.