English Historical Narratives of Jewish Child-Murder, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and the Date of Chaucer’s Unknown Source

Scholars have long recognized that The Prioress’s Tale is a version of the Chorister class, sometimes called the Boy Singer class, of Marian miracle stories. In The Prioress’s Tale, Jews in an Asian city murder a Christian schoolboy, the “litel clergeon,” for singing the Alma redemptoris mater in the Jewry. A “greyn” that Mary places on his tongue miraculously causes him to continue singing until Christians discover the crime, the authorities execute his murderers by drawing and hanging, and an abbot removes the grain. Monks then inter the boy’s corpse in a marble tomb.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Carleton Brown distinguished three groups among the Chorister tales, which he labeled A, B, and C. The Prioress’s Tale is number 6 in Group C.¹ The Chorister stories have strong ties to England. Many versions, especially those of Group C, survive in manuscripts of English provenance, and six versions have an English setting.² Indeed, C9, from fifteenth-century Spain, is set in Lincoln. Chaucerians have not fully appreciated the implications of this late Spanish version for study of The Prioress’s Tale.

The present essay explores the possibility that The Prioress’s Tale combines Chorister features with features from non-Marian English narratives in which Jews are said to crucify Christian boys in mockery of Christ’s Passion. I begin my analysis by revisiting the question, long thought to be settled, of whether The Prioress’s Tale owes a debt to the history of Hugh of Lincoln, a Christian boy for whose supposed crucifixion in 1255 Henry III executed nineteen Lincoln Jews.³ As we shall see, evidence from a number of sources suggests that boy-crucifixion stories,⁴ whose origins scholars have traced to twelfth-century England, partially merged with the Chorister tradition in England in response to distinctive historical stimuli. We can identify the stimuli from the testimony of The Prioress’s Tale and its Spanish cousin. I conclude by proposing a terminus a quo for the kind of Chorister narrative Chaucer draws on and suggesting that Hugh of Lincoln played a more central role in the genesis of The Prioress’s Tale than has hitherto been supposed.

Group A and B stories, Brown observed, survive from the thirteenth century, but the earliest C analogues of which Brown was aware at the time he distinguished the groups date from the early fourteenth century. Because the victim’s death and burial occur exclusively in Group C, Brown reasoned that they are a late development. He further hypothesized that the death and burial derive from the history of Hugh,⁵ for the Prioress invokes Hugh in her final stanza:

O yonge Hugh of Lincoln, slayn also With cursed Jewes, as it is notable, For it is but a litel while ago, Preye eke for us, we sinful folk unstable . . .

(VII.684–87)⁶

Brown’s evidence proved flawed, however, and his hypothesis untenable. In the 1930s, Albert C. Friend discovered a C analogue from around 1215, complete with the death and burial of the victim. The 1215 analogue, since designated C1, is the earliest of all the precisely datable analogues, A, B, and C. The death and burial cannot be a late development and cannot derive from Hugh, who died in 1255, which C1 antedates by some forty years. In 1941, Brown withdrew his hypothesis, and the idea that Hugh could be a source of The Prioress’s Tale has been discounted ever since.⁷

Yet close examination shows that although the evidence of C1 rules out Brown’s hypothesis, it does not rule out Hugh of Lincoln as a source of The Prioress’s Tale. The left-hand column of Table 1 lists twenty-six plot features from pre-Chaucerian English narratives of Jewish child-murder. In all cases the victims are Christian boys, some said to have been horribly tortured before death, and some said to have been crucified. Features 20–26 are absent from The Prioress’s Tale and all other...