148 Leech

Chapter 6 The Corpse of Public Opinion: Thomas of , Anti-Semitism, and Christian Identity

Mary E. Leech

The story of Hugh of Lincoln is the best-known hagiographic legend of a saintly boy allegedly murdered by . Invoked in Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale and used as the topic of ballads collected as late as the nineteenth century,1 Hugh’s story grew out of an established institution of anti-Judaic sentiment and the profitability of boy-martyr cults. By the time little Hugh of Lincoln was vener- ated as a in the mid-thirteenth century, the cults of boy presumably murdered by Jews through violent anti-Christian rituals were long established both in England and on the Continent.2 While the myth of ritual murder of Christians by Jews had been around for centuries,3 it was the hagiography of William of Norwich (d. 1144), written by Thomas of Monmouth, that laid the social and legal foundations for accusing specific Jewish communities of a spe- cific murder. By manipulating the narrative of William’s corpse, Thomas creates a saint’s body through which he establishes a cult; motivated by greed, social rivalry and religious identity, other communities used Thomas’s work to form narratives for the corpses of boys murdered violently in order to generate

1 This tale is motif #155 in Francis James Childs’ The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York, 1965). There are numerous ballads collected about Hugh of Lincoln, including an Anglo- Norman ballad (based on an Italian legend) that may have been a source for Chaucer’s tale. Michel Francisque, Hugues de Lincoln: Recueil de Ballades Anglo-Normande et Ecossoises Relatives Au Meurtre de Cet Enfant Commes par les Juifs MCCLV (Paris, 1834). 2 Montague Rhodes James lists the most prominent of the English and French boys presumably murdered by Jews in his chapter “The Legend” in The Life and of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge, 1896), lxxiv-lxxvii. 3 Jessopp cites a possible fifth-century source for a story of ritual murder of Christians by Jews. Jessopp states, “The original story of the Jews of Inmestar who were punished by magistrates on the charge of beating a boy to death in the fifth century is to be found in the ecclesiastical history of Socrates, who was alive at the time of the [alleged] occurrence.” Augustus Jessopp, “The Norwich Jews,” in The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge, 1896), xl.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004358331_008 The Corpse of Public Opinion 149 similar local cults.4 Through his hagiography of William, Thomas establishes a pattern that became the standard for explaining similar deaths of boys in sub- sequent hagiographies.5 While anti-Judaic sentiments fostered these tales, there was also a base eco- nomic motivation on the part of local communities in which the tales flourished and produced a sensational martyr as a local saint.6 William of Norwich’s hagiography, begun by Thomas several years after William’s death, is as much a propaganda piece justifying William’s saintliness as it is a marketing campaign for his tomb at Norwich, with Thomas as the administrator of William’s cult. Throughout the hagiography of William, Thomas aligns local stories of the boy’s death with the sanctity and miraculous events associated with sainthood. Thomas’s desire to promote the cult of William and to pro- mote himself as the cult’s custodian required a hook to attract his audience’s attention, and that hook was the myth of Jewish ritual murder. Despite Thomas’s best attempts to validate that myth, there is no evidence in the hagi- ography that the Norwich Jews – or any Jews – had anything to do with the murder. However, by inscribing a hagiographic narrative onto William’s corpse and thereby rewriting the body as a surrogate for Christ’s, Thomas evokes a

4 Historian Joe Hillaby explains the connection of William’s murder to the death of Harold of Gloucester and the deaths of other boys that followed. According to Hillaby, although the cult of Harold did not flourish, it did demonstrate that the deaths of boys, particularly around Easter, could be presented to the public as ritual murders or “blood libels,” thus popularizing boy-martyr cults and spreading such notions outward and into Europe. “The Ritual-Child- Murder Accusation: Its Dissemination and Harold of Gloucester,” Jewish Historical Studies 34 (1994-1996): 74-77. 5 The hagiographies of Harold of Gloucester and Robert of Bury St. Edmunds do not survive. The story of Robert is recounted by Rev. H. Copinger Hill in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute for Archaeology & History XXI Pt. 2 (1932), along with mentions of Harold, William, Hugh, and an unknown boy in Winchester. At the end of the piece is a ballad about Robert, taken from MS Laud 683. Bury St. Edmunds already had a thriving cult for their namesake, St. Edmund, who is invoked in the ballad, but used the death of Robert to build another cult for the town. 6 The economic benefits of relics, saints’ tombs, and pilgrimages are discussed in a variety of sources. Hillaby states that “England and indeed Europe had precious few new martyrs in the twelfth century as the extraordinary success of the cult of St. Thomas in Canterbury shows.” “The Ritual-Child-Murder,” 69-70. Also see Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central (Princeton, NJ, 1978), 25-27, and Thomas A. Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (New York, 2004). Among other things, Prendergast discusses the activities of pilgrimages and the economic benefits derived from pilgrimages in the coda of the book, 141-146.