44. John Hudson, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, II. 871–1216 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 395–6; see also pp. 409–12.
45. On marriage of the clergy in this period, see below, note 18, p. 207.
46. See Judith A. Green, English Sheriffs to 1154, Public Record Office Handbooks 24 (London: HMSO, 1990), p. 61; also H. A. Cronne, The Reign of Stephen, 1135–54: Anarchy in England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), pp. 149–50.
47. On Bishop Everard, see Charles Grégoire, ‘Everard, évêque de Norwich, “bâtisseur” de l’abbatiale cistercienne de Fontenay’, Cîteaux 43 (1992), pp. 418–25, and Stuart Harrison, ‘Dating the Abbey Church of Fontenay: A Reassessment of the Evidence’, Cîteaux 61 (2010), pp. 99–124; esp. pp. 107–110. On burial in churches, see Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 95–6.
48. See Catherine Cubitt, ‘Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints’, Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000), pp. 53–83, and Paul. A. Hayward, ‘The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom in Late Tenth- and Eleventh-Century English Hagiology’, Studies in Church History 30 (1993), pp. 81–92. This was a wider phenomenon, too, and the cults tended to be informal ones; see André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 147–51.
49. Thomas presents the crime as a killing in mockery of Christ, but uses the word ‘crucifixion’ sparingly; see below, note 72. See also, Langmuir, ‘Historiographic Crucifixion’, p. 284.
50. On popular participation in the cult of William, see John M. McCulloh, ‘Unofficial Elements in the Cult of St William of Norwich’, Hagiographica 13 (2006), pp. 163–204. See, more generally, on the relative influence of laypeople and institutions, Pierre-André Sigal, L’Homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale (XIe–XIIe siècle) (Paris: Cerf, 1985), pp. 167–72.
51. See McCulloh, ‘Jewish Ritual Murder’, esp. p. 725.
52. See English Episcopal Acta VI: Norwich 1070–1214, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 371–3.
53. See Christopher Harper-Bill, ‘Bishop William Turbe and the Diocese of Norwich, 1146–1174’, Anglo-Norman Studies 7 (1985), pp. 142–60.
54. On education at Norwich Cathedral Priory, see Joan Greatrex, ‘The Almonry School at Norwich Cathedral Priory in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, Studies in Church History 31 (1994), pp. 169–81; esp. pp. 169–71.
55. See David Knowles, The Episcopal Colleagues of Archbishop Thomas Becket (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. 31–3, 108–109; and Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), p. 90.
56. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, trans. and ed. Michael Swanton (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 265–6. On the manuscript, see pp. xxvi–xxvii; see also George Younge, ‘The Canterbury Anthology: An Old English Manuscript in Its Anglo-Norman Context’, Ph.D. Dissertation Submitted to the University of Cambridge (2001), pp. 186–7. Indeed, those rumours may have also contributed to other sections of the 1137 entry, as discussed below, note 68. See also Langmuir, ‘Thomas of Monmouth’, pp. 820–21.
57. See The Customary of the Cathedral Priory Church of Norwich: ms. 465 in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ed. J. B. L. Tolhurst, Henry Bradshaw Society 82 (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1948), p. 73, and for entry in calendar, p. 3.
58. On the book’s structure, see Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 123–7.
59. See above, pp. xviii.
60. See Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, p. 124.
61. Langmuir, ‘Thomas of Monmouth’, pp. 839–40.
62. For the first editors’ assessment of what may be considered the kernel of truth, see Jessopp and James, pp. xiv–xviii.
63. On Harold of Gloucester, Historia et cartularium monasterii sancti Petri Gloucestriae I, ed. William Henry Hart, Rolls Series (London: HMSO, 1863 [Wiesbaden: Kraus Reprints, 1971]), pp. 20–21; David Welander, The History, Art and Architecture of Gloucester Cathedral (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1991), pp. 609–10 [English translation]; Joe Hillaby, ‘The Ritual-Child-Murder Accusation: Its Dissemination and Harold of Gloucester’, Jewish Historical Studies 34 (1994–6), pp. 69–109; on Robert of Bury, see Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, pp. 105–43; interest in Robert, as in William of Norwich, was revived in the fifteenth century. Richard of Devizes composed a satirical tale of child murder, The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, ed. John T. Appleby (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), pp. 64–9; on this text, see the introduction, pp. xiv–xv. The case of Adam of Bristol is a literary confection of the thirteenth century, which probably originated as a parish drama, see Robert C. Stacey, ‘ “Adam of Bristol” and Tales of Ritual Crucifixion in Medieval England’, Thirteenth-Century England 11 (2007), pp. 1–15, and Harvey J. Hames, ‘The Limits of Conversion: Ritual Murder and the Virgin Mary in the Account of Adam of Bristol’, Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007), pp. 43–59. Heather Blurton has considered the echoes of child-murder accusations in historical writings of the later twelfth century, in ‘Egyptian Days: From Passion to Exodus in the Representation of Twelfth-Century Jewish–Christian Relations’, in Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, ed. Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (York: York Medieval Press/Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 222–37; esp. pp. 224–6.
64. See the analysis above, pp. xxxi–xxxii.
65. See Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century Historical Writing (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 21–57.
66. This scene is described in MacLehose, ‘A Tender Age’, p. 292.
67. I am most grateful to Matthew Champion, who discussed this passage with me. See below for the biblical sources, Book One, note 26, p. 208.
68. ‘Now we wish to tell some part of what happened in King Stephen’s time. In his time the Jews of Norwich bought a Christian child before Easter, and tortured him with all the same tortures with which our Lord was tortured, and on Good Friday hanged him on a cross for love of our Lord, and afterwards buried him – imagined that it would be concealed, but our Lord showed that he was a holy martyr, and the monks took him and buried him reverently in the minster, and through our Lord he performs wonderful and manifold miracles; and he is called St William,’ The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, pp. 265–6; see also Younge, ‘The Canterbury Anthology’, pp. 186–7.
69. I am grateful to Andrew Reynolds, the author of Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), for confirming this.
70. The description of tortures during Stephen’s reign also includes incarceration with toads and adders, practices described in miracles of the Life and Passion; see The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, p. 265; and see the text below, p. 163.
71. On the use of boiling water (and a possible link to the rituals of Passover) in later accusations against Jews, see Katrin Kogman-Appel, A Mahzor from Worms: Art and Religion in a Medieval Jewish Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 95–6; also Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 45, figures 19, 20a and b.
72. The verb ‘to crucify’ is used only twice in the Life and Passion, when Thomas marshals seven arguments in support of his version of events; he also applies it in passing to set the scene for the testimony he claims a maid in the Jews’ house gave him: ‘William was being tortured so cruelly in retribution, ridiculed and crucified’ (penaliter torquebatur, illudebatur, et crucifigebatur), below. p. 59.
73. Such invented speeches were a common classroom exercise in the course of teaching rhetoric; see Marjorie Curry Woods, ‘Rhetoric, Gender and the Literary Arts: Classical Speeches in the Schoolroom’, New Medieval Literatures 11 (2009), pp. 113–32. Thomas uses it elsewhere in the Life and Passion, when
he recreates Bishop Turbe’s speech at the trial of Simon de Nodariis; see below, pp. 68–70.
74. Intention became an increasingly central moral test in the judgement of sin and virtue in twelfth-century Europe; see David E. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard: The Influence of Abelard’s Thought in the Early Scholastic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 139–40, 151–3, 163, 175–6. For similar incorporation of current ‘objections’ to a saint within the hagiographical account of her life, see The Life of Christina of Markyate, a Twelfth-Century Recluse, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 68.
75. See Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 34–6. This claim is associated with the Christian understanding (developed over the twelfth century) of the hope for ‘vengeful redemption’ among Jews in Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, pp. 173–4.
76. ‘apud Narbonam habent summum papam, ad quam a iudaeis ex toto curritur orbe. His xenia cumulantibus, his si quid questionis intra eos ortum fuerit quod solutionem desiderat, illius arbitratu decidentibus’, José M. Canal, El Libro ‘De laudibus et miraculis Sanctae Mariae’ de Guillermo de Malmesbury, OSB (+c. 1143). Estudio y texto (Rome: Alma Roma, 1968), p. 73, lines 295–8. See Peter Carter, ‘The Historical Content of William of Malmesbury’s Miracles of the Virgin Mary’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 127–65; esp. pp. 146–50.
77. On the dating, see Petri Venerabilis Adversus Iudeorum inveteratam duritiem, ed. Yvonne Friedman, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 58 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), pp. lxiii–lxiv, and the entry about Narbonne, p. 70. See the English translation and comments in Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, trans. and ed. Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), p. 40. On the legend, see Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 293–5; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 254–70. On the community at Narbonne and its leading family, see Aryeh Graboïs, ‘La dynastie des “rois juifs” de Narbonne (IXe–XIIIe siècles)’, in Narbonne: Archéologie et historie II (Montpellier: Fédération historique du Languedoc méditerranéen et du Roussillon, 1973), pp. 49–54. This view contrasts with the one expressed in the 1130s by Peter Abelard, that the Jews were ‘dispersed among the nations, alone, without an earthly king or prince’, Peter Abelard, Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian, ed. and trans. Pierre J. Payer (Toronto: Pontificial Institute of Mediaevel Studies, 1979), pp. 32–3.
78. Damien van den Eynde, ‘Les principaux voyages de Pierre le Vénérable’, Benedictina 15 (1968), pp. 58–110; esp. pp. 89–94.
79. Aimar was prior for only a short period: his predecessor died in 1143, and Aimar occurs in 1144 and 1145, and is succeeded by 1147. For his presence in Norwich we rely on Thomas alone, but so soon after assuming office he may well have wished to visit Norwich and survey his Norfolk interests, The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, I. 940–1216, ed. David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and Vera C. M. London, second edn with new material by C. N. L. Brooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 119, 268–9. The rich market church of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, was held by St Pancras, Campbell, ‘Norwich’, map 6 and p. 24.
80. The Warenne (Hyde) Chronicle, ed. and trans. Elisabeth M. C. van Houts and Rosalind C. Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2013), pp. 97–102.
81. The see was moved from Thetford to Norwich, and in 1126 Norwich Cathedral became the mother church of East Anglia, Everett U. Crosby, Bishop and Chapter in Twelfth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 174–95; esp. pp. 176–85. For the complex chronology of the move, see J. Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, XI. Coventry and Lichfield, ed. Christopher Brooke, Jeffrey Denton and Diana Greenway (London: University of London Institute of Historical Research, 2012), p. xxvii. On Herbert, see Tom Licence, ‘Herbert Losinga’s Trip to Rome and the Bishopric of Bury St Edmunds’, Anglo-Norman Studies 34 (2012), pp. 151–68.
82. On the division of property between bishop and Cathedral Priory, see the example in Martin Brett, The English Church under Henry I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 192. On the complex role of bishops within their urban contexts, see Paul Dalton, Charles Insley and Louise J. Wilkinson, ‘Introduction’, in Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Paul Dalton, Charles Insley and Louise J. Wilkinson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 1–26; esp. pp. 17–26.
83. English Episcopal Acta VI, pp. xxviii–xxix. He wrote to the abbey with a request for a copy of its customs, The Life, Letters, and Sermons of Bishop Herbert de Losinga (b. circ. A.D. 1050, d. 1119) II, ed. Edward Meyrick Goulburn and Henry Symonds (Oxford and London: James Parker and Co., 1878), pp. 65–6; Barbara Dodwell, ‘The Monastic Community’, in Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996, ed. Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie, Christopher Harper-Bill and Hassell Smith (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), pp. 231–54; esp. pp. 233–4. On this sermon see also Brett, The English Church under Henry I, pp. 116–20.
84. See The Heads of Religious Houses I, p. 162. See also, for example, the account of John of Worcester in The Chronicle of John of Worcester III, ed. and trans. P. McGurk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 68–71.
85. The Life, Letters and Sermons of Bishop Herbert de Losinga II, pp. 30–33. This connection was also noted by Jessopp and James, p. lxv. On the story and its reach, see Rubin, Gentile Tales, pp. 7–28 and MacLehose, ‘A Tender Age’, paragraphs 244–7.
86. I am much inspired here by conversations on Herbert’s activities with Dr Tom Licence. For a reference to oral memories ‘as is related by old people’ (ex relatione antiquorum), see The First Register of Norwich Cathedral Priory, ed. H. W. Saunders (Norwich: Norfolk Record Society, 1939), pp. 50–51. On the use of the figure of Herbert in the Life and Passion, see Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 133–40.
87. Edmund King, King Stephen (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 218–220.
88. Nicholas Vincent, ‘New Charters of King Stephen with Some Reflections upon the Royal Forests During the Anarchy’, English Historical Review 114 (1999), pp. 899–928; esp. pp. 902–903, 914–15. Earlier in the reign Norwich had benefited from concessions, too; see King, King Stephen, pp. 78–9. On violence during the reign, see Hugh M. Thomas, ‘Violent Disorder in King Stephen’s England: A Maximum Argument’, in King Stephen’s Reign (1135–1154), ed. Paul Dalton and Graeme J. White (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), pp. 139–70. On the consequences for the Church, see Christopher Harper-Bill, ‘The Anglo-Norman Church’, in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), pp. 165–90; esp. pp. 187–8.
89. On solvency, see Vincent, ‘New Charters’, pp. 920–21 and Judith Green, ‘Financing Stephen’s War’, Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992), pp. 91–114; at pp. 99–100.
90. Campbell, ‘Norwich’, p. 9.
91. Ibid., p. 7.
92. Brian Ayers and P. Murphy, ‘Waterfront Excavation at Whitefriars Street Car Park, Norwich, 1979’, East Anglian Archaeology Report 17 (1983), pp. 1–60; Brian Ayers, Excavations at St Martin-at-Palace Plain, Norwich, 1981, East Anglian Archaeology 37 (Dereham: Norfolk Archaeological Unit, Norfolk Museums Service, 1987). I am grateful to Susan Raich for an edifying conversation on Norwich’s river trade. See also, Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 150–53.
93. On liturgical life in the cathedral see David Chadd, ‘The Medieval Customary of the Cathedral Priory’, in Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996, ed. Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie,
Christopher Harper-Bill and Hassell Smith (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), pp. 314–24.
94. Even as Thomas was completing his work in the early 1170s, Norwich Cathedral Priory acquired a substantial relic from Fécamp: a portion of the Holy Blood. Its arrival inspired new liturgical and architectural arrangements within the cathedral; see Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 69–71, 209–10.
95. See Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 2, 96, 113. On the incorporation of new saints in this period, see Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, pp. 461–2.
96. See, for example, 90, 92, pp. 112 (implict), 114.
97. The vast majority of 115 miracles occurred to people from Norfolk villages; only seven to people from Suffolk. On the geographical distribution, see Yarrow, Saints and their Communities, pp. 151–3. On some of the patterns of the tales, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, pp. 125–34.
98. On the distribution of illnesses in accounts of miraculous cures, see Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, p.343.
99. On attention to chains of transmission and witness, see an example in a Vita bound alongside The Life and Passion in our manuscript: John of Forde, The Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, Anchorite, trans. Pauline Matarasso (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011), Book 3, chapter 6, pp. 178–9.
100. See examples below, pp. 166, 167, 177, 182.
101. For example, see the positions described and evaluated in Marcus Bull, The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), esp. pp. 11–20.
102. See Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 121–68.
103. On the monastic preoccupation with Jews and Judaism, see Kati Ihnat, ‘Getting the Punchline: Deciphering Anti-Jewish Humour in Anglo-Norman England’, in Journal of Medieval History 38 (2012), pp. 408–23.
The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (Penguin Classics) Page 5