Medieval Anti-Semitism in England

[Gerald]

Interesting article from next month's 'History Today' magazine about Medieval Anti-Semitism in England. I have underlined the sentence that mentions the role of Theobald a convert whose 'insider' knowledge is used to support the claims made against the Jews.

June 2010 | Volume: 60 Issue: 6 | Page 48-54 | Words: 3186 | Author: Miri Rubin
Medieval Anti-Semitism: Making a Martyr: William of Norwich and the Jews
The murder of a 12-year-old boy in Norwich in 1144 inspired Thomas of Monmouth, a monk from the city’s cathedral, to create an anti-semitic account of the incident. His influential work reveals much about life and belief in medieval England, argues Miri Rubin.
In August 1891 M. R. James (1862-1936), the scholar and author of ghost stories, wrote to Augustus Jessopp, honorary canon of Norwich, about an exciting acquisition recently made by the Cambridge University Library. The manuscript contained three lives of saints and a tract on the Mass. The first – copied over 77 folios of parchment – opened with a caption in red letters: Incipit prologus de vita et passione Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis (‘Here begins the prologue to the life and passion of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich’). James recognised the significance of the find, for this was the long-lost account of the life of a 12-year-old boy whose alleged martyrdom in 1144 had been claimed by his family and whose cult had developed soon after in and around Norwich Cathedral Priory. Jessopp wrote excitedly in return:

The chances are that the discovery of this manuscript will throw some light upon the whole cycle of stories about Jews crucifying or otherwise slaying Christian boys in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Composed at least six years after the discovery of the boy’s body, the Life and Passion was the product of the determined effort of one man, Thomas of Monmouth, monk of the Norwich Cathedral Priory, to provide a definitive account of William’s death as a martyr at the hands of the Jews of Norwich. Such a claim had no precedent in mid-12th century England and Thomas attempted to support it with irrefutable evidence of William’s merit through the miracles worked at his tomb. Thomas’s complaint resounded: William was a martyr killed by the Jews and had been grievously ignored by the people of Norwich; Thomas was a man with a mission to put this iniquity right and to see justice done.

In his attempt to develop the cult of William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth invented a fiction about a Jewish plot to kill a Christian boy that was to injure Jews for generations. The accusation of ritual murder is an English contribution to the stock of anti-Jewish narratives told in Europe since the 12th century, yet knowledge of it has all but faded from English consciousness. Embellished in the decades that followed, the ritual murder accusation gained a powerful hold in the culture of Christian Europe and remained part of Catholic lore even after it had all but disappeared from Protestant countries. With the spread of Christian culture to other continents, the myth that Jews ritually sacrificed children took root in versions of antisemitism across the world. It still resounds in neo-Nazi and some anti-semitic Arabic publications.

The Jews in Norwich
Situated on the river Wensum, Norwich was conveniently placed for commerce with north-west Europe. By the mid-12th century, with a flourishing export trade of manufactured metal and pottery goods and strong links with Rouen in Normandy, the city’s population had reached nearly 10,000.

The arrival of the Jews in Norwich just a few years before the death of the boy William, reflected the city’s growing prosperity. At the time of his death the Jews were one of several groups that made up the complex social web of the city. They were associated with the French-speaking quarter to the west and south of the market place where people of Norman extraction had settled. They lent money to rural landowners and to religious houses and interacted with artisans, probably including young workers like William, in a variety of ways. They paid their taxes and tallages to the sheriff and maintained lively contact with Jews of other English cities and those on the Continent.

By the time Thomas of Monmouth moved to Norwich around 1150 a story was already in circulation, spread by William’s family, of the boy’s cruel death at the hands of the Jews. A sufficient amount of interest in William had been generated for his body to be removed from its first burial site in woodland to a more prominent location in the monks’ cemetery on the east side of the Cathedral Priory cloister. A number of miracles were alleged to have taken place at his new tomb but these assertions had not received the support necessary for the establishment of an official cult. Struck by the untapped potential to boost the reputation of his monastery, Thomas took up the case. He visited the relevant sites, interviewed witnesses and diligently investigated reports of the miracles.

What had really happened to the boy William? Historical insight is complicated by the fact that Thomas’s Life and Passion is the only substantial source about the boy and his family. There is no independent evidence beyond it. Polemical, repetitious and vindictive, the Life and Passion is a challenging document. The sections in which the Jews are accused of ritual murder appear early in the work in Books I and II. The remaining three quarters of its 44,000 Latin words are devoted to recording the miracles that occurred at William’s tomb between 1144 and 1172 when Thomas set the seal on his work.

In typical hagiographical manner William is presented as a pleasant and pious village boy. At the age of eight he came to Norwich, where he had some relatives, to learn the skinner’s trade. We are told that on Friday, March 23rd, 1144 a forest worker, Henry of Sprouston, discovered the body of a boy wearing only a jacket and shoes in Thorpe Wood, just to the east of the city across the river Wensum. Since the Easter festivities beckoned, Henry delayed the treatment of the body three days until Monday when he returned to the location and buried it. He was not the only person to discover the corpse; a pious woman, Lady Ledgarda, was allegedly drawn to the spot by an emanation of light as she returned through the wood from a visit to the nearby leper house of St Mary Magdalene.

Had William been missed? Was his family already searching for him? We will never know. Rumours of the discovery reached Norwich and soon after William’s uncle, Godwin Sturt, a married priest, and his son Alexander went to the wood where they exhumed and identified the body. Thomas describes pitiful scenes of distress after William’s mother and aunt learned the news. At some point Godwin Sturt suggested that the manner of death was suspicious and bits of gossip combined to support his claim that William had been enticed to a Jewish house on Passover where he was killed after a series of tortures.

Easter week was a particularly busy time in this period for priests and lay people alike. The city was abuzz as people travelled to Norwich from the surrounding villages to witness the celebrations, with liturgies, processions and preaching in the cathedral and numerous city churches. One important gathering was the Easter synod to which the clergy of the diocese were summoned. Dignitaries from further afield who happened to be in Norwich on business also attended. Chaired by the bishop, this was an occasion at which important news was disseminated, such as innovations in canon law, new feasts and liturgical practices and warnings about misguided conduct by the clergy. At the 1144 synod Godwin Sturt stood up to raise his accusation against the city’s Jews.

Since all business relating to the Jews was handled by the king’s representative, sheriff John de Chesney was summoned to respond to the accusation. According to Thomas, the sheriff offered the Jews protection in Norwich Castle, his headquarters and the symbol of royal authority within the city. No Jew was harmed. Thomas does not allow this fact to stand, however. He claims that the Jews had bribed the sheriff to act on their behalf in the affair. Indeed Thomas calls him defensor judaeorum – protector of the Jews. He suggests that subsequently several Jews left Norwich and met their ends in terrible deaths; those who stayed were also punished, like the Jew Eleazar, whose house had been made the scene of the alleged crime, and who was later found murdered. Thomas also observes pointedly that de Chesney’s death around 1146 was long and painful, a sign of God’s punishment for his protection of the Jews. During the sheriff’s death throes, Thomas describes a terrible flux of blood issuing from his anus in a manner reminiscent of Judas’s end. The association with the Crucifixion is poignant. Thomas paraphrases Matthew 27:25 (‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’): ‘The innocent blood is upon us and our children.’

Developing the myth
Thomas created a convoluted narrative according to which the Jews had gained access to William by offering him work through an intermediary who entreated and bribed the boy’s mother until she relented. William worked and ate in the house of one of the Jews until Passover when, after worship in synagogue, he was taken, gagged, trussed, hung, pierced in the head and ultimately killed. The Jews then concealed his body and transported it to a shallow grave in woods outside the city. Thomas’s investigations succeeded in finding witnesses too: the girl who served William’s aunt and a man who saw the Jews entering the forest with a bulky weight shaped like a body.


There is, however, no evidence that any violence against the Jews of Norwich followed as a result of Sturt’s accusation; the king’s authority was wielded in protection of the Jews and no process was initiated concerning the body of the boy. Had it been, the evidence of a ‘Norman’ procedure for investigation would have been clearer. But the affair was not over. With the Life and Passion Thomas of Monmouth created a myth that associated Jews with the collective intention of killing a Christian child every year in a ritualised manner. He claims as his source for this ‘insider’ knowledge a Jewish convert, Theobald. Certainly, later accusations often invoked converts as informants about misdeeds Jews were meant to have committed.

The Jews were not the sole target of Thomas’s self-righteous indignation. In the course of his defence of William’s virtue he takes issue with those who doubted the boy’s sanctity and lists seven common opinions voiced by detractors. These are interesting for what they reveal about contemporary concerns regarding religious practices. For example, among those objections to William’s cult, Thomas identifies the doubt that some expressed that a ragged boy (panosus) might be chosen for his sanctity. This description of William is misleading, for Thomas describes his family as settled in a village near Norwich; it was of Anglo-Saxon stock, but also well connected with members in the city and among the clergy. Its sons had French names – William and Robert – and this may indicate that the parents entertained social ambitions for them.

The argument against William’s cult shows physical poverty was not yet seen as a positive attribute of sanctity. Indeed, the ideal of religious poverty, imitative of the lives of Jesus and the Apostles and long the model of monastic life, was still uncommon among European lay people. It would be exemplified most effectively by Francis of Assisi (born in the early 1180s) and his followers in the 13th century. At the time the Life and Passion was written England’s most important martyrs and its young saints were either of royal descent or particularly pious in their religious, monastic lives. None were child workers.


Another objection recorded by Thomas concerned William’s obscurity beyond Norwich. Who would be drawn to the city to venerate so simple a martyr of so little renown? Thomas counters forcefully that neither St Cuthbert nor the king and martyr Edmund were known in Greece and Palestine and yet they were undoubtedly great English saints who attracted pilgrims from afar. An interesting question arises here, regarding the degree of diversity and regional variation the Church was willing and able to tolerate. The first post-Conquest Archbishop of Canterbury, the ecclesiastical legislator Lanfranc (1070-89), sought to bring England into line with the Continental practices authorised and disseminated from Rome. He attempted to make English Christians share in the liturgy, procession and worship practised by other Europeans. He worked hard to uproot the cults of obscure saints and promoted those of St Peter and the Virgin. Indeed, the lives of saints written most frequently in 12th-century England were those of the well-established Barbara, Nicholas and Catherine. While nearby Bury St Edmunds had a long cultic tradition of venerating a king and martyr, the boy William’s cult in Norwich was supported by modest lay people and headed by Sturt, a highly involved relative. There was clearly a section of the ecclesiastical establishment in post-Conquest England – most likely with representatives in Norwich Cathedral Priory – that distrusted and discouraged the proliferation of local saints by popular acclamation.

The impact of the martyrdom
To understand the significance of the Life and Passion we must think back to a time before Europeans were familiar with ritual murder accusations or other anti-Jewish narratives. Jews were associated with the Crucifixion, of course, and were the victims of violence in the wake of highly charged crusades which aimed to conquer the land of Christ’s Sepulchre. The violence against Jews in the course of the First Crusade (1095-99) and to a lesser extent during the Second (1147-49) did not involve England, however. Although some English writings were composed in polemical confrontation with Judaism – like those of Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster (c. 1045-1117) and Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033-1109) – there is no evidence of actual suspicion and fear towards Jews. Yet an increased attention to Jewish difference and a desire to mark them apart from Christians can be traced to the decades of the mid-12th century. By the 1160s, Continental images of the Crucifixion began to show the tormentors of Christ as Jews (rather than Romans or unspecified Orientals), while English collections of pastoral materials and miracle tales included stories which also were anti-Jewish.

The force of Thomas of Monmouth’s narrative lay in imagining the respectable Jewish citizens of Norwich as fiendish participants in a conspiracy that involved all who shared the Jewish faith, which targeted a Norwich boy and sought to shame the Christian God. There seems to be a great disparity between the few Jewish families in the city and the menace they came to represent.


Thomas may have been inspired not only by the vision of the Cathedral Priory as a renowned centre of pilgrimage, but by the lively literature of historical legend which was being produced in Britain at the time, both in the west, from whence he came, and the east, his new home. An exciting new wave of literature and liturgy, of miracle tales and new feasts of the Virgin Mary was permeating monastic circles. Much of this material was adapted and updated from early medieval stories, born in the eastern Mediterranean. Among these are several about abusive Jews: some who tortured a waxen figure of Jesus, fathers acting cruelly against their own children, desecrating an image of the Virgin and more. Rewritten in British monasteries, these stories increasingly emphasised the power of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, Mary’s miracles often elaborated the links between children and mothers and build upon the knowledge that Mary herself witnessed the death – albeit brief – of her son. The Life and Passion is redolent with the presence of the Virgin Mary. There is a biblical undertone that echoes the description of Jesus’s birth in Luke 2:21 (‘and his name was called Jesus’); when William is born Thomas writes:

A son was born to a woman, and his name was called William. He was born on the day of the Purification of the Mother of God and Virgin Mary, that is, on the Candlemas (Purification).

Thomas records how a sick man called Lewin from the Fens around Ely had a vision in Easter week 1144 of being transported to heaven. He saw there God in majesty, the Virgin on his right and at God’s feet the 12-year-old boy, dressed in white, his face bright and his head crowned. Lewin was informed that the boy was he ‘whom the Norwich Jews slew in mockery and scorn of the Lord’s passion during this holy season’. At another key moment, around 1150, when William’s body was moved from the monks’ cemetery into the safer location within the priory’s chapter house, Mary’s words at the Visitation (which became the important canticle, the Magnificat) were used to endorse the honour; they are cited from Luke 1:52: ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble’.


Understanding the legacy
The anti-Jewish narrative that Thomas of Monmouth developed from the earlier, local rumours was thus the product of a religious sensibility unique to the decades after 1150. These were also years of political unrest during the contested reign of King Stephen (r. 1135-54). They saw a new and successful Jewish community established in Norwich, a cathedral seeking its place on the map of great ecclesiastical institutions and new strains of piety moving from monasteries to cities and their parishes. The ritual murder accusation was the creation of a man who saw the city and its possibilities afresh, as newcomers often do, and used his Jewish fellow newcomers as scapegoats.


The ‘martyrdom’ of William of Norwich has occupied a distinctive place in the annals of Jewish history. It gained iconic status as the source of subsequent anti-Jewish narratives: blood libels, host desecration, well poisoning, medical malpractice, conspiracies to desecrate images and more. This contribution by a British monk to the repertoire of Christian tales reveals a great deal about community life and religious practice just a few generations after the Norman Conquest. It is time to treat the British story of William of Norwich as one which grew in the fertile soil of 12th-century Norwich. Only once that has been done can we hope to understand better how stories of abuse, of exclusion and blame, have come into being in other places and at other times.


Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London. Research has been facilitated by the AHRC Network Youth, Violence and Cult: for the case of William of Norwich, see: http://yvc.history.qmul.ac.uk

Further Reading

Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James (eds), The Life and Miracles of Saint William of Norwich (Cambridge UP, 1896); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich’, Speculum 78 (2004), pp. 26-65; Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (Yale UP, 1988); Gavin Langmuir, ‘Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder’, in Towards a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley UP), 1999), pp. 209-36; John M. McCulloch, ‘Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth’, Speculum 72 (1997), pp. 698-740.

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