The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (Penguin Classics) Read online

  Thomas of Monmouth

  THE LIFE AND PASSION OF WILLIAM OF NORWICH

  Translated and Edited by Miri Rubin

  Contents

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  THE LIFE AND PASSION OF WILLIAM OF NORWICH

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE LIFE AND PASSION OF WILLIAM OF NORWICH

  THOMAS OF MONMOUTH was a monk in Norwich Cathedral Priory in the mid-twelfth century, but nothing more is known about his life.

  MIRI RUBIN is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (1987), Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (1991), Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (1999), The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (2005), Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (2009) and Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (2009).

  For Christopher Brooke

  Introduction

  HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

  Tales in which Jews are the abusers or killers of Christian children appear in the most unexpected places. Around 1389 the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) has his Prioress, one of the Canterbury pilgrims, recount a horrific tale in which a Jew slits the throat of a singing schoolboy. The story is all the more horrific because it is told by a lady of refinement and piety; it is also all the more consoling because the boy miraculously continues to sing in praise of the Virgin Mary, even from his bleeding throat, from the depths of the privy into which he has been thrown. In ‘The Prioress’s Tale’ Chaucer elegantly combines two powerful narrative strands of medieval religious culture: child murder by Jews and miracles of the Virgin Mary.1 As the Prioress completes her tale, Chaucer stages her appeal to a boy long dead:

  O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also

  With cursed Jewes, as it is notable,

  For it is but a litel while ago,

  Preye eek for us, we synful folk unstable,

  That, of his mercy, God so merciable

  On us his grete mercy multiplie,

  For reverence of his mooder Marie. Amen.

  The Jews were accused of the killing of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255, after the boy went missing. Following the accusation by the boy’s mother and the efforts of John of Lexington, King Henry III’s steward, the Jew Copin of Lincoln was tried, made to confess, then dragged through Lincoln by horse to a place where he was hanged. Henry III’s visit to Lincoln lent the affair authority and prominence; the trial and execution in London of eighteen other Jews of Lincoln followed.2 The case of Hugh of Lincoln (whose body was eventually found down a well) was promoted by the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral, whose members had the boy buried near the sainted Bishop Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) and promoted his cult. This became a highly public affair, much reported by chroniclers, and made even more popular through the French ballade it inspired,3 so that a century and a half later Chaucer was able to invoke it, spoken by his Prioress.

  However, the first known accusation of a Jew murdering a child was made more than a century earlier in the English city of Norwich in 1144 and it contained many of the ingredients that would combine so fatefully in Lincoln. The body of a twelve-year-old boy called William was discovered in a wood outside the city. His relatives claimed he had been murdered by Jews. Following an appeal to the bishop, the sheriff was summoned to answer for the king’s Jews, who were in his charge. He must have been able to protect the Jews, since we hear of no trial or reprisals against them. William was buried outside the cathedral and achieved a limited fame. A few years later, around 1150, a more purposeful narrative about his death began to develop: the earlier parts of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, composed by the monk Thomas of Monmouth. The Life and Passion claims that every year around Passover Jews seek to identify, entrap, torture and kill a Christian child. This new idea gained some credence over the following decades in England and beyond.

  Circulated in Latin and later in the European vernaculars, versions of the story first told in the Life and Passion had a lasting and damaging effect. It was sometimes used as the basis for accusations against whole Jewish communities. In every century since it appeared it has been adapted and reused, right up to its grotesque appropriation by the Nazis.4

  The Life and Passion combines two cultural themes: the innocence of children and the imputed evil intent of Jews towards Christians, particularly their desire to re-enact the Crucifixion. In later centuries other fantasies were added to the child-murder narrative: it was said that Jews used Christian blood for baking matzo, the Passover bread; or that they circumcised the Christian child before bleeding it to death, and so on. But these ideas were the product of other times and other places. Such notions – which came into play with great inventiveness during a child-murder trial at Trent in 1475 – share some of the elements that characterized accusations against witches in the later Middle Ages, and sometimes Jews were tried by the very same inquisitors.5

  Of all the accusations brought against Jews, child murder was the most horrific. Over the centuries many Christian writers included such tales in their polemics against Jews and Judaism.6 Catholic and Protestant writers (mostly clergymen) compiled lists in Latin and in vernacular languages of abuses by Jews. Sometimes these writings informed the composition of sermons or the iconography of works of art and thereby fed the popular imagination. In the nineteenth century a more diverse group of writers contributed to the discussion, and this is when Jewish historians began to subject these accusations to proper scrutiny.

  With the discovery of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich and its publication in 1896 by Cambridge University Press7 a new stage in the study of the child-murder accusation began.8 The text was ignored by historians of medieval England,9 but it proved useful to those studying Jewish history. This was still a relatively new subject, emerging in the mid-nineteenth century from academic circles in Central Europe. History, literature and philosophy merged in a new discipline: the Wissenschaft des Judenthums (Jewish Studies), which was influenced by general trends in academic scholarship.10 One of its aims was to establish ‘empirical’ truth in place of the myths and apologetics which had for so long prevailed in the telling of Jewish history.11 In A History of the Jews in England (1941) Cecil Roth makes use of the Life and Passion, interpreting the murder of William as an unintended result of the rituals of the Jewish festival of Purim.12 Roth had lived through the cause célèbre of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew accused of killing a Christian child in Kiev in 1911,13 and he was also writing at a time – the 1930s and 1940s – when Jews were being abused and massacred all over Europe.

  Interest in the case of William of Norwich increased in the 1970s as social historians recognized that hagiographical works like the Life and Passion are rich in details of social and religious life. In his study of pilgrimage Ronald Finucane analysed the miracles reported at William’s shrine, examining local patterns of pilgrimage and the nature of the ailments the boy saint is supposed to have cured.14 Yet it was Gavin Langmuir, an historian of the Capetian dynasty turned historian of Jewish life in England and France, who brought the Life and Passion into the mainstream of medieval history. Langmuir approached it as a work of imagination and invention.15 He identified the strategies Thomas of Monmouth uses to present himself as a reliable authority – indeed, as a detective hunting down a killer. Following Langmuir’s lead (and sometimes disputing his findings
) historians have continued to refine our understanding of the Life and Passion. John McCulloh’s work has been particularly helpful in evaluating the Continental evidence and in assessing the degree to which knowledge of William of Norwich spread beyond the Channel before Thomas of Monmouth started to write about him around 1150.16 Other approaches to the Life and Passion have been more literary, paying particular attention to cultural diversity in twelfth-century Norwich, and to the theme of innocence and childhood in the devotional sensibilities of the period.17

  When studying long-term trends in Christians’ ideas about Jews, historians vary in how much weight they give to context and contingency.18 Israel Yuval has emphasized the mirror-like, even reciprocal nature of Jewish–Christian attitudes, as a set of ingrained assumptions always tested by each group against its views of the other. Yuval suggests that twelfth-century prejudice against the Jews of Europe may have developed out of violent encounters, beginning with the pogroms of the Rhineland in 1096, when Jews publicly chose death for themselves and their children over conversion or death at the hand of crusading armies and local communities.19 In Christ Killers Jeremy Cohen explains the child-murder accusation and its subsequent elaborations as ritual murder – drawing on the use of blood in Jewish rituals, especially at Passover – as a way of giving substance to the idea of Jewish guilt, long embedded in the Gospels.20 Ronnie Hsia noted a decline in accusations of ritual murder in Protestant Europe,21 while they lingered in Catholic regions and resurfaced in the nineteenth century. In modern times the stories of child murder were reborn with the rise of radical nationalism in search of an ‘Other’ to denounce and destroy; this is when such ideas spread beyond Europe to other continents and cultures.22

  The Life and Passion is an attempt to apportion blame and to make a link between mythical time – the time of the Passion of Christ – with the medieval present. We approach the book all too aware of the terrible consequences of such narratives. Yet historians must wear this knowledge lightly, lest we confuse Thomas of Monmouth’s intentions with events that occurred much later.

  THOMAS OF MONMOUTH

  This is a new translation of the Vita et passio Willelmi Norwicensis. It tells the story of the life and martyrdom of William, a twelve-year-old boy, and records the miracles which took place at his tomb or by invocation from afar over subsequent years until 1173. The author, Thomas of Monmouth, was a monk in Norwich Cathedral Priory. He aims to persuade his fellow monks, as well as the people of Norwich and the region, that William was murdered by local Jews on behalf of Jews everywhere. Thomas presents William as a martyr, someone killed for their faith. But what persuaded him to write the Life and Passion some six years after the boy’s death?

  The name Thomas of Monmouth (Thomas Monemutensis)23 suggests that he came from Monmouth in South Wales, perhaps becoming a member of the local Benedictine monastery.24 Although they were obliged to remain permanently in one location (stabilitas loci was an aspect of their monastic discipline), it was not unknown for Benedictine monks to travel for the purpose of study or on missions on behalf of their house, the king or the Pope. If Thomas was indeed born and educated in South Wales, he may have been familiar with the traditions of creative forgery and fiction which several Welsh writers developed so effectively in the twelfth century, in particular Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155).

  Geoffrey was the foremost British historian of the twelfth century in terms of popularity and fame, though he was not without detractors.25 He is associated with the schools at Oxford, where he studied as a secular clerk. Geoffrey’s colleague Caradoc of Llancarfan specialized in writing fictitious hagiography, as did the anonymous author of the Book of Llandaff.26 In fact, the monks of South Wales in the decades just before and during Thomas’s life were accomplished at the art of forgery and invention. South Wales was also home to a number of dependencies of Gloucester, another important centre for forgery, not least from 1139 under Abbot Gilbert Foliot.27 Thomas may also have spent time in Oxford on a journey east, which ultimately brought him to Norwich.

  Thomas tells us a great deal about the life of William, whom he had never met, but he divulges very little about his own background. This is in contrast to his treatment of even the lowliest villager in his accounts of miracles, for whom he usually provides a name, details of parentage and a place of residence. Thomas’s life acquired meaning, it seems, when he found his true vocation: to be William’s secretarius, the man who initiated the boy’s cult.28 The only other thing we learn about Thomas is that he lost – and later found with William’s help – a book of psalms (p. 132), which he had copied for his own use.

  Nevertheless, Thomas’s writing style offers us some clues about the life he may have led before becoming the author of the Life and Passion. His work on the story of William of Norwich probably spanned the prime of his life as a monk. He was active between 1150 and late 1173 (the Life and Passion is dedicated to William Turbe (c. 1095–1174), Bishop of Norwich). Thomas mentions no family or friends, but his fellow monks of the Cathedral Priory do enter his narrative, some with approval, others the subject of criticism, depending on whether they promoted or discouraged the cult of William of Norwich.29

  The style of the Life and Passion also indirectly reveals the cultural milieu within which Thomas developed and worked. He was familiar with scripture, had a reasonable command of Latin grammar and was schooled in the art of rhetoric.30 There were tens of schools in twelfth-century England where he might have studied: in London or Oxford, in cathedral cities and in ports.31 If Thomas had been offered to a monastery at an early age – as an oblate (literally, a gift), as was still common in the early twelfth century – then he would have benefited from the long and thorough Latin education provided to oblates and novices.32 Men recruited at a later age probably never quite caught up with those who had been offered as boys. Thomas’s range of biblical and classical references, and his care with grammar and syntax, as well as the occasional use of quite sophisticated vocabulary, suggest that he had a good Latin education, which was available in monastic and secular settings.

  Monastic libraries like the one in Norwich Cathedral Priory possessed standard Christian texts, such as Augustine’s and Jerome’s commentaries on the Psalms, Augustine’s commentary on the Gospel of John, Gregory the Great’s Dialogues and the works of Bede.33 Alongside biblical citation, Thomas had occasional – often highly artful – recourse to classical authors, such as Virgil and Horace.34 In terms of his range of interests and vocabulary his style is close to that of Henry of Huntingdon (?1084–1155), Archdeacon of Huntingdon in the diocese of Lincoln.35

  In his Prologue to the Life and Passion Thomas displays his rhetorical craft to the full.36 Latin prologues were at the time highly stylized confections, composed of standard tropes that were taught as part of the Latin educational curriculum. The prologue usually addresses the patron and imagined readers, seeking to inspire in them a favourable attitude to the work: Quintilian (c. 35–c. 100) called this captatio benevolentiae (‘an attempt to get goodwill’) and Augustine (354–430) used it to good effect. In their prologues authors often anticipate possible shortcomings and inadequacies in what is to follow; they present their work as being written under duress or at the insistence of others – in Thomas’s case, his fellow monks.37 After more than two decades of compilation and writing, he assumes a modest tone, asking forbearance of his readers and offering a section-by-section itinerary of his book (pp. 6–7).

  Much that is described in the Life and Passion seems incredible and unsubstantiated, but Thomas tries to maintain a certain standard of reliability. He repeatedly asserts the truth of his facts and the cogency of his arguments. By the time he was composing the later entries in his book, eyewitness verification had become widely expected as a criterion for credibility in historical and hagiographical works.38 It became part of the hagiographical conventions known throughout the Christian world and particular to the English style. Unable to offer an eyewitness account, Thomas falls back on his
own authority born of pious intention.

  CONTENTS AND PURPOSE

  Why did the first account of child murder by Jews appear in twelfth-century Norwich? The Jews arrived in England with the Norman Conquest in 1066 and in significant numbers after the pogroms of 1096 in the Rhineland and northern France. In Norwich their presence is documented from the 1130s and they formed a community of some 200 people.39 The Jews inhabited a space adjacent to the market, close to Norwich Castle and associated with the ‘French’ sector of the city; indeed, they are more likely to have spoken French than English in their daily lives.40

  The narrative of child murder crafted by Thomas of Monmouth was probably based on rumours that circulated soon after the discovery of William’s body in 1144.41 Thomas’s approach is a novel interpretation of the character of contemporary Jews, drawing on traditional stories about ancient Jews, as conveyed in liturgy, biblical exegesis and preaching. This link between Jews past and Jews present had never before been so boldly attempted. Indeed, in the first three books of the Life and Passion his tone is above all polemical, animated by a desire to persuade those who are not convinced of his claim that the Jews of Norwich are bloodthirsty child-murderers.

  According to Thomas’s account, William of Norwich was born in the village of Haveringland (pp. 11–12), about fourteen kilometres north-west of Norwich, some three generations after the Norman Conquest. His parents have Anglo-Saxon names: Elviva and Wenstan (Old English: Aelfgifu and Wynstan). It is interesting, though not uncommon, that William and his brother Robert (who became a monk of Norwich Cathedral Priory) were given Norman names, as was their cousin Alexander.42

  In the Life and Passion William is left dead in Thorpe Wood43 on Friday, 24 March 1144. This is Good Friday, which fell in the week of the Jewish festival of Passover. William’s dead body was discovered on Saturday by two separate groups, the first led by Lady Legarda, a religious woman, and the second by Henry of Sprowston, a working man.