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

by Thomas of Monmouth

  The Life and Passion is a testament to the religious culture and social life of England in the mid- and later twelfth century. It reveals the interplay in an urban centre between political and religious authorities a few generations after the Norman Conquest.121 In order to add verisimilitude to his outrageous account, Thomas of Monmouth seeks to engage the reader with the minutiae of life, with local colour and detail, to make the horrific and unusual seem believable, even mundane. In doing so he presents the practices of parish and neighbourhood, relations within families, intrigues in a monastic community and the natural world (on land and at sea) as both threatening and familiar.

  The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is a rich and challenging text that greatly informs our understanding of how Christian ideas about Jews developed and spread in the Middle Ages. It rewards those who pay close attention to the historical context in which it was composed and who appreciate the literary work of Thomas of Monmouth.122 The story of who killed William of Norwich – and stories of child murder by Jews all over Europe – was accepted as true by some medieval Europeans, but by no means all. Such tales were more readily believed in areas where the religious imagination dominated public discourse. Accounts such as the Life and Passion were disseminated widely as literature and as edifying tales, but were occasionally acted out in city streets or in law courts as individual Jews or groups of Jews were accused of child murder. This could lead to trials and executions, but it should be remembered that on occasion such accusations were also derided and dismissed.123

  Another theme in the Life and Passion is human hope in the face of illness, and throughout this book Thomas of Monmouth recounts the role of children in families and communities. However, it is also this common humanity, the instinct to nurture our children, that he exploits so effectively. This translation will, I hope, alert new readers to the ways in which stories shape our perceptions of others in our communities, and how alluring those narratives can be which so easily explain evil and loss by demonizing vulnerable people.

  In the spirit of such raised awareness, I offer this new translation.

  NOTES

  1. On ‘The Prioress’s Tale’, see Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 56–88; and on its revisions in the fifteenth century, pp. 88–103. For its sources, see Carleton Brown, A Study of the Miracle of Our Lady Told by Chaucer’s Prioress (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1910) and Roger Dahood, ‘English Historical Narratives of Jewish Child-Murder, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and the Date of Chaucer’s Unknown Source’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009), pp. 125–40; Louise O. Fradenburg, ‘Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale’, Exemplaria 1 (1989), pp. 69–115.

  2. For the first modern treatment of the case of Hugh of Lincoln, see Gavin I. Langmuir, ‘The Knight’s Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln’, Speculum 47 (1972), pp. 459–82. For David Carpenter’s authoritative recent analysis of this case, see ‘Crucifixion and Conversion: King Henry III and the Jews in 1255, Part 1: http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/content/month/fm-01-2010.html and Part 2 http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/content/month/fm-02-2010.html.

  3. Dahood, ‘English Historical Narratives’, p. 129.

  4. For the historical traditions that associated Jews and crimes of blood, see David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).

  5. Tamar Herzig, ‘Anti-Jewish Polemics and Female Stigmatization in Renaissance Ferrara’, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà 25 (2012/13), pp. 99–123. On the infamous trial, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

  6. See, for example, the work of Alfonso da Spina, discussed in Alisa Meyuhas Ginio, De bello iudaeorum: Fray Alonso de Espina y su ‘Fortalitium fidei’ (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1998), esp. pp. 60–75.

  7. The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, trans. and ed. Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896) [henceforward, Jessopp and James]. For discussions by the Press Syndics between 1894 and 1896, see CUL, University Archive (UA), Pr.V.12, pp. 219–20, 240, 330 and 387. For my discussion of the discovery and of its preparation for publication, see below, pp. li–lii.

  8. On the treatment of the William of Norwich case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Gavin I. Langmuir, ‘Historiographic Crucifixion’, in Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 287–8.

  9. See Carpenter, ‘Crucifixion and Conversion’, Part 1.

  10. Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany, trans. Barbara Harshav and Christian Wiese (Leiden: Brill, 2005). On the treatment offered by the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), see Langmuir, ‘Historiographic Crucifixion’, pp. 288–9.

  11. See The Jews of Angevin England: Documents and Records (London: David Nutt, 1893), pp. 19–20.

  12. He associated the accusation with the perceived ritual violence of Jews on the festival of Purim. See Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 9. For an authoritative history of the Jews of Norwich and a useful summary of the state of scholarship at that stage, see V. D. Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich, ed. A. M. Habermann (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1967), pp. 49–57. See also Langmuir, ‘Historiographic Crucifixion’; Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 165–7; and Elliott S. Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 222–7.

  13. Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank) 1894–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 174–93.

  14. Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1977), pp. 113–29. For a more recent exploration of social questions, see the study of attitudes to childhood and children’s health in William F. MacLehose, ‘A Tender Age’: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

  15. Gavin I. Langmuir, ‘Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder’, Speculum 59 (1984), pp. 820–46. For a discussion of Langmuir’s approach, see Hannah R. Johnson, Blood Libel: Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), pp. 30–58.

  16. The short mention of the case of William of Norwich on XV kal. May (17 April) – ‘Apud Anglos Willehelmi pueri a iudeis crucifixi’ – in Bavarian copes of the eleventh-century martyrology updated by Paul of Bernried (Munich, Bavarian State Library clm 5256 (Chiemsee), fols. 24v–25r, clm 22058 (Wessobrunn), fol. 32r, and clm 1071 (Oberaltaich), fol. 28r), added by the late 1140s, attest to a regional link and a shared source of information; as discussed in John M. McCulloh, ‘Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth’, Speculum 72 (1997), pp. 698–740; at pp. 717–28. Strong contacts existed between German and English monasteries in the twelfth century.

  17. For interesting recent interpretations of the Life and Passion by literary scholars, see Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich’, Speculum 79 (2004), pp. 26–65, and Denise L. Despres, ‘Adolescence and Sanctity: The Life and Passion of Saint William of Norwich’, Journal of Religion 90 (2010), pp. 33–62; it is also considered in Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 118–19. See also Patricia Healy Wasyliw, Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic: Child Saints and Their Cults in Medieval Europe (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), chapter 7. Robert Bartlett considers the case in W
hy Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 179–80.

  18. For a recent attempt to historicize the efforts of historians studying ritual-murder accusations, see Johnson, Blood Libel.

  19. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, pp. 135–204.

  20. Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 93–117.

  21. R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 197–230. For an insightful discussion of the appeal of ritual-murder accusations to the late medieval public, see Christopher Ocker, ‘Ritual Murder and the Subjectivity of Christ: A Choice in Medieval Christianity’, Harvard Theological Review 91 (1998), pp. 153–92.

  22. See Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: ‘Ritual Murder’, Politics and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  23. As on folios 1r and 18r of our text. Augustus Jessopp, one of the first editors of the Life and Passion, preferred to think of Thomas as a local man. Jessopp returned to this several times in letters to his co-editor M. R. James: ‘It is very hard to believe that Thomas can have been a Monmouth man really and I should not be much surprised to find out that your Monumotensis stands for something else,’ 29 August 1891 (Cambridge University Library, Add 7481, Letter J40); ‘By the way, I very much doubt whether Thomas had anything to do with Monmouth. How should he? Monument is still a Norfolk name, but very uncommon,’ 13 November 1891 (Letter J43); ‘Another suggestion comes to me that Monewden near Wickham Market may have something to do with his name: but I rather think my original notion better,’ 2 March 1894 (Letter J54); ‘I am in hesitation on whether to translate Monemetensis, or Monemutensis of Monmouth. I am rather inclined to keep to the man’s Latin form Thomas Monementensis. I feel sure Monmouth is wrong in any case,’ 3 May 1894 (Letter J59).

  24. There was a Benedictine house in Monmouth, affiliated to the French house of Saint-Florent in Saumur, see David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (London: Longman, 1971), pp. 55, 71.

  25. See Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), pp. 103–21; esp. pp. 114–15.

  26. On literary creativity on the Welsh Borders, see the studies in Christopher N. L. Brooke, The Church and the Welsh Border in the Central Middle Ages, ed. D. N. Dumville and C. N. L. Brooke (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1986).

  27. Gilbert Foliot and his Letters, ed. Adrian Morey and C. N. L. Brooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 124–46. On the dependencies, see pp. 77–8.

  28. On hagiography, see David Townsend, ‘Anglo-Latin Hagiography and the Norman Transition’, Exemplaria 3 (1991), pp. 385–433.

  29. Jessopp formed a very negative image of Thomas, whom he saw as ‘a bit of a scoundrel; at any rate half knave and half fool and visionary’, 11 April 1894 (CUL, Add 7481, Letter J51); he also wrote on 2 March 1894: ‘It’s a horribly long business and this “Monumetensis” is such a scoundrel!’ (CUL, Add 7481, Letter J54).

  30. The reach of Thomas’s field of citation is similar to that of Herman the Archdeacon, the monk of Bury St Edmunds in an earlier generation, who also collected miracles of that monastery’s martyr and patron, St Edmund; see Tom Licence, ‘History and Hagiography in the Late Eleventh Century: The Life and Work of Herman the Archdeacon, Monk of Bury St Edmunds’, English Historical Review 124 (2009), pp. 516–44; at pp. 536–8. On Thomas’s rhetorical strategies, especially in the refutation of detractors, see Hannah R. Johnson, ‘Rhetoric’s Work: Thomas of Monmouth and the History of Forgetting’, New Medieval Literatures 9 (2007), pp. 63–91.

  31. See Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), pp. 167–74, 225–6 (and see map on p. 171).

  32. Julie Barrau, ‘Did Medieval Monks Actually Speak Latin?’, in Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries), ed. S. Vanderputten (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 293–317; esp. pp. 304–5.

  33. A twelfth-century Priscian from Norwich survived the 1272 fire: see N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books, Guides and Handbooks 3 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1964), p. 137. On the library of the neighbouring and far more ancient abbey, Bury St Edmunds, see Rodney M. Thomson, ‘The Library of Bury St Edmunds Abbey in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Speculum 47 (1972), pp. 617–45; esp. pp. 627–32.

  34. There are three citations from Horace and four from Virgil in the Life and Passion. In his choices Thomas resembles Herman the Archdeacon, the collector of miracles at the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, a contemporary of the foundation of Norwich Cathedral Priory. See Licence, ‘History and Hagiography’, pp. 536–7. On access to Virgil within English education in this period, see Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 15, 34–6. On the uses of Horace, see Rita Copeland, ‘Horace’s Ars poetica in the Medieval Classroom and Beyond: The Horizons of Ancient Precept’, in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 15–33; esp. pp. 19–28. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Thomas does not cite Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  35. Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. xxxiii–xxxv. Henry commands a wider range of classical citations than Thomas.

  36. Augustus Jessopp, the work’s first translator, found it a challenge to translate: ‘I don’t think my translation will be as bold as in this detestable prologue which is the worst bit of the whole,’ 18 May 1894 (CUL, Add 7481, Letter J55). On some of Thomas’s rhetorical practices, see Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2010), pp. 50–58.

  37. See Antonia Gransden, ‘Prologues in the Historiography of Twelfth-Century England’, in England in the Twelfth Century, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1990), pp. 55–81; reprinted in Antonia Gransden, Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon Press, 1992), pp. 125–51; and on prologues to lives of saints more generally, see Michael Goodich, ‘A Note on Sainthood in the Hagiographical Prologue’, History and Theory 20 (1981), pp. 168–74. For an example of a work on rhetoric close to Thomas’s time, that of Peter of Blois of 1181–5, which discusses the opening of letters with captatio in mind, see Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English ‘Artes Dictandi’ and Their Tradition, ed. Martin Camargo (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), pp. 55–6.

  38. See Peter Ainsworth, ‘ “Contemporary” and “Eyewitness” History’, in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 249–76; esp. pp. 249–54; Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 183–93; on the reuse of hagiographical models, see Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 138–58; on the rhetorical style of history writing in this period, see Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400–1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 87–90, 156–8. On women as witnesses, see E. M. C. van Houts, ‘Orality in Norman Hagiography of the 11th and 12th Centuries: The Value of Female Testimonies’, in History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000–1200 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 1–13. The Augustinian canon and historian William of Newburgh (c. 1136–c. 1198) criticized Geoffrey of Monmouth for adding to the false proph
ecies of Merlin much of his own (‘de proprio plurimum adjecit’); see William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1988), pp. 28–9.

  39. James Campbell, ‘Norwich’, in Atlas of Historic Towns II, ed. M. D. Lobel (London: Scolar, 1975), pp. 1–15; see p. 10. On the Jews of Norwich, see Elizabeth Rutledge, ‘The Medieval Jews of Norwich and Their Legacy’, in Art, Faith and Place in East Anglia from Prehistory to the Present, ed. T. A. Heslop, Elizabeth Mellings and Margit Thøfner (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 117–29, and Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich; see also Simon Yarrow, Saints and their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 140–6.

  40. Hebrew was the Jews’ liturgical language. On the Jews in England, see Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian–Jewish Relations, 1000–1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom (Harlow: Longman, 2011), pp. 88–108, and Paul Hyams, ‘The Jewish Minority in Mediaeval England, 1066–1290’, Journal of Jewish Studies 25 (1974), pp. 270–93. On the ethnic composition of Norwich, see Cohen, ‘The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich’.

  41. On the accidental deaths of children (albeit after the twelfth century, when the sources allow such study), see Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 175–82; and on the basis of the miracle account, see Didier Lett, L’Enfant des miracles: Enfance et société au Moyen ge (XIIe–XIIIe siècle) (Paris: Aubier, 1997), pp. 91–106.

  42. See Cecily Clark, ‘Women’s Names in Post-Conquest England: Observations and Speculations’, Speculum 53 (1978), pp. 223–51; esp. pp. 233–5.

  43. In the Middle Ages Thorpe Wood was the property of the bishops of Norwich; today it is the partly wooded, partly residential area across the River Wensum from the city proper.