NORWICH AND NORFOLK DURING STEPHEN’S REIGN
The Life and Passion is a work of Thomas of Monmouth’s imagination, based on memories and practices associated with William and his tomb. Thomas employs ideas about Jews styled after fashionable miracle collections. He also had institutional ambitions for his community. As we consider Thomas’s work we must also appreciate the distinctive setting within which it was composed: Norwich Cathedral Priory, where William was buried, where remarkable events were said to have occurred and where grateful believers offered thanks and prayers.
About 1100 the Norman Herbert of Losinga founded a community of sixty Benedictine monks in the new cathedral at Norwich.81 Following the tenth-century reforms of English religious life, several cathedrals adopted the monastic lifestyle for their religious communities. These cathedral priories were substantial institutions. They were headed by a bishop, who supervised religious life in the diocese and also managed the sizeable estates attached to the see. Alongside the bishop, the prior directed the community of monks, and the whole religious institution existed in proximity to a bustling city.82 Bishop and monks reached complex arrangements over their respective rights to the cathedral’s estates, wood, livestock and buildings. As Bishop Herbert designed his new community, he looked for inspiration to the traditions of the great Norman monastery at Fécamp, where he had served as prior before the Norman Conquest.83
Bishop Herbert’s appointment to the East Anglian see of Thetford in 1090/91 had been marred by accusations of simony (the sin of purchasing an ecclesiastical office), for which he atoned in several ways.84 He seems to have embraced an active ecclesiastical life, accompanied by grand gestures of piety. His writings include outpourings of extravagant Marian devotion, sometimes aligned with denunciation of the Jews. His Christmas sermon elaborates the theme of the Virgin birth and ends with one of the best-known Marian tales: the story of the Jewish boy who received Communion at Easter with his Christian schoolmates; when his father discovered this, he pushed his son into an oven. The boy was saved by the Virgin Mary, and the father, instead, perished in the fire. Bishop Herbert’s version magnifies the ending with the death of all Jews: ‘Forthwith there followed a most just vengeance on the heads of the Jews; and they who would not believe in the Incarnate Word were all alike burned in the aforesaid furnace.’85
Bishop Herbert’s religion combined several devotional strands that were to develop over the twelfth century: the enhanced emphasis on the suffering of Christ at the Crucifixion, and the appreciation of the Virgin Mary as a symbol of purity and mercy. These qualities informed the lives of monks and nuns above all, but they were also spreading more widely and would eventually touch the experiences of laypeople, too. Some of the monks still alive in Thomas’s day may even have heard Bishop Herbert’s preaching in their youth.86 He left a strong mark on the identity and lore of the Cathedral Priory; indeed, Thomas recounts three visions in which Bishop Herbert appears in support of the cult of William of Norwich.
Another important context for Thomas of Monmouth’s literary enterprise is that troubled period in English politics: the reign of Stephen. After the Battle of Lincoln (1141), when Stephen was defeated by supporters of Empress Matilda (another claimant to the throne), England was divided into spheres of influence. Within his ‘regional kingship’ East Anglia was largely within Stephen’s sphere.87 This meant that men loyal to him held important offices, but the state of political fragility obliged Stephen to bargain and often comply with requests for favours.88 Nevertheless, although his income from some counties fell, Stephen maintained his solvency, not least thanks to income exacted from Jews.89 He visited East Anglia and in 1146 founded the Benedictine nunnery of Carrow on the outskirts of the city.90
During these years the city of Norwich continued to flourish as a centre of manufacture and trade. It was endowed with building materials like flint and chalk, and with fuel such as peat and the resources of the largest forest in East Anglia: Thorpe Wood.91 The craftsmen of Norwich worked in textiles and metal, as well as in the preparation of skins: tanning, the trade to which William is said to have been apprenticed. The city’s location on the River Wensum made it an important river port for the marketing of produce from a vast agricultural hinterland; on its riverfront there were substantial stone warehouses.92 Within this urban space the Cathedral Priory held lands and interacted with royal officials and townspeople. As collective landlord of vast estates with their villages and communities it also had strong contacts with the East Anglian countryside.
Here it was that the accusation of child murder was brought against the Jews of Norwich, who lived in the city as the Crown’s protected people, under the eye of the sheriff. Tales of evil Jews who want to offend and shame Christians and their symbols are as old as the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Yet the involvement of Jews in the death of a local boy provided a compelling bond between the people of Norwich, its cathedral and the villagers who lived in its hinterland, all within the larger frame of Christian history. Although it probably derived from a story promoted by William’s family, Thomas of Monmouth’s child-murder narrative was decidedly novel and very much his own. He presented the Jews as acting in a concerted, knowing, planned, collective and cruel manner. In doing so, he remade Christian history in a contemporary English city.
This immediacy was new and Thomas’s story no doubt made some Christians think differently about their Jewish neighbours. The Jews’ crime was the happy occasion of a martyr’s birth: William was to be venerated at Norwich Cathedral, a religious centre hitherto without a saint’s cult.93 The cathedral was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, but this concept (impossible to associate with relics) lacked the immediacy and the benevolent agency of a holy person; as a result, the cathedral paled in comparison to its neighbour in Bury St Edmunds, the ancient burial place of St Edmund, king and martyr. Thomas hoped that this might be rectified once his story became established and led to a flourishing cult.94
Having established in Books One and Two a narrative of childhood piety, boyhood martyrdom and post-mortem signs of virtue in William, in Book Three Thomas assumed a different style of reporting, more in keeping with the tradition of miracle books (libri miraculorum). He wrote, as many of his contemporaries did in their accounts of even very recent saints, about the miracles worked after death, as proof of their sanctity.95 He depicted the aftermath of William’s death as a time of miraculous signs: the lights which drew good people to the burial place in Thorpe Wood; the wholesome, fragrant state of the boy’s body; the experiences of those who were charged with the preparation of his corpse for burial; and finally, the miracles which took place at William’s tomb over the ensuing two decades. The people of Norwich, Thomas says, felt a growing attachment to William, which increased their veneration, once they understood the divine mercy apparent in the miracles. Thomas of Monmouth was present in 1150 when William was moved and buried in the Cathedral Priory’s chapter house; the tomb slab refused to settle level with the pavement, despite the stonemasons’ repeated efforts to fix it. Henceforward, Thomas referred to himself as William’s ‘sacrist’, his loyal servant.96
Some of the miracles mentioned by Thomas are dated and they usually start with the name of the person to whom the miracle occurs, a location and some family context (wife, daughter, son, widow). The miracles are recounted at varying length, the later accounts usually being shorter than the earlier. Thomas makes himself felt and known throughout these tales, praising William’s virtue and favour with God and making interjections designed to reassure readers of the veracity of his reports.
Most of Thomas’s accounts of miracles begin with the description of a long-standing condition suffered by some inhabitant of Norwich or a village in Norfolk or neighbouring Suffolk.97 Pilgrims approach William’s tomb after a long period of illness or disability, often after failed attempts at medical treatment (a common trope in miracle tales), having been advised to do so by a priest or a friend, or sometimes guided by a
vision.98 Others are healed by the mere invocation of William’s name in prayer. Many repay the miraculous cure with a thanksgiving pilgrimage to his tomb, where they pray and make an offering. When the miracle takes place at the tomb, it is described as being witnessed by lay visitors, members of the monastic community and sometimes by Thomas himself.99 When it takes place away from the shrine, Thomas aims to establish an evidence trail made up of testimonies from the cured person, family members or attendant neighbours and friends. He usually describes those cured as returning home grateful, safe and sound.100 In two cases the cured choose to remain at the shrine and render service to William for the rest of their lives.
How should historians use such accounts of miracles as historical evidence?101 Written for the close-knit religious community of Norwich Cathedral Priory, whose cultic activities were made public on many occasions, Thomas’s account also had to include known features of the built surroundings, of relations within the Cathedral Priory and with liturgical routines. As a work for local use it had to recount a credible set of events, even if their interpretation was embellished with highly personal feelings about Jews, about saints and their cult, about royal officials and about other monks.
DEVOTIONAL CULTURE
A dynamic period of literary innovation, the twelfth century produced a great deal of hagiographical writing and displayed a strong interest in history. In this century the genre of romance came to fruition, based on Arthurian legend, and devotional poetry was refined. Beginning in the later eleventh century, the basic tenets of Christianity were debated with a new intensity, led by monastic scholars and teachers in the cathedral schools. There was a new theology of the Incarnation, with novel understandings of the role of the Virgin Mary as its agent. Throughout the twelfth century these discussions often developed through polemical conversations – real as well as imagined – with Jews and Judaism.102
Monks were particularly preoccupied with Judaism, just as friars would be in the thirteenth century: they encountered Judaism in the incessant unfolding of the liturgy, in reflection on sin and guilt, in the work of biblical exegesis, and in their efforts to reformulate the tenets of faith and the story of Christian salvation.103 At the heart of monastic spirituality was a strong affinity to the figure of Christ, particularly his saving Passion.104 Monastic ideas about Jews were not solely prompted by interactions with contemporary Jews – although monastic officials regularly did business with them – but rather through reflection on the precarious relationship of affinity and supersession between Judaism and Christianity. Monks across England composed new materials and reworked old ones; they blended a rich English heritage with new elements, such as the emerging cult of the Virgin Mary. England’s wealth and vibrant monastic culture attracted a visit around 1123 from the canons of Laon Cathedral, bringing Marian relics and accounts of the miracles they worked.105
Thomas of Monmouth drew upon a rich heritage. Accounts of English royal martyrs abound in late Anglo-Saxon England, often involving enthusiastic laypeople.106 Accounts of saints’ lives, as developed in the tenth and eleventh centuries, offered Thomas a template for his own tale of William of Norwich. In these stories it is the interest of local laypeople that forces ecclesiastical authorities to take note; killers are unworthy, inferior types;107 a body is revealed by the appearance of a column of light, and so on.108 Anglo-Saxon authors paid special attention to ‘the purity and virginity of boy martyrs’.109 In new Latin compositions and in translations these accounts of martyrdom – passiones – now reached an interested readership from among the Anglo-Norman secular and religious elites of post-Conquest England.110
Another strand woven into the Life and Passion takes the form of encounters with the Virgin Mary, often with William of Norwich at her side: purity with purity, sanctity with sanctity. The cult of the Virgin Mary – which had deep roots in Anglo-Saxon culture – was dramatically revived and extended in mid-twelfth-century England.111 Monks collected miracle stories, composed liturgical material for Mary’s feast days, and had her image carved and painted in newly built and adorned monastic buildings.112 In the 1140s at the Benedictine monastery at Bury St Edmunds, not far from Norwich, Abbot Anselm created the authoritative collection of miracles of the Virgin Mary, several of which involved Jews.113 We have already seen how Bishop Herbert inserted the Marian tale about a Jewish boy and his father into his Christmas sermon.
The Life and Passion is unique as the earliest known account of the murder of a Christian child by Jews, a killing executed collectively.114 It became known within the Anglo-Norman cultural sphere, its monasteries bound by links of filiation, and whose cathedrals were served by Englishmen and Frenchmen alike. In 1171, when the Norman monk Robert of Torigni (c. 1100–86) – abbot of Mont Saint-Michel and third continuator of the chronicle of the Dukes of Normandy – reported upon the burning of Jews for alleged child murder in Blois, he mentioned the cases of Norwich and Gloucester as forerunners.115 His report ends with the observation: ‘And it is said that they frequently do so [i.e., murder children] at Easter-time, if they have the opportunity.’
Knowledge of the Life and Passion quickly spread from Norwich Cathedral Priory to other Benedictine communities; Bury St Edmunds and Pershore are mentioned in the text, while a connection to Gloucester Abbey, through the church of St Peter Mancroft in Norwich marketplace, almost certainly explains the spread from Norwich to Gloucester of similar accusations against Jews. While most of the links in this chain of transmission cannot be reconstructed, I am now able to offer some new evidence. Our sole manuscript (which is described in detail in the Note on the Text below) was copied in an English Cistercian house by the year 1200, most probably at Sibton Abbey in Suffolk.
The Cistercian connection is further demonstrated a few decades later in the work of a Cistercian monk from northern France. At the beginning of the entry for 1146 in his Chronicon (written c. 1204) the poet and chronicler Hélinand of Froidmont (c. 1160–by 1237), a troubadour-turned-monk, refers to the death of William ‘crucified in England by the Jews on holy Friday in the city of Norwich’.116 Hélinand goes on to describe William’s journey to the afterlife. Such a vision exists in the Life and Passion, although not experienced by William but by a certain Lewin; however, there is very little overlap in the language or details in the two accounts. News of William of Norwich may have reached Froidmont Abbey via an English visitor and we know that the tales of English monks were often recorded as interesting exempla. Indeed, Thomas’s and Hélinand’s accounts differ so greatly that the latter seems more like a memory of a tale told, rather than of a text consulted.117 There is another possible link, too. Thomas of Beverley (d. after 1225) accompanied Thomas Becket into exile in the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in northern Burgundy between 1164 and 1166; and later, around 1174, he joined the Cistercian house of Froidmont as a monk, eventually becoming its abbot. Thomas of Beverley was himself a writer of hagiography. He wrote a Life of his sister St Margaret of Jerusalem and he may have been the author of a Life of Becket which existed in Froidmont Library. As a member of Becket’s household, Thomas of Beverley must have known William Turbe, Bishop of Norwich, and through him may have gained knowledge (and perhaps procured a copy) of earlier sections of the Life and Passion.118 By the time Hélinand wrote his Chronicon the tale of William of Norwich had reached Froidmont. The Life and Passion was copied into our Cistercian manuscript, together with other interesting and novel works on the religious life.
This speedy absorption of a recent account of an English martyrdom into the Cistercian repertoire should not surprise us. The decades between 1150 and 1210 were a period of exceptional literary activity within the Cistercian Order: edifying literary material in a wide range of genres was compiled, composed and disseminated. One striking characteristic is the proliferation of exempla relating to the interaction of Cistercians with the Virgin Mary, a tradition evident in accounts of the life of St Bernard.119 Another quality prominent in these writings is the wide geographical range of
source materials. Since Cistercian monasteries were obliged to send representatives to the Order’s annual meetings (chapters) at its French mother-house Cîteaux, books, tales and rumours spread swiftly between houses. In writings from northern France – such as Hélinand of Froidmont’s – English sources are particularly notable: in a collection from the house of Beaupré in the Beauvaisis, a brother from Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire and a cellarer from Gloucester are among the tellers of new tales.120
The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (Penguin Classics) Page 3