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

by Thomas of Monmouth

  The pious Lady Legarda tended to the inmates of the St Mary Magdalene leper hospital in Thorpe Wood. The hospital’s remains survive in Sprowston, some three kilometres along the road leading out of Norwich. Lady Legarda was with a group of lepers to whom she ministered when a vision of a fiery ladder appeared, leading from the boy’s body up to heaven, and guided her to him. She saw extraordinary lights shining above the place where William lay (pp. 23–4). His body seemed unharmed and uncorrupted; even the ravens could not tear his flesh. She acknowledged a miracle, prayed in thanks and returned home. Lady Legarda was not a woman of the world, so she did not act in a worldly way.

  However, the next witness to arrive on the scene was indeed a man of the world. Once a stable-worker for the Bishop of Norwich and now a forester, Henry of Sprowston entered Thorpe Wood on horseback on the lookout for unlawful clearances or woodcutting. He was told that a body had been found in the wood and soon came upon it. Henry saw that the boy was wounded and that some kind of wooden instrument of torture had been placed in his mouth. He is said to have noted that William had been tortured – and here Thomas interjects on behalf of Henry, observing that ‘only a Jew would have taken it upon himself to kill the innocent in this way with such rash daring’ (p. 25). Henry rushed to summon the priest of his parish of Sprowston, as well as members of his family. Following consultation, they decided to leave the boy until after Easter. They returned on Monday. Rumours spread in the city and throngs of interested people arrived, among them William’s brother, uncle and cousin.

  Henry of Sprowston’s decision to bury the body in a shallow grave in the wood is decidedly odd. Following the Conquest some very clear rules had been established about the treatment of corpses, partly to protect those of Norman descent. The male population was bound together in sworn groups for mutual responsibility. Henry should have informed his fellow tithingmen, as well as the sheriff.44 These rules would have been clear to anyone involved in administration, as Henry was. Thomas of Monmouth is silent on this breach of normal practice and uses the miraculous preservation of the boy’s body as proof of his martyrdom.

  William’s relatives accused the Jews of his murder, but not everyone was persuaded. William’s maternal uncle Godwin Sturt, a married priest,45 approached the Easter synod in Norwich, presided over by Bishop Everard of Calne (p. 31), a gathering of the diocesan clergy and some dignitaries from further afield. He addressed the synod as an ecclesiastical court and claimed that the marks on William, as well as the miraculous circumstances associated with the finding of the body, pointed to the Jews as his killers.

  The sheriff, John of Chesney,46 who represented the secular royal interest in all matters related to the Jews of Norwich, was presented with the family’s complaint, but as far as we know (and as Thomas disapprovingly reports) he initiated no legal proceedings. Bishop Everard deemed it wise to allow William’s burial in the monks’ cemetery, just east of the chancel, within the cathedral precinct.47

  In twelfth-century England it was not uncommon for children to be venerated as saints after their death,48 but the story of William of Norwich is unique. Thomas turned the murder of a twelve-year-old boy into an event of epic proportions, an attack on Christians and Christianity itself, a spiteful re-enactment of the Crucifixion.49 His literary task was made challenging by the fact that he was not in Norwich in 1144, when the boy’s body was found. Nevertheless, upon his arrival by 1150 Thomas clearly believed the family’s claim that the Jews were responsible and that William was a martyr. By the time Thomas settled in Norwich there were reports and expectations of miraculous happenings associated with William’s tomb in the monks’ cemetery.50

  News of William of Norwich may have even reached the Continent, as shown in some monastic calendars of saints’ feast days from Bavaria in the 1140s.51 The well-connected bishops of Norwich may have helped to spread the word: Bishop Everard retired to the Cistercian house of Fontenay in Burgundy, France, where he died, probably in 1149; his successor as bishop, Bishop Turbe, travelled twice to the Continent, to the papal councils of Reims (1148) and Tours (1163).52

  The Life and Passion describes a martyrdom that Thomas of Monmouth had not witnessed, but which he was eager to promote. Indeed, he claims this cult of William of Norwich as his life’s mission (p. 4). The Life and Passion greatly increased the fame of William of Norwich, but it also affected Norwich Cathedral and its members. It is dedicated to Bishop Turbe, who presided over the cathedral during most of the years covered by the book.53 A local man, Turbe was nurtured by the Norman Bishop of Norwich Herbert of Losinga (d. 1119), the founder of Norwich Cathedral. He rose through the ranks of the Cathedral Priory to which he had been offered at a young age.54 Though never quite a high-flyer, Turbe achieved prominence within the English Church and served kings Stephen (c. 1097–1154) and Henry II (1133–89) as emissary to Church councils and popes, entrusted with tasks of arbitration and legal judgement; he was also a member of the circle close to Archbishop Thomas Becket (?1118–70).55 It appears from the Life and Passion that Turbe welcomed the cult of William of Norwich as a timely addition to the cathedral’s lore and a means of strengthening its claim to be at the head of Christian life in East Anglia.

  It should be evident to the reader by now how difficult is any historical reading of the Life and Passion in that Thomas’s account of the whole affair, though detailed and intricate, remains virtually the only historical source. No other Christian or Jewish contemporary accounts have survived, just the story as told by Thomas, himself writing several years after the discovery of William’s body. The continuator of the Peterborough version of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, writing in Peterborough Abbey around 1154, reports the case of William of Norwich at the end of his entry for the year 1137. He must have relied on oral tradition or perhaps a version of the earlier sections of the Life and Passion.56 Some of the facts can be surmised from later evidence, such as traces of cult locations in the cathedral or the liturgy used on William’s feast day, which by the late thirteenth century was celebrated at Norwich Cathedral Priory on 24 March.57

  The Life and Passion is divided into a prologue and seven books.58

  Book One recounts the life, death and burial of William, from the portents that foretold his birth, through his innocent childhood, his abduction, killing, burial in the woods and discovery there; then on to the appeal to Bishop Everard, John the Sheriff’s protection of the Jews and the transfer (technically known as a translation) of the body for burial in the monks’ cemetery. This part may have circulated separately as a Vita or Life of William and may have influenced reports in chronicles.59

  Book Two opens with an attack against those who disparage William: it recounts the miracles at the boy’s tomb, as well as the dramatic death of John the Sheriff, protector of the Jews. This book is more polemical and disparages King Stephen, so it was probably written after the king’s death in 1154.60 In this book Thomas often refers to events recorded in Book One.61

  Book Three recounts the translation of William’s corpse to the priory’s chapter house, and the subsequent miracles of healing, many of which occurred to laypeople associated with the cathedral. It describes the establishment of William’s cult around 1150 and its enhancement following Prior Elias’s death in that year.

  Book Four recounts eighteen wonders, including a miracle at sea, and reveals conflict around the cult of William of Norwich over issues such as the manner of veneration and access to relics.

  Book Five begins with the translation of William’s body from the chapter house to the area of the altar within the cathedral on 3 July 1151. This book recounts twenty-two miracles experienced by local people and one miracle that happened to a man from Lincolnshire.

  Book Six begins with the last translation of William’s body to a chapel north of the chancel in Norwich Cathedral in April 1154. The miracles that follow involve some prominent figures, such as the daughter of Reginald de Warenne (d. 1179), and a knight from the archbishopric of Trier.

&
nbsp; Book Seven continues with accounts of miracles, some dating to the 1160s and early 1170s, including a miracle wrought with St Edmund, and one which occurred after an appeal to St Thomas Becket (who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170). Near the end of this last book a letter of testimony from a monk of Pershore in Worcestershire is copied in, a testament to the spread of William’s fame and efficacy. News of William of Norwich may have travelled by word of mouth or perhaps through the circulation of separate hagiographical sections like Book One.

  The sections of the Life and Passion devoted to accounts of miracles – the largest part of the book – offer us descriptions of diseases, the lives of disabled people, relationships within families and communities, and of penitential pilgrimages. We can learn a great deal about the social and religious history of twelfth-century England from the Life and Passion, although some stories are more plausible than others.62

  However, much of the interest of the Life and Passion lies in the power and poignancy of its narrative and in what it tells us about William’s death and its significance. Thomas’s account was received in a few other English Benedictine monastic houses, where similar complaints against Jews soon followed: Jews were accused of killing boys at Gloucester in 1168 and at Bury St Edmunds in 1181, but these attempts led to no concerted action and left little mark on local devotional life.63 Cistercian religious houses also helped to spread the story of William of Norwich; to judge by our manuscript’s script and decoration, it was probably copied in a Cistercian monastery. As we shall see, William was known by 1204 even in Froidmont in northern France, where he appeared as a visionary in a chronicle composed by the Cistercian monk Hélinand.64

  THE FABRICATION OF JEWISH GUILT

  When reading the Life and Passion it is useful to remember the linguistic legacy of the term inventio, its sense of ‘finding’. Inventio was the process whereby a writer identified the template most suited to the writing task at hand, the appropriate frame within which an argument is to unfold (dispositio) and to which embellishment with stylistic ornament is to be added (elocutio).65 One of Thomas of Monmouth’s central preoccupations – especially in the earlier sections when telling the child-murder story – is chronology. A period of five or six years separated him from William’s death, but once he began writing around 1150 he logged dates with the sort of detail that suggests he was consulting an almanac.

  The Life and Passion includes a great deal of literary invention, too, usually to support the least knowable facts. For example, Thomas provides a backstory in which William had on occasion worked for Jews, until he was warned against doing so (pp. 13–14). Yet Thomas does not refer to this when he explains how William came to be in the Jews’ house at the time of his death; rather, he creates an elaborate tale of seduction, whereby William’s mother is persuaded to let her boy spend the days leading up to Easter not at the family home but working for the cook of the Archdeacon of Norwich. The tempter is an emissary of the Jews – or is he a Jew? – who entices the boy with the offer of a job. As to William’s mother, the tempter persuades her to let her son go – at a price.

  Thomas is at his inventive best in this scene of seduction, with its slapstick rhythm, a veritable tug of war over the boy.66 William’s mother is depicted as weak and gullible. Thomas likens her to a latter-day Judas, seduced by the payment of money to hand over her son; although rather than the biblical thirty pieces of silver, Thomas tells us she received three shillings.

  This inventive section of the Life and Passion leads to the scene of the killing (pp. 16–18). Thomas describes William eating his meal in peace in the Jews’ house, utterly without fear, when the Jews fall upon him, tie him up, inflict torments on his body and finally hang him between the doorposts. Thomas describes the boy’s torture in extraordinary detail. Some rope ‘as thick as a little finger’ is knotted in five places and tied around his head and neck in such a way that each knot presses hard on a tender spot: his forehead and temples, the nape and front of his neck. To add to the boy’s suffering a ‘teasel’ is placed in his mouth. This could mean either the prickly head of a plant or the manufactured device which resembles it; here it clearly means the man-made version, which was used to finish woollen cloth.

  This scene is the most elaborate, inventive and graphic in detail, and the richest in fateful resonances. Thomas draws parallels between the murder of William and the sufferings of Christ: both have been betrayed, tortured and killed by Jews full of hatred and contempt. The rope of five knots is reminiscent of the five wounds of Christ; the boy’s head is pricked with thorns, reminiscent of the Crown of Thorns, which both tortured and mocked Christ. Perhaps the teasel’s association with wool evokes the lamb of God or Christ the Shepherd, for in homes and workshops all over Norwich the wool of Norfolk sheep was made into yarn for weaving into cloth, then finished with the help of a teasel. And then after the torture comes the hanging between the doorposts. Here is a novel concoction of elements of the Crucifixion and its typology; it also evokes the sacrifices at the Temple which prefigured Christ’s suffering on the Cross.67

  The torture of William was extraordinary enough to impress a contemporary chronicler, the ‘second continuator’ of the Peterborough version of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Around 1154 he wrote about the previous two decades and began the entry for the year 1137 with a lament on the cruelty perpetrated throughout the land as ‘traitors’ exploited Stephen’s mildness. One torture perpetrated in their castles was the hanging of enemies by their thumbs, heads or feet. Sometimes ‘Knotted ropes were put round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brains.’ The chronicle for 1137 ends with the story of William’s death using this very form of torture.68 This juxtaposition suggests that the disloyalty of the barons is akin to the crime of the Jews and that both pose a danger to the Christian body politic.

  Killing by knotted ropes is otherwise unknown in England in this period, in written sources or in archaeological remains.69 By 1154 the chronicler may have had access to the early parts of the Life and Passion or at least to similar accounts of William’s sufferings, which had travelled from the neighbouring diocese of Norwich.70

  William’s uniquely cruel murder is presented in the Life and Passion as a crucifixion in all but name. Its meaning, as explained by Thomas of Monmouth, is that the Jews enacted a crucifixion in Norwich to express their hatred of Christians and to offend the crucified Christ. Here, too, the most unknowable part of the story is imagined as taking place in secret, without witnesses or verification. Again, Thomas provides a supporting tale: the testimony of a Christian maid. She was asked to fetch a bowl of boiling water to staunch the bleeding71 and as she handed it over to the Jews she managed to peep in on the crime scene (pp. 59–60).

  The Jew that Thomas calls Deus-adiuvet (‘God may help’, a translation of the Hebrew name Eleazar) is a prominent figure in the story. He is central to the discussions that Thomas imagines the Jews having after William’s death. However, Thomas does not single out here a particular Jew as the murderer; rather, he presents the crime as an act of group violence of a cruel and inventive nature. It is a scene akin to a crucifixion and although Thomas does not use the word here, he uses it later in the work.72 The Jews are presented as a group working together during the murder and its aftermath. Thomas even imagines their conversation over how best to dispose of the corpse: one Jew suggests throwing it into the privy that runs under their houses; another, ‘wiser’ Jew says it would be safer to dispose of the body at a distance.73

  Next Thomas describes the Jews placing the body in a sack and carrying it at daybreak, on horseback, to the wood, just east of the cathedral precinct across the River Wensum. A witness to their presence in Thorpe Wood also makes an appearance. Aelwerd Ded, a prominent burgess of the city, wonders what the Jews are up to in the wood on Good Friday; he even stretches out his hand to touch the sack. According to Thomas, Aelwerd on his deathbed would divulge that he had reported his suspicions to John the Sheriff, only to be warne
d against pursuing them further; he was bound by an oath to keep quiet (pp. 22–3). Wichemann, a monk who heard Aelwerd’s confession, revealed the dying man’s words to Thomas of Monmouth.

  Having described the murder and the burial, Thomas’s work is almost done. Yet he must have decided that his narrative required further embellishment for it to carry conviction. Upon joining the Cathedral Priory he must have been struck by the absence of a coherent version of William’s death and by the presence of members who questioned the boy’s sanctity. They claimed William lacked merit; that he was poor and insignificant; that he was of limited, local fame, hardly worthy of universal veneration; that even though he was murdered it could never be established that he went to his death willingly accepting martyrdom.74

  Thomas rebuts these objections one by one and then produces his clinching proof: evidence from an erstwhile Jew, now Thomas’s fellow monk Theobald. This convert divulged to him the Jews’ belief that they would never return to the ‘land of their fathers’ without the shedding of human blood.75 Hence, ‘the leaders and rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain, at Narbonne, where the seed of kings and their glory flourishes greatly, meet together, and cast lots of all the regions where Jews lived.’ These Jewish leaders allocated the task of annual murder of a Christian to a particular community of Jews. According to Thomas, the Jews of England were chosen in 1144 and they delegated the operation to their brethren in Norwich.

  Thomas of Monmouth took the rumour of a child murder and turned it into a powerful narrative, but he also infused the actions of the alleged murderers – the Jews – with new meanings. In his collection of Marian tales William of Malmesbury (c. 1080/95–1143) mentions the existence of a high priest or pope (summus papa) of the Jews in Narbonne, ‘who accumulated great wealth and offered judgements to Jews all over the world’.76 About the same time this idea was further developed and disseminated through the work of the leading theologian Peter the Venerable (c. 1092–1156), Abbot of Cluny, Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam duritiem (Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews) of 1144.77 Peter visited England on two occasions, in spring and summer 1130, and on a shorter visit in autumn 1148, following the composition of his polemic against Judaism, and close to the time when Thomas of Monmouth began writing the Life and Passion.78 We do not know how Thomas came to learn of this new idea – a high priest of the Jews – but the Cluniac priory of St Pancras in Lewes, Sussex, was closely involved with Norfolk through its daughter house at Castle Acre, and also owned property in Norwich. Aimar, the prior of St Pancras, was among the delegates at the Norwich synod of 1144 at which the Jews were first accused of William’s murder. Thomas claims that Aimar was enthusiastic in his support for the veneration of William of Norwich.79 Indeed, the prior even offered to take William’s body back with him to Lewes if Norwich decided to ignore the boy’s sanctity (pp. 34–5). Had he done so, William’s remains would have joined the relics of another child martyr in Lewes, St Pancras (d. 304), the Cluniac house’s patron saint.80