England’s Dead Boys: Telling Tales of Christian-Jewish Relations Before and After the First European Expulsion of the Jews

On July 31, 1255, an eight-year-old boy named Hugh, the son of a widow, Beatrice, in the city of Lincoln, fell into a cesspool attached to the house of a member of the Jewish community. There,

the body putrefied for some twenty-six days and rose to the surface to dismay Jews who had assembled from all over England to celebrate a marriage in an important family. They surreptitiously dropped the body in a well away from their houses where it was discovered on 29 August. (Langmuir, “Knight’s Tale” 461)¹

The panicked behavior of the Jews who were gathered in Lincoln for the marriage of Belaset, daughter of Benedict fil’ Moses, poignantly expresses the sense of fragility and danger that characterized the quotidian existence of Jews in medieval England, a minority community subject to periodic violence from the majority Christian community among whom English Jews lived, and by whom they were surrounded. Jewish panic also issued from a frightened recognition of threat from a medieval technology of power against Jews, a techne that scholarship today calls the “ritual murder libel.” In the customary plot of the libel, Jews are said periodically to seize Christian boys of tender years, on the cusp of childhood, in order to torture, mutilate, and slaughter them in purposeful reenactments of the killing of Christ, for whose deicide Jews were held responsible.

By 1255, ritual murder stories were well-sedimented in English culture, a popular fantasy of Christian child martyrdom with proliferating material effects, since they punctually installed a series of shrines for the Christian martyred that became public devotional sites around which feelings of Christian community could gather, pool, and intensify.² First invoked at Norwich in 1144, then Gloucester in 1168, Bury St. Edmunds in 1181, Bristol in 1183 or 1260, Winchester in 1192, 1225, 1232, and 1244, London in the 1260s, and 1276, and at Northampton in 1279, ritual murder libel—to be distinguished from its near-relative in anti-Semitic fiction, the blood libel, and its first cousin, host desecration libel—was invoked against the Jews of Lincoln in 1255.³

On October 4, by order of Henry III of England, ninety-one Jews were imprisoned and one person executed for the “martyrdom” of Hugh. On November 22, eighteen more Jews were executed, “drawn through the streets of London before daybreak and hung on specially constructed gallows” (Langmuir, “Knight’s Tale” 477–78).⁴ Through a story whose power had accrued by communal consent for over a century, nineteen of Lincoln’s Jews were thus summarily executed by the state in juridical acts of legal murder.

The precariousness of the lives of medieval European Jews has been amply documented by a vast, still accreting scholarship. In England, Jews arrived in the wake of the Norman Conquest, and became pivotal to England’s commercializing economy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.⁵ They constituted an immigrant community identifiable by virtue of religious and sociocultural practices, language, dress, and physical appearance (caricatures of Jewish facial phenotypes survive in English manuscript marginalia and visual art).

In 1218, they were forced by law to wear badges on their chests, to set them apart at a glance from the rest of the English population. This was the earliest historical example of a country’s execution of the church’s demand, in Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, that Jews and Muslims be set apart from Christians by a difference in dress. In 1222, 1253, and 1275, English rulings elaborated on this badge for the Jewish minority—who had to wear it (men and women at first, then children over the age of seven)—its size, color, and how it was to be displayed on the chest in an adequately prominent fashion. Then, in 1290, after a century of laws that eroded the economic, religious, occupational, social, and personal status of English Jews, Jewish communities were finally driven out of England en masse, marking the first permanent forcible expulsion in Europe.^6...