Mcculloh Article

Medieval Academy of America
Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early
Dissemination of the Myth
Author(s): John M. McCulloh
Source: Speculum, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Jul., 1997), pp. 698-740
Published by: Medieval Academy of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3040759
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Jewish Ritual Murder:
William of Norwich, Thomas of
Monmouth, and the Early
Dissemination of the Myth
By John M. McCulloh
One of the most enduring contributions of the Middle Ages to the history of
Western intolerance is the myth that Jews practice the ritual murder of Christian
children. From the twelfth century to the twentieth and from eastern Europe to
North America Christians have accused Jews of conducting sanguinary rituals.
These have included charges of sacrificing Christian children and collecting their
blood for ritual purposes, as well as the commonly associated accusation of
desecrating the body of Christ in the form of the host sanctified in the mass.
Not surprisingly the recent flowering of scholarly interest in the history of anti-
Semitism and Christian-Jewish relations has yielded numerous studies of these
charges in both medieval and modern times.1
Within the last decade alone, two strikingly original contributions have exam-
ined the earliest examples of the ritual-murder accusation. In 1984 Gavin I. Lang-
muir published a critical investigation of Thomas of Monmouth's life of St.'Wil-
liam of Norwich, which documents the first clear example of a ritual murder
charge.2 Most earlier scholars had studied Thomas's narrative to determine what
Many people deserve thanks for their contributions to this work, although only one bears any
responsibility for errors. I presented an abbreviated version of this paper to the Medieval Society of
the University of Kansas in October 1995, and my colleagues in history at Kansas State University
read and critiqued a nearly final draft. Both groups pushed me to refine my ideas. Christoph Cluse
and George R. Keiser also read the paper and offered valuable comments as did several anonymous
reviewers. I am especially indebted to Willis Johnson, who is preparing a critical edition of Thomas
of Monmouth's Life of St. William. He freely shared the results of his investigations, and his assistance
with the modern literature in Hebrew on this topic has been indispensable.
1 Classic studies of this
phenomenon include Hermann L. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice,
trans. Henry Blanchamp (New York, 1909); Cecil Roth, The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew: The
Report by Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli (Pope Clement XIV) (London, 1934); Will-Erich Peukert,
"Ritualmord," in Hanns Bachtold-Staubli, ed., Handworterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 7:727-
39; Joshua Trachenberg, The Devil and the Jews (New York, 1966). Two recent collections of essays
attest to continuing interest in the topic: Alan Dundes, ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in
Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison, Wis., 1991); and Rainer Erb, ed., Die Legende vom Ritualmord: Zur
Geschichte der Blutbeschuldigung gegen Juden, Dokumente, Texte, Materialen 6 (Berlin, 1993). Each
collection includes an essay by the editor that reviews scholarship: Dundes, "The Ritual Murder or
Blood Libel Legend: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective Inversion," pp. 336-76
(repr. from Temenos 25 [1989], 7-32); and Erb, "Zur Erforschung der europaischen Ritualmordbe-
schuldigungen," pp. 9-16. Twentieth-century examples of ritual murder accusations, cited by Dundes,
p. 345, include one in Kiev in 1911, which provided the basis for Bernard Malamud's novel The Fixer,
and one in Massena, N.Y, in 1928.
2
"Thomas of Monmouth: Dectector of Ritual Murder," Speculum 59 (1984), 820-46.
698 Speculum 72 (1997)

Jewish Ritual Murder 699
"really happened" at Norwich in 1144, but Langmuir directs attention to a his-
torical issue of much greater significance: Who first accused the Jews of killing
young William in a bloody rite? He concludes that Thomas of Monmouth per-
sonally invented the malignant myth of ritual murder and introduced it to the
world with the publication of his life of St. William around 11.50. In later works
Langmuir presents this as a turning point in Christian attitudes toward Jews. He
argues that the creation of the ritual murder fantasy marks a transition from "anti-
Judaism" to "anti-Semitism," from hostility to Jews founded upon actual char-
acteristics of the people and their religion to attacks based upon irrational and
completely unfounded beliefs about Jews and Judaism. He finds the cause of this
change in rising doubts among Christians about the truth of their own religion,
doubts that led them to project antireligious behavior onto the Jews, and he iden-
tifies Thomas of Monmouth as the inventor of the first of these fantasies.3
Theories of this scope invite response, and other scholars have already raised
questions or proposed adjustments in Langmuir's broad scheme.4 Nevertheless,
his assessment of the events in Norwich has been very well received, and for nearly
a decade it provided the basis for something approaching a scholarly consensus
on when and where the ritual murder accusation entered the Western tradition.
In 1993, however, Israel J. Yuval provoked bitter controversy with an article that
challenged nearly every element of the prevailing view.5 Yuval contends that the
ritual murder myth arose in the aftermath of the Christian attacks on Jewish
communities in the Rhineland in 1096. Faced with forced conversion or death at
the hands of forces assembled for the First Crusade, many Jews chose to avoid
surrender, killing their children and wives and then committing suicide. Yuval
argues that this response arose out of a belief among Ashkenazic Jews that their
martyrdom would hasten the coming of messianic judgment, when the Jews would
triumph over their enemies. But the Christians who witnessed or heard of these
acts perceived a more immediate threat. If Jews were willing to sacrifice their own
offspring, would they not do the same with Christian children?
Yuval's conviction that the ritual murder accusation originated on the Continent
in the psychological atmosphere engendered by the First Crusade also leads him
to deny that Thomas of Monmouth provides the earliest witness to the charge.
3 Langmuir'sexposition of the larger context of Thomas's work appears in two recent books. Toward
a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, Calif., 1990) is a collection of the author's essays. Most of
them, including "Thomas of Monmouth," pp. 209-36 (notes, pp. 384-87), have appeared earlier,but
several are new. One of these is "Doubt in Christendom," pp. 100-133 (notes, pp. 365-68). History,
Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley, Calif., 1990) offers a theoretical analysis of the problems in-
volved in defining and discussing the topics of the title. Particularly relevant here is chap. 14, "From
Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism," pp. 275-305, esp. pp. 298-99.
4 See Anna
Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London, 1995),
on the extent to which Christian fantasies about Jews were irrational in origin. David Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1996), adopts
a different perspective on the role of violence in Christian-Jewish relations.
5 "Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel
Accusations" (in Hebrew), Zion 58 (1993), 33-90; English summary,pp. vi-viii. The following volume
of Zion, a double number, 59:2-3 (1994), presents seven articles, all in Hebrew, disputing or sup-
porting various aspects of Yuval's thesis (pp. 129-350; English summaries, pp. x-xvii) along with
Yuval's rejoinders (pp. 351-414; English summary, pp. xvii-xx).
700 Jewish Ritual Murder
Accepting Langmuir's conclusion that Thomas could not have conceived of the
ritual murder accusation before 1148 or 1149, Yuval argues that the charge first
appeared in Germany at the time of the Second Crusade. Early in 1147, as forces
gathered at Wiirzburg for the march to the East, some of their number proclaimed
as a martyr a man they alleged had been killed by the Jews. Since this incident
occurred before Thomas penned his life of St. William, Yuval sees it as evidence
that Thomas employed a conception of ritual murder imported from continental
Europe.
The eleventh and twelfth centuries marked a period of broad and profound
change in medieval Latin Christendom. Economy, society, politics, thought, reli-
gion-nearly every aspect of western European culture was transformed.6 This
same age witnessed far-reaching developments in the relations between Christians
and Jews. Christian hostility toward the religious minority increased. Economic
opportunities for Jews became more restricted; their legal status declined; and they
came to be regarded as enemies of Christ and the Christian religion.7 The ap-
pearance of the ritual murder accusation represents an important stage in the
increasingly negative attitudes of the majority toward the minority. This myth
helped to justify Christian hostility by assuring the Christians that Jewish enmity
toward Christ had not been satisfied with his execution; it continued, directed at
his followers.
The first example of this particular escalation of Christian antagonism toward
Jews is the case of St. William of Norwich. But the significance of this episode is
now in dispute. Langmuir sees mid-twelfth-century Norwich as the font of this
fantasy, and he identifies Thomas of Monmouth as its creator. Yuval explains the
ritual murder myth as an outgrowth of events that occurred a half century before
William's murder, and he sees Thomas as having elaborated the local incident on
the basis of ideas derived from the Continent. These contrasting interpretations
provide both context and incentive for a reexamination of the sources that attest
to awareness of William of Norwich as a reputed victim of ritual murder. First, I
shall review the evidence for the date of Thomas of Monmouth's life of William,
evidence that shows that Thomas composed this hagiography later than is gen-
erally assumed. Next, I shall examine other English sources that reveal knowledge
of William's death. These works are for the most part already well known, but
their contents suggest that their references to the murder do not derive from
Thomas's life. Then I shall consider Continental evidence, some of which has
escaped the attention of earlier investigators. These sources confirm the existence
6 Out of the vast literature on these

developments, two synthetic works can serve as examples: R. W.
Southern's classic exposition, The Making of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1970; first published,
1953), and Robert Bartlett's chronologically broader analysis, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Col-
onization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, N.J., 1993).
7 Several recent studies
place these developments in larger contexts. R. I. Moore, The Formation of
a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford, 1987), sees the
treatment of Jews as part of a growing intolerance of marginal groups. Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated
Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), places this period within the
Middle Ages as a whole, examining the world of the Jews as well as their relations with the Christians.
Jeremy Cohen, "The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars,"
Traditio 39 (1983), 1-27, outlines the evolution of a key component in the view of Jews as enemies.
of information about William that cannot be traced to Thomas's work. They also
demonstrate the likelihood that word of William's supposed martyrdom had
spread to southern Germany before Thomas wrote his hagiography and probably
even before the incident at Wiirzburg. Finally, I shall reexamine the evidence for
the first accusations of ritual murder in Norwich.
1. WILLIAM OF NORWICH AND THOMAS OF MONMOUTH
The case generally regarded as the first in the centuries-long series of ritual
murder charges occurred in England, in the city of Norwich, where the mutilated
body of twelve-year-old William was discovered in Thorpe Wood on the day be-
fore Easter in 1144.8 No witnesses came forward to offer evidence about the crime.
However, at a diocesan synod held within weeks of the discovery, the boy's uncle,
Godwin Sturt, a priest, publicly accused the Jews of murdering his nephew. Shortly
thereafter, the child's body, which had been temporarily buried in the wood, was
transferred to the monks' cemetery next to the cathedral, and miracles were re-
ported at the tomb.
Information about these events and the developing cult of St. William in the
decade following his death is far more extensive than for most putative victims of
ritual murder because William of Norwich found a hagiographer in the person of
Thomas of Monmouth. Although Thomas was almost certainly not living in Nor-
wich at the time of William's murder and the events that immediately followed,
he did enter the cathedral priory sometime before 1150.9 As a monk of Norwich,
he became interested in William's case, and during Lent of 1150 he experienced
a series of visionary visitations in which he was ordered to tell Bishop William
Turbe to translate the young martyr's body into the chapter house. Thereafter
Thomas came to be regarded as William's "sacrist," responsible for the upkeep of
the tomb and other relics and for collecting stories of the saint's supernatural
powers. When the time came to produce a written account of William's life and
miracles, Thomas undertook the task, using stories provided by observers of the
events surrounding William's death and information he had obtained directly since
8 The
starting point for any study of this case is The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich by
Thomas of Monmouth, Now First Edited from the Unique Manuscript, with an Introduction, Trans-
lation and Notes by Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge, Eng., 1896), hereafter
cited as Life. The only book-length investigation of the incident, M. D. Anderson, A Saint at Stake:
The Strange Death of William of Norwich, 1144 (London, 1964), addresses a popular audience. The
most influential recent study is Langmuir, "Thomas of Monmouth." The same author reviews both
medieval and modern scholarship in "Historiographic Crucifixion," in Gilbert Dahan, ed., Les juifs en
regard de l'histoire: Melanges en honneur de Bernhard Blumenkranz (Paris, 1985), pp. 109-27. Newer
publications on the topic include a brief review by Zefira Entin Rokeah, "The State, the Church, and
the Jews in Medieval England," in Shmuel Almog, ed., Antisemitism through the Ages, trans. Nathan
H. Reisner (Oxford, 1988), pp. 104-6, and a substantial contribution by Friedrich Lotter, "Innocens
virgo et martyr: Thomas von Monmouth und die Verbreitung der Ritualmordlegende im Hochmittel-
alter," in Erb, Die Legende vom Ritualmord (see above, n. 1), pp. 25-72. Two recent studies examine
William's cult with emphasis on his miracles: Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular
Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa, N.J., 1977); and Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval
Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000-1215 (Philadelphia, 1982), esp. pp. 68-76.
9
Life, p. x.
his arrival in Norwich. He actively investigated certain aspects of the case, and in
his retrospective account he describes the results of his personal visit to the scene
of the crime and cites evidence from witnesses who apparently had not spoken up
in 1144.
The fruit of Thomas's efforts was The Life and Passion of St. William the Martyr
of Norwich.10 Thomas divided his work into seven books, the last five of which
he devoted entirely to accounts of the multiple translations of William's body and
stories of the miracles that occurred at his tombs and elsewhere. In the first two
libri, however, Thomas presents a detailed account of William's murder along with
extensive evidence in support of his claims that the Jews were guilty of the child's
death and that the homicide qualified as a martyrdom and thus justified recog-
nizing William as a saint.
The first book consists almost entirely of a narrative of the boy's life, his death,
and the events of the month that followed. According to Thomas, William was a
youth from a village outside Norwich who was apprenticed to a skinner in the
city. In that position he attracted the attention of local Jews who brought him fur
garments for repair and eventually selected him as the victim for a sacrifice that
they would perform at the time of Passover.
On the Monday after Palm Sunday, a man claiming to be the cook of the arch-
deacon of Norwich approached William, asking the boy to come to work for him.
William's father being dead, the child insisted on obtaining his mother's permis-
sion, and the two sought her out at her home. The mother, Elviva, suspected that
something was amiss-or so she claimed after the murder-and argued that her
son should not go with the man or that, at the very least, they should wait until
after Easter. Finally, however, the stranger won her over with a cash payment and
returned with William to Norwich on Tuesday. As they passed through the city,
they also stopped at the home of William's aunt, his mother's sister Leviva, wife
of Godwin Sturt, where the "cook" announced that Elviva had entrusted her child
to him. Leviva, also suspicious of the arrangement, sent her young daughter to
follow the pair, and the girl saw them enter the house of Eleazar, the leading
member of Norwich's Jewish community. Inside the house William was well
treated until the following morning, the day of the Passover, when the Jews seized
him and gagged him with a teasel. They tied a knotted cord around his head and
neck, and shaving his head, they stabbed it with thorns. Then they fastened him
to a post and beam as if to a cross "in mockery of the Lord's passion."11Finally,
they dispatched the boy, inflicting a wound in his side that penetrated to his heart,
and to stanch the flow of blood they poured boiling water over the corpse. The
day was the Wednesday after Palm Sunday, 22 March 1144.
On Thursday, according to Thomas's day-by-day account, the Jews took coun-
sel about how to dispose of the body. They decided to transport it to Thorpe
Wood on the opposite side of the town in order to divert suspicion from them-
selves. At dawn on Good Friday, Eleazar and a companion set out on horseback
with the body in a sack, and as they entered the wood they encountered /Elward
10 This title appears in the manuscript at the beginning of the general prologue, Life, p. 1.
11
Life 1.5, p. 21.
Ded, a wealthy and respected citizen who was on his way to church accompanied
by a servant. /Elward touched the bag and recognized that it contained a human
body, whereupon the Jews took off at a gallop. IElward proceeded about his
business without raising the alarm, but he did reveal his experience to a confessor
five years later as he lay on his deathbed, and Thomas of Monmouth heard the
story from the priest.
Thomas states that the Jews hid the corpse in the wood, but the following night
rays of light shone down from heaven to mark the spot where it lay. On Saturday
morning several people who had seen the celestial sign found their way to the
body. Following the discovery, the corpse lay exposed until the day after Easter,
when it was buried on the spot. Then, apparently within days of this interment,
the priest Godwin heard of the murder and opened the grave in order to determine
whether the victim was his nephew William. Having identified the corpse, he re-
buried it. Shortly thereafter, in the diocesan synod, he accused the Jews of the
murder, and the bishop summoned them to answer the charge. The Jews refused
to submit to the ecclesiastical authority and sought the support and protection of
the sheriff, the king's representative, who harbored them in the royal castle until
the crisis had passed. Godwin's charge did not succeed in establishing the guilt of
the Jews in his nephew's murder, but it did lead, on 24 April, to the translation
of young William's body from the temporary grave in Thorpe Wood to a promi-
nent tomb in the monks' cemetery located next to the cathedral-the first official
step in the gradual development of William's cult.
In his second book Thomas switches from narrative to argument. He denounces
detractors who refuse to recognize William's sainthood and attempts to refute their
objections. He also contends that William was not only a saint, but a martyr,that
the Jews were responsible for his death, and that they killed him as a part of a
Passover ritual intended to mock the passion of Christ. The evidence for Jewish
guilt that Thomas presents here is of several sorts. He adduces the testimony of
two eyewitnesses, the child who followed William and the traitorous "cook" to
Eleazar's dwelling and also a Christian maidservant in Eleazar's house. This
woman-well after the event-claimed to have glimpsed William fastened to a
beam as she passed boiling water to his persecutors through a partly open door.
Thomas also refers to several comments by unidentified Jews that appear to be
admissions of guilt, and he cites numerous examples of bribes and attempted
bribes that, he insists, innocent people would never have offered. Most damning,
however, is Thomas's report of the testimony of one Theobald, formerly a Jew of
Cambridge, who on hearing of the miracles God worked through William had
converted to Christianity and become a monk. According to Thomas, Theobald
revealed that Jews believed they could never return to their ancient homeland
unless they yearly sacrificed a Christian "in contempt of Christ."12To implement
this requirement, their rabbis and leaders met annually at Narbonne to determine
by lot the country for that year's sacrifice, and within the country they used a
similar procedure to select a city. In 1144 the lot had fallen on Norwich, and all
the Jewish communities in the kingdom had consented to the act.
12
Life 2.11, pp. 93-94.
Since the publication of The Life and Miracles of St. William a century ago,
Thomas of Monmouth has been accepted as the first author of any detailed ac-
count of a case involving the charge of ritual murder. Moreover, within the past
decade Thomas has come to be seen as a pivotal figure in the history of Christian-
Jewish relations. In his seminal article published in 1984, Gavin I. Langmuir la-
beled Thomas the "detector of ritual murder," identifying him not merely as the
recorder, but indeed as the inventor, of the story that William of Norwich was
crucified by the Jews.13With his article several times reprinted and supplemented
by additional studies, Langmuir's thesis has gained wide acceptance.14
Langmuir'sargument is lucidly presented. He begins by excluding the possibility
that Thomas's tale might have been inspired by stories transmitted by ancient
authors. He establishes with virtual certainty that the relevant texts were unknown
to Thomas and, thus, that Thomas's fable is a medieval invention.15He then con-
siders the genesis of the story. Examining the seven books of Thomas's opus, he
argues that they represent the result of a multistage process of composition. In
particular, he suggests that Thomas wrote book 1, the vita per se, in 1149 or early
1150. Thomas admits that the memory of William had almost died out among
the people of Norwich by the late 1140s, and Langmuir sees evidence of a con-
certed effort at this time on the part of certain individuals to revive popular interest
in St. William. One of these was Wicheman, a monk whom the bishop had dep-
utized to hear confessions. He received the account of a recent miracle by which
a pious maiden was freed through William's intercession from the unwelcome
attentions of an incubus. In or about 1149 he also heard the deathbed confession.
of /Elward Ded, who finally told the story of his encounter with the Jews on their
way to dispose of William's body. Langmuir places Thomas's first book in this
context, arguing that he wrote it as part of the campaign to promote William's
cult and to justify the need for a translation from the cemetery to a more protected
and honorable location. This suggestion is not implausible. In his narrative of the
removal of William's body from the cemetery to the chapter house on 12 April
1150, Thomas recounts his visions of the preceding Lent in which Bishop Herbert
Losinga (1091-1119) and St. William himself demanded a translation, and
Thomas declares that he personally persuaded Prior Elias, the head of the cathe-
dral chapter, who in turn convinced Bishop William Turbe to undertake the task.16
Adopting 1150, his date for book 1, as the terminus ad quem for the charge
13
Langmuir,"Thomasof Monmouth."
14 "Thomasof Monmouth"has been reprintedin Dundes,The Blood Libel Legend(see above,n.
1), pp. 3-40, as well as in Langmuir'sown Towarda Definitionof Antisemitism.For this and his
otherrecentwork, see above, n. 3. Langmuir'sconclusionsin "Thomasof Monmouth"hold an im-
portantplace in the argumentsof Yuval,"Vengeanceand Damnation"(see above,n. 5), pp. 79-80,
and Lotter,"Innocensvirgo et martyr"(see above, n. 8), pp. 25-72, esp. pp. 38, 48, and 72. For
furtherexamplesof Langmuir'sinfluence,see Moore, PersecutingSociety(see above,n. 7), pp. 119-
21; Stow,AlienatedMinority(seeabove,n. 7), p. 237; andAdriaanH. Bredero,"Anti-Jewish Sentiment
in MedievalSociety,"in idem, Christendomand Christianityin the Middle Ages, trans. Reinder
Bruinsma(GrandRapids,Mich., 1994), p. 294.
15Langmuir,"Thomasof Monmouth,"pp. 822-27; see also Langmuir,"Historiographic Crucifix-
ion" (see above,n. 8), p. 110.
16
Life 2.1, pp. 116-21.
that William died by crucifixion, Langmuir then reviews all the statements that
Thomas attributes to various actors in the narrative. He does not contend that
Thomas reports the ipsissima verba of the speeches "quoted" in the life, but he
does argue that, writing at a time when many of the principals were still alive,
Thomas would not have risked attributing the completely unprecedented accu-
sation of crucifixion to someone who had not actually made it.17 And, in fact,
Thomas does not cite any explicit reference to crucifixion by any of the characters
in his drama. Even the convert Theobald-who declared that his former coreli-
gionists practiced annual human sacrifice as an insult to Christianity-did not
suggest that they crucified their victims. Rather, the first reference to the manner
of William's death appears in Thomas's narrative of the event, into which he inserts
a description of what appears to be a personal visit to the scene of the crime.18He
speaks of finding marks in the house which indicated that the child was affixed,
not to a freestanding cross, but to a cruciform structure of posts and a beam.
Thomas attributes this explanation of the supposed evidence to common report
(ut fama traditur), but Langmuir argues that in fact Thomas, already convinced
that William had been crucified, interpreted what he found in the house in the
light of that conviction.19
Langmuir does concede that anyone could have fabricated the crucifixion
story.20Once the Jews were accused in the murder of an innocent child found dead
during Easter week, associations between the child and Christ might easily spring
to the mind of any Christian, but Langmuir believes that Thomas-who empha-
sizes other parallels between William and Christ-would be more likely than
anyone else to make the connection. He summarizes: "So far as we are ever likely
to, know, Thomas created the accusation. Since he had not acquired all the ele-
ments of his story until 1149, and had apparently written book 1 by 1150, we
may feel reasonably sure that the fantasy that Jews ritually murdered Christians
by crucifixion was created and contributed to western culture by Thomas of Mon-
mouth about 1150."21 Then, once recorded, Thomas's fantasy spread widely and
rapidly, first within England and then to France and beyond. Its circulation was
marked by two sorts of traces: widely distributed information about William him-
self and, far more threatening, a growing number of murdered children identified
as victims of ritual crimes.
But is it indeed reasonable to brand Thomas of Monmouth as the inventor of
the crucifixion libel? To answer this fundamental question, we must consider a
number of different issues: When did Thomas write? What evidence exists that
people outside of Norwich possessed any knowledge of William and the manner
of his death? And did that information come from Thomas's text, either directly
or indirectly?
17
Langmuir,"Thomasof Monmouth,"pp. 840-42.
18
Life 1.5, pp. 21-22.
19
Langmuir,"Thomasof Monmouth,"p. 841.
20
Langmuir,"Thomasof Monmouth,"pp. 836, 842.
21
Langmuir,"Thomasof Monmouth,"p. 842.
2. THE DATE OF THOMAS'S COMPOSITION
A reexamination of the evidence must begin with the date of Thomas of Mon-
mouth's Life of St. William. The original editors apparently assumed that Thomas
composed the work in its extant form, with seven books and a general prologue,
as a single piece. The author obligingly dates the final miracle of his last book to
January 1172, and he addresses his general prologue to Bishop William Turbe,
who died on 16 January 1174. On that basis M. R. James placed the writing of
the work within a period of approximately two years.22For the purpose of estab-
lishing the time within which Thomas put his hagiography into final form, this
argument is probably conclusive, but it fails to take into account other internal
evidence that reveals a more extended process of composition.
Besides Jessopp and James, only Langmuir has examined in detail the question
of dating, and he argues that Thomas composed the work in three stages.23He
contends that book 1, the narrative life of St. William, represents an independent
composition that Thomas wrote in 1149 or early 1150, and he sees the next five
books as the product of a later effort, dating to 1154-55. The second book con-
tains frequent references to people who doubted William's sanctity, and Langmuir
construes these as an indication that Thomas felt he had to respond to criticism
leveled against the previously published life before narrating the translations and
miracles of the early 1150s in books 3-6. By contrast, book 7 and the general
prologue belong, according to Langmuir's timetable, to a still later stage in which
Thomas rounded out and concluded his work between 1172 and 1174.
A complete analysis of the chronology of Thomas's composition would exceed
the limits of this study, but the date of book 1 and its relationship to book 2
demand consideration because they play a crucial role in any attempt to assess
the early dissemination of information about William of Norwich. Langmuir's
view that books 2-6 were composed as a group is certainly correct, as is his dating
of that process to the years 1154-55. The second book contains several references
to the time of King Stephen couched in terms that Thomas would only have em-
ployed after the king's death on 25 October 1154.24 Then, in his prologue to book
7, the author reveals that he had completed book 6 before the end of 1155.25 In
this introduction to his final book, Thomas notes that, while he was writing his
earlier codicelli, St. William ceased for a time to perform miracles. During this lull
Thomas concluded his account of the miracles he knew of, believing that his task
was finished. Then, when the wondrous events resumed, he had to add one more
book to his collection. This renewal of William's thaumaturgic powers occurred
sometime in the year 1155. Since book 2 could not have been written before late
October 1154 and book 6 was finished before the end of 1155, the chronological
limits for five of Thomas's seven libri are quite narrow.
22
Life, p. liii.
Langmuir, "Thomas of Monmouth," pp. 838-40.
23
24
Life 2.10, p. 91, "Ea tempestate qua Regis Stephani florebat regnum, immo iusticia languente
degenerabat .. ."; 2.11, p. 95, "Regnante etenim Rege Stephano ... iudei ... nobis audacter insultare
solebant."
25
Life 7, prol., pp. 262-63.
Thomas surely composed book 1 as a part of this process and not earlier. Al-
though the first book lacks the clear temporal references that place book 2 after
the death of King Stephen, ample evidence associates it with libri 2-6. One clear
indication that Thomas did not compose a separate life of St. William to encourage
a translation is his silence in the first codicellus about William's earliest miracles.
For all his enthusiasm for his hero's sanctity, Thomas was able to present only five
miracle stories from the years between 1144 and 1150: a rose on William's grave
that blossomed out of season; two visions of the young martyr in glory; a woman's
relief from a painful and extended labor; and a virgin delivered from an incubus.
The number is not large, but if Thomas had composed book 1 in 1149 or early
1150 to justify increased veneration for William and to promote a translation
from the cemetery to the chapter house, he would certainly have incorporated
such clear evidence of divine favor into that work. But instead, he ended book 1
with William's first translation and burial in the cemetery, and he reserved the
miracles that occurred between the first translation and the second for book 2.26
Moreover, clear textual ties between the first book and those that follow indicate
that libri 1-6 formed a single unit of Thomas's composition. One link between
the first and second books appears in the arguments adduced in both places to
establish the guilt of the Jews. In book 1 Thomas describes Godwin Sturt's ap-
pearance before the diocesan synod at which he charged the Jews with murder. In
support of his accusation, he presented three points: the rituals the Jews were
known to conduct in the season when William died; the forms of torture inflicted
on the victim and the resulting wounds; and additional circumstantial evidence.27
Then in the eighth chapter of book 2, Thomas presents a similar passage, but in
this case he speaks for himself. Addressing those who had expressed doubt about
the Jews' responsibility for William's death, Thomas reiterates the same three
points,28 and these theses summarize much of the argument of the second book.
If the first book had already appeared and met with severe criticism, it appears
surprising that Thomas-after five years' time for reflection-should choose to
rely so heavily on these same points. Rather, the parallels between the ideas pre-
sented in these two passages suggest that the first and second books are the product
of a single, continuous process of composition.
The eighth chapter of book 2 also contains another, more explicit expression
of its connection with book 1. Here Thomas addresses those who know that
William was cruelly murdered but still doubt that his death was a martyrdom. He
mentions three possible avenues by which they might have come to their knowl-
edge of the boy's death: they have seen with their own eyes that he was murdered,
or they hear of it from others, or they read of it in the present work (uel oculis
uiderunt, uel ab aliis audiunt, uel scriptis presentibus legunt).29The narrative of
William's death appears in book 1, but in book 2 the author refers in the present
tense to those who are reading that account here and now.
26
Life 2.3-7, pp. 66-85. Lotter,"Innocensvirgoet martyr"(see above, n. 8), p. 30, suggeststhat
thesemiraclescould haveformedpartof an originalone-bookvita.
27
Life 1.16, p. 44.
28 Life 2.8, p. 88.
29
Life 2.8, p. 85.
Finally, several references in the first book indicate that Thomas composed that
unit with knowledge of events that occurred after William's tomb was opened and
his body translated to the chapter house. In telling the story of the original burial
in Thorpe Wood, Thomas says that this interment was divinely ordained so that
the saint might be moved to a more honorable tomb in the cemetery. He adds that
God also revealed William's virtues by working miracles at the site of his first
resting place.30After this general statement in book 1, Thomas's next reference to
miracles at that location appears in book 4, where he tells how Botilda, the wife
of the monks' cook, followed instructions that William gave her in a vision and
found a healing spring there.31Like most of Thomas's miracle narratives, the story
of Botilda's discovery lacks a precise date. Nevertheless, the author adheres closely
to the chronological order of events, and he begins each of the original libri mira-
culorum with a milestone in the history of St. William's cult. Book 3 opens with
events surrounding the translation of William's body from the cemetery into the
chapter house, which Thomas places on 2 April 1150,32 and book 4 starts with
the death of Prior Elias on 22 October of an unspecified year.33Elias could not
have perished before 1150, however, for Thomas interprets his demise as divine
punishment for his reluctance to approve the placement of special marks of
honor-a carpet and candles-at William's tomb in the chapter house, and Bo-
tilda did not find the spring until after the prior's death.34
A second chronological incongruity in book 1 occurs in one of the passages
Langmuir interprets as evidence for Thomas's personal sleuthing into the manner
of William's death.35In the midst of his account of the child's passion, Thomas
interrupts his narrative to describe a later investigation of the crime scene and an
inspection of the victim's wounds: "And we, after enquiring into the matter very
diligently, did both find the house, and discovered (deprehendimus) some most
certain marks in it of what had been done there. For report goes that there was
there instead of a cross a post set up between two other posts, and a beam stretched
across the midmost post and attached to the other on either side. And as we
afterwards discovered (deprehendimus), from the marks of the wounds and of the
bands, the right hand and foot had been tightly bound and fastened with cords,
but the left hand and foot were pierced with two nails: so in fact the deed was
done by design that, in case at any time he should be found, when the fastenings
of the nails were discovered it might not be supposed that he had been killed by
Jews rather than by Christians."36Thomas describes here two discoveries, and in
both cases his use of a first-person verb at least implies that he personally took
part in the observations he recounts. He offers no clue as to when the house was
explored, but presumably he could have visited it anytime after his arrival in
30
Life 1.12, p. 37.
31
Life 4.10, pp. 179-80. Thomas recounts other miracles at the same place in 7.13, pp. 272-73,
and 7.18, pp. 279-89.
32
Life 3.1, pp. 116-25.
33
Life 4.1, pp. 165-66.
34
Indeed, the discovery of the spring, described in Life 4.10, probably occurred after Christmas of
1150, for Thomas refers to the coming of that season in 4.8, p. 173.
35
Langmuir, "Thomas of Monmouth," p. 841.
36
Life 1.5, pp. 21-22.
Norwich in the later 1140s. The possibilities for inspecting the traces of wounds
and bonds were much more limited. William's body lay entombed in the monks'
cemetery from April 1144 until April 1150, when the sarcophagus was opened
for the second translation. Thus, if Thomas's first-person verb literally means that
he personally saw marks on William's corpse, then he could not have penned this
passage before the translation of spring 1150.37
These references in book 1 to events that occurred during or after the translation
of April 1150 accord with the other evidence that Thomas included in his original
unit of composition not only the narrative of William's life in book 1 but also the
later events of books 2-6. As a result, his work could not have contributed to the
distribution of information about St. William until sometime in 1155, at the ear-
liest.
On the other hand, Thomas himself provides evidence for the early spread of
knowledge of St. William when he identifies the origins of petitioners who came
to the boy's tomb seeking miracles. He refers frequently to the crowds who came
from far and wide to obtain the aid of the holy child,38 and these people could
not have learned of William from Thomas's account. Nevertheless, specific in-
stances of visitors from distant locations are rare,39and most of the beneficiaries
of William's thaumaturgy did not travel far.40Thomas's most telling evidence for
knowledge of William outside of East Anglia appears in his account of the cure
of a girl in Worcestershire, who had a vision of William as a beautiful but bloody
youth bearing a cross. The value of this story is enhanced because, instead of
telling it in his own words, Thomas quotes a letter composed by a monk of Per-
shore. But the context suggests that he received this communication around 1170,
well after completing the main body of his text.41
3. ENGLISH EVIDENCE FOR THE DISSEMINATION

OF KNOWLEDGE OF WILLIAM'S DEATH
The textual tradition of Thomas's opus suggests that even after it appeared, it
did little to enhance the fame of its hero. The Life and Passion of St. William
37
Conversely, if the "we" here refers not to Thomas personally but to an unspecified group such as
the brothers who prepared the body, then one must also question whether Thomas personally inspected
the house where William was said to have died.
38
Examples of such statements appear at Life 3.17, p. 150; 3.31, pp. 161-62; 4.1, p. 165; 4.11, p.
181; 6.1, p. 220; 6.9, p. 231.
39
Among the miracles that can reasonably be dated to 1155 or before, the more distant recipients
came from Canterbury (Life 3.29, p. 160), the province of York (5.8, pp. 195-96), and the region of
Hastings (7.1, p. 263). The petitioner who came the greatest distance was Philip of Bella Arbore, a
Lorrainer,but he did not make a special trip to visit St. William. He had made a penitential pilgrimage
to Rome and to shrines from Jerusalem to Ireland before arriving in Norwich, 6.9, pp. 232, 234-35.
40
Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims (see above, n. 8), pp. 161-62.
41
The letter appears in Life 7.19, pp. 283-89. On the date, see James, Life, p. lxxvi, who also notes
an East Anglian connection. He indicates that William, abbot of Pershore, was a former monk of Eye
in Suffolk, but William was dead by 1143: David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke, and Vera C. M. London,
Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, 940-1216 (Cambridge, Eng., 1972), p. 59.
survives in a single manuscript dating from the last quarter of the twelfth century.42
The copy is not an autograph or author's original, but it may well have been
copied within a decade of the completion of the original. The provenance of the
manuscript is unknown. However, it is most likely East Anglian, and what little
is known of its history suggests that it may never have left that region. Around
1700 it was willed to the Suffolk parish of Brent Eleigh by Edward Colman,
formerly of Trinity College, Cambridge,43and the Cambridge University Library
purchased the codex from the parish in 1891.44
Evidence for the possible existence of any other manuscripts is also very limited.
One copy of the text was certainly available in the fourteenth century to John of
Tynemouth, who included a much-abbreviated version of Thomas's life in his own
Sanctilogium Angliae, but John traveled widely to assemble the materials for his
ambitious historical and hagiographical collections. Thus his use of William's vita
does not imply that any manuscript had migrated far from Norwich. John's Sanc-
tilogium was rearranged in the fifteenth century from calendarial to alphabetical
order and became associated with the name of John Capgrave; it was printed in
the early sixteenth century by Wynkyn de Worde under the title Nova legenda
Anglie.4s This made the central features of Thomas's story available to a much
broader audience, but until the publication of the complete text by Jessopp and
James in 1896, "Capgrave's"life of St. William remained the only widely known
source of information about the circumstances surrounding William's death.46
A few other scholars were aware of Thomas's composition, but the earliest
reference is in the work of the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland (1506?-
1552). Likewise, John Bale (1495-1563) showed independent knowledge of the
text. Yet these notices offer no evidence of notable dissemination, for Leland in-
dicates that he used a manuscript in the Norwich cathedral priory, and Bale was
42
Cambridge, University Library, Additional MS 3037. M. R. James describes the codex, Life, pp.
li-liii, and dates the section containing the life of William to the late twelfth century. Willis Johnson,
who has generously shared the unpublished results of his investigations, favors a date in the 1170s or
1180s and argues for an East Anglian origin.
43 This is most
likely the Edward Colman who matriculated at Cambridge in 1651: John Venn and
J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses:A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Hold-
ers of Office at the University of Cambridge from the Earliest Times to 1900, 1/1 (Cambridge, Eng.,
1922), p. 369.
44 Willis
Johnson informs me that the records of the University Library indicate this manuscript was
purchased in 1891 rather than 1889 as noted by M. R. James, Life, p. 1.
45 Carl
Horstmann, ed., Nova legenda Anglie: As Collected by John of Tynemouth, John Capgrave,
and Others, and First Printed by Wynkyn de Worde a.d. m d xui, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1901). Horstmann
demonstrated that this collection, traditionally attributed to Capgrave, is essentially a reworking of
John of Tynemouth's Sanctilogium, which is preserved in London, British Library,MS Cotton Tiberius
El (l:xi), and he examined the evidence for John of Tynemouth's career (1:xxxiii-lxvii). Horstmann
conceded credit to Capgrave for rearranging the collection, but Peter J. Lucas, "John Capgrave and
the Nova legenda Anglie: A Survey," The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 1-10, considers even that
assessment too generous.
46 It was
reprinted in the Bollandists' Acta sanctorum, Mar. 3:590-91; 3rd ed., pp. 587-88. An
English version appeared in the same year that de Worde published the Nova legenda. It is now
available in a critical edition: The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, Ed. from Pynson's
Printed Edition, 1516 by Manfred G6rlach, Middle English Texts 27 (Heidelberg, 1994), pp. 174-
75.
a native East Anglian. Even in its area of origin, however, the text enjoyed quite
limited circulation, for Francis Blomefield, the famed Norfolk antiquary of the
eighteenth century, knew Thomas's work only at several removes.47
English martyrologies likewise provide no clear evidence for broader knowledge
of Thomas's composition.48 The earliest text with a reference to William appears
to be the sixteenth-century Martiloge in Englysshe.49The author of this compi-
lation, Richard Whytford, clearly based his entry on John of Tynemouth's abbre-
viation rather than on Thomas of Monmouth's original, for he inserted his notice
for William on 15 April, a date otherwise attested only in the Sanctilogium and
the Nova legenda Anglie.
Another potential source of hagiographical evidence for the transmission of
Thomas's text would be stories of other cases involving the charge of ritual murder,
but here again the results are disappointing. Information survives regarding the
deaths of four other youths in twelfth-century England. Three of them-Harold
at Gloucester in 1168, Robert at Bury St. Edmunds in 1181, and an anonymous
boy at Winchester in 1192-are known only on the basis of chronicle accounts,
but at least some of the authors must have heard of St. William.50The letter from
the monk of Pershore attests to knowledge of William's cult near Gloucester by
about the time of Harold's death in that city,51and the monks of Bury could hardly
have been ignorant of Norwich claims for William's sanctity. The most detailed
of these accounts is that pertaining to the child killed at Winchester. Richard of
Devizes narrates the events in a caustic fashion, directing his criticism primarily
at the citizens of Winchester,52and his tale reveals some notable similarities to
47 James surveys the evidence from early-modern scholars (Life, pp. lviii-lx), but he focuses almost
exclusively on Leland and Bale, who actually saw Thomas's text. Blomefield's discussion of William's
case, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 3 (London, 1806), pp.
26-28 (originally published 1741), is based on chronicles-especially the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and
Bartholomew Cotton-the Nova legenda, and John Pits's De illustribus Angliae scriptoribus (1619).
Pits drew his information from Bale, and Blomefield displays no independent knowledge of Thomas's
work. Similarly derivative is the reference to Thomas's history in Alban Butler's great hagiographical
reference work, first published anonymously under the title The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and
Other Principal Saints (London, 1756-59), where William appears on 24 March. All of Butler's in-
formation about William comes from Blomefield.
48 Richard Stanton, A Menology of England and Wales (London, 1892), supplemented his articles
on saints with lists of calendars and martyrologies in which they appeared. These lists were based on
information compiled by the renowned student of English liturgy, Edmund Bishop. Nevertheless, the
references in the article on St. William (p. 134) reveal nothing earlier than Whytford's work (see
following note). My own examination of published martyrologies has yielded no further examples.
49The
Martiloge in Englysshe after the use of the chirche of Salisbury and as it is redde in Syon with
addicyons. Printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1526, ed. F Procter and E. S. Dewick, Henry Bradshaw
Society 3 (London, 1893), pp. 57-58.
50 On these
English cases generally, see Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd ed.
(Oxford, 1964), p. 13; Langmuir, "Historiographic Crucifixion" (see above, n. 8), pp. 113-14; and
Rok6ah (see above, n. 8), pp. 106-11. Jocelin of Brakelond mentions Robert in his Chronicle, ed. and
trans. H. E. Butler (New York, 1949), p. 16, stating that he has written more about the case elsewhere,
and Bale refers to a life of Robert, Index Britanniae scriptorum, ed. Reginald Lane Poole and Mary
Bateson (Oxford, 1902), p. 276, but it does not survive.
51 See above, n. 41.
52 The
Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, ed. and trans. John
T. Appleby (London, 1963), pp. 64-69. The ambiguity and cynicism of this passage have yielded
Thomas's. He attributes the murder to an international "conspiracy"in which the
victim was selected in France and sent to England. He also indicates that the two
primary witnesses were unable to testify because one was a child and the other a
woman employed in the house where the murder occurred, and he declares that
the charge was finally dismissed as a result of bribery. Yet even these elements
would not require knowledge of Thomas's story. The lack of competent witnesses
is virtually universal in ritual murder cases. The Christian housemaid and the
conspiracy appear as elements of other stories.53The imputation of bribery offers
a reasonable explanation for why the accused remained unpunished. Thus, while
these authors may have heard of the death and miracles of St. William, neither
Richard of Devizes nor any of the others show specific knowledge of Thomas of
Monmouth's account of those events.54
Besides William of Norwich only one putative victim of ritual murder in twelfth-
century England became the subject of an extant hagiographical treatment. This
was Adam, who has been thought to have died at Bristol around 1183. The story
of Adam's martyrdom is the work of an anonymous author who may possibly
have had Thomas's text at hand. Nevertheless, the evidence for the composition
of the work suggests that it dates from the thirteenth century,55and if its author
knew Thomas's vita, he made little specific use of it.
Turning from hagiographical to more traditional historical sources, the earliest
reference to William in an English work appears in the Peterborough version of
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the annal for 1137. This entry, composed in or
shortly after 1155, reviews much of the reign of King Stephen, including the events
in Norwich:56 "In his [Stephen's] time, the Jews of Norwich bought a Christian
widely varying interpretations of Richard's attitude toward Jews and the degree of his skepticism about
the Winchester murder case. For a review and assessment of the literature, see Gerd Mentgen, "Richard
of Devizes und die Juden: Ein Beitrag zur Interpretation seiner 'Gesta Richardi,' " Kairos 30-31 (1988-
89), 95-104.
53 Lotter, "Innocens virgo et martyr" (see above, n. 8), p. 70, lists the maid among the common
elements of these stories, and he refers, p. 59, to international arrangements in the ritual murder
accusation at Valr6as in 1247.
54
Nancy F Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England
(Chicago, 1977), pp. 175-79, reviews Richard's narrative, pointing to some additional, but much less
specific, factual parallels with Thomas's life. On this basis she contends that Richard was satirizing
Thomas's book, which she believes was "sufficiently well known for quick allusions to register im-
mediately." Richard may possibly have read Thomas's work, but its limited distribution assures that
Richard's audience would not have recognized a parody.
55 Michael Adler, Jews of Medieval England (London, 1939), pp. 185-86, called attention to an
account of this episode, which is presently the object of study by at least two scholars. Christoph Cluse
has prepared an edition, "Fabula ineptissima: Die Ritualmordlegende um Adam von Bristol nach der
Handschrift London, British Library,Harley 957," Aschkenas 5 (1995), 293-330; on the date, see pp.
301-3. Robert C. Stacey presented a paper entitled "From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration:
The Excruciating Drama of Adam of Redcliff" at the spring 1995 meeting of the Medieval Academy
of America, and he has generously shared with me some of the unpublished results of his research.
56 Dorothy Whitelock, D. C. Douglas, and S. I. Tucker, transs., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a Re-
vised Translation (New Brunswick, N.J., 1961), p. 200. Regarding the date of composition, Whitelock
notes, p. xvi, "Finally, in or after 1155, the section dealing with events from 1132 to the early part of
1155 was added by another scribe who can only rarely assign them to their proper year." R. H. C.
Davis, King Stephen, 3rd ed. (London, 1990), p. 147, states that this portion of the chronicle was
written "in, or soon after, 1154." Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), pp. 92, 274, notes only that the chronicle ends in 1154.
child before Easter and tortured him with all the torture that our Lord was tor-
tured with; and on Good Friday hanged him on a cross on account of our Lord,
and then buried him. They expected that it would be concealed, but our Lord
made it plain that he was a holy martyr, and the monks took him and buried him
with ceremony in the monastery, and through our Lord he works wonderful and
varied miracles, and he is called St. William." The date of this annal's composition
makes it approximately contemporary with Thomas's life, but its confused de-
scriptions of political events suggest that the chronicler was writing on the basis
of memory rather than contemporary records, and the same may be true of his
account of St. William. Surely if he had been able to consult Thomas's hagiogra-
phy, he would have more closely approximated the year of the boy's death.
The factual similarities between the chronicle's narrative and Thomas's are strik-
ing, but there are also some differences. In the first place, the statement that the
Jews purchased William differs somewhat from Thomas's indication that their
representative bribed the boy's mother to let him leave, but the distinction is mi-
nor.57More important, the chronicle places William's death on Good Friday,while
Thomas very explicitly puts it on the preceding Wednesday. Likewise, the annal
states that the Jews buried William's body. Thomas, however, declares that they
left it in the wood on Good Friday, hanging from a tree by a flaxen cord, that it
was found the next day, lying "at the root of an oak,"58 and that it remained
unburied until the following Monday. Finally, the chronicler's statement that the
monks buried William in the monastery is sufficiently imprecise to cover all of
William's resting places from his grave in the monks' cemetery to his final tomb
in the church. Clearly, the Peterborough annalist knew some of the fundamental
facts about William's death and miracles. Nevertheless, the differences between
his account and Thomas's-especially on the year and the day of the murder-
suggest that he did not obtain his information from Thomas's life.
Much more abbreviated notices of William's death appear in a number of other
English chronicles, but by no means in all.59Most of the authors who mention
William reproduce, with only minor variations, a standard notice under the year
1144: Puer Willelmus crucifixus est a Judaeis apud Norwicum.60 The only signifi-
57 Purchase of the victim is a common element in the stories of ritual murder:

Lotter, "Innocens virgo
et martyr" (see above, n. 8), p. 70.
58
Life 1.7, 1.10, pp. 28, 33.
59 In looking for references to William's death I have concentrated on two categories of texts: those
Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 526-27, and Edgar Graves, A Bibliography of English History to
1485 (Oxford, 1975), p. 390, identify as dating wholly or in part from the period between the deaths
of St. William and King Richard I (1144-99); and those from the East Anglian region. Works that
omit all mention of William include the chronicles of Gervase of Canterbury, Henry of Huntingdon,
Hugh Candidus, John of Hexham, Ralph of Diceto, Ralph Niger, Roger of Howden, and William of
Newburgh as well as the annals of Abingdon, Evesham, and Battle Abbey. See also Langmuir, "His-
toriographic Crucifixion" (see above, n. 8), p. 115.
60 The basic notice appears in the South English continuation of the annals of Rouen, ed. Felix
Liebermann, Ungedruckte anglo-normannische Geschichtsquellen (Strasbourg, 1879; repr. Ridge-

wood, N.J., 1966), p. 48; Annales sancti Edmundi, ibid., p. 133; Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon
Anglicanum, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Rolls Series 66 (London, 1875), p. 12; Waverly Annals, ed. H. R.
Luard, Annales monastici, Rolls Series 36 (London, 1865), 1:230; Worcester Annals, ibid., 4:379; and
"John Brompton," Chronicon, ed. Roger Twysden, Historiae Anglicanae scriptores X (London, 1652),
cant expansion on this core appears in the late-thirteenth-century chronicle of
John of Oxnead, a monk at the Norfolk abbey of St. Benet of Hulme, who added
a date for William's death: ix kalendas Martii (21 February).61Despite the number
of such references, their brevity and verbal similarity suggest that concrete, his-
torical information about William's death spread slowly and primarily as a result
of chroniclers' copying from their predecessors, and not through independent use
of Thomas of Monmouth's vita.
An examination of the works of Matthew Paris, the most noted English histo-
rian of the thirteenth century, strengthens this impression. His two most important
compositions, the Chronica majora and Historia Anglorum, contain no reference
at all to St. William. This was certainly not because Matthew lacked interest in
the subject. In his Greater Chronicle he presents accounts of attacks on Jews in
Norwich, Stamford, Bury St. Edmunds, and York in 1190; the crimes of Jews
in Norwich in 1234 and again in 1239 or 1240; their murder of a boy in London
in 1244; a case of blasphemy and murder at Berkhampstead in 1150; and, most
famous of all, the ritual murder of little St. Hugh at Lincoln in 1255.62 That
Matthew should provide a detailed account of the death of St. Hugh and say not
a word about the martyrdom of St. William suggests that he was completely un-
informed about the earlier case. The sole reference to William in any of Matthew's
opera appears in one of his later and shorter chronicles, the Flores historiarum.63
Even there his notice is only an incomplete version of the most common annalistic
text: Eo anno [i.e., 1144] quidam puer a Judaeis apud Norwicum crucifixus est.
The text omits the name of the child, and not all of the manuscripts even refer to
the Jews. Only one copy of the work mentions William by name, and it adds the
indication that he died on the ninth kalends of March. This manuscript, written
around the beginning of the fourteenth century at St. Benet of Hulme, also con-
col. 1043. Two other works reproduce the basic text but omit William's name: Thomas Wykes, Chron-
icle, ed. Luard, Annales monastici, 4:25; and the Bermondsey Annals, ibid., 3:437. The late-thirteenth-
century Norwich chronicler Bartholomew Cotton, who drew upon earlier annals from the cathedral
priory, provides nothing beyond the standard notice s.a. 1144, even substituting martyrizatus for
crucifixus, but s.a. 1150 he inserts a unique reference to William's translation from the cemetery to
the chapter house: Bartholomaei de Cotton monachi Norwicensis Historia Anglicana, ed. H. R. Luard,
Rolls Series 16 (London, 1859), pp. 67, 68. On Cotton's local source, see Luard, pp. xxi-xxv; and
Gransden, Historical Writing, p. 444. On the chronicle accounts of William's death, see also Langmuir,
"Historiographic Crucifixion" (see above, n. 8), pp. 115-16.
61 Ed.
Henry Ellis, Rolls Series 13 (London, 1859), p. 48. John also added that the Jews were severely
punished. Nicholas Trivet, Annales sex regum Angliae, ed. Thomas Hog, English Historical Society
(London, 1865; repr. Vaduz, 1964), p. 18, rejected the standard reference to William's death. He
elaborated on the blasphemy and cruelty of the Jews, but he omitted the name of their victim.
62 Chronica
majora, ed. H. R. Luard, Rolls Series 57 (London, 1872-83), 2:358-59; 3:305-6,543;
4:30-31, 377-78; 5:114-15, 516-19, 546, 552. On the events of 1190, see R. B. Dobson, The Jews
of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190, Borthwick Papers 45 (York, 1974), pp. 25-28.
On the incidents in Norwich, see V. D. Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich (London, 1961), pp.
57-64; and Zefira Entin Rokeah, "The Jewish Church-Robbers and Host Desecrators of Norwich (ca.
1285)," Revue des etudes juives 141 (1982), 331-62, here pp. 339-46. On the case of St. Hugh, see
Gavin I. Langmuir, "The Knight's Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln," Speculum 47 (1972), 459-82.
63 Ed. H. R.
Luard, Rolls Series 95 (London, 1890), 2:65.
tains a number of other additions to Matthew's text that relate to Norfolk and
the diocese of Norwich.64
One point of disagreement among the various sources is the date of William's
death. Thomas states that William was murdered on the Wednesday after Palm
Sunday, 22 March 1144, while the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle declares that he suf-
fered martyrdom on Good Friday, which fell on 24 March in that year. Of the
shorter annalistic accounts, only two even mention a date, and both of these works
come from the Benedictine house of St. Benet of Hulme, not far from Norwich.
These two texts place the child's death on the ninth kalends of March, or 21
February.Taken at its face value, the February date seems to have no connection
with William's case, for it does not correspond to any of the dated events in
Thomas's account. However, in the Roman reckoning the St. Benet date of IX Kl.
Martii differs by exactly one month from IX Kl. Aprilis (24 March), the date of
Good Friday in 1144. This discrepancy is not surprising. The Roman system of
dating, in which the days in the second half of each month are numbered in
relation to the first day (kalends) of the next month, was confusing even to me-
dieval writers who employed it regularly. As a result, errors of this sort abound
in materials relating to saints.
In liturgical sources William's name appears only rarely,65but it does occur in
a few service books closely associated with Norwich. Notices of William's feast
turn up in five calendars from Norwich cathedral. The earliest of these is asso-
ciated with a customary of the cathedral church and probably dates from the early
1280s;66 another is attributable to the late thirteenth century;67 two more come
from around 1300;68and the last-an addition to the famous Ormesby Psalter-
64
British Library, MS Royal 14.C.6; Luard discusses these additions in the introduction to his edi-
tion, 1:xxii-xxiv.
65 He
is not included in any of the calendars in Francis Wormald, English Benedictine Kalendars
after A.D. 1100, 2 vols., Henry Bradshaw Society 77 and 83 (London, 1939,1946), nor was he inserted
later into any of the texts in Wormald's English Kalendars before A.D. 1100, Henry Bradshaw Society
72 (London, 1934).
66
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 465, ed. J. B. L. Tolhurst, The Customary of the Cathe-
dral Priory Church of Norwich, Henry Bradshaw Society 82 (London, 1948). The calendar appears
on pp. 1-12, and Tolhurst discusses its date on pp. vii-viii. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of
the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1911-
12), 2:396-97, and N. R. Ker, "Medieval Manuscripts from Norwich Cathedral Priory," in idem,
Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. Andrew G. Watson (London,
1985), p. 258, favor dates at the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century, and
neither offers a separate date for the calendar.
67 The calendar
accompanies a psalter in Lambeth Palace, MS 368; see M. R. James, A Descriptive
Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Lambeth Palace: The Medieval Manuscripts (Cam-
bridge, Eng., 1932), pp. 498-501. I wish to thank Willis Johnson who brought this calendar to my
attention.
68 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MSS 470 and 347. James, Catalogue, 2:405-6, dates the
calendar in codex 470 as "xiv early?"; but Ker, "Medieval Manuscripts," p. 263, favors a span from
the end of the twelfth through the thirteenth century for the entire manuscript without specifying a
date for the calendar. James, Catalogue, 2:181-82, places codex 347 in the early fourteenth century,
and Ker, "Medieval Manuscripts," p. 265, assigns the entire manuscript to the fourteenth century
without distinguishing the calendar. On the contents of these calendars, see the following note.
was probably written in the 1320s.69 In all of these texts, the passion of St. Wil-
liam, martyr of Norwich, is entered on 24 March. Somewhat earlier than the first
calendar is the text of the customary itself. Dating from around 1260, this work
contains instructions for celebrating the feast of St. William the martyr, again on
24 March.70
Thomas of Monmouth noted with great precision that William died on the
Wednesday of Holy Week in 1144, but his contemporary, the Anglo-Saxon chron-
icler at Peterborough, placed the boy's death on Good Friday. A century later, the
monks of the cathedral priory celebrated the martyrdom on the date correspond-
ing to that of Good Friday in 1144. If this were all the evidence available, one
might easily conclude that, although the church of Norwich had known the
Wednesday date in the beginning, the attraction of associating William's death
with that of his Lord had ultimately proven irresistible, and the feast had moved
from the twenty-second to the twenty-fourth of March. However, at one point in
his account, Thomas himself-perhaps unwittingly-presents evidence for an al-
ternative date for William's murder.
In his tale of William's death and the events immediately surrounding it, Thomas
reveals great concern for chronological precision. He states that the Jews' repre-
sentative came to fetch the child on the Monday before Easter, that William was
murdered on Wednesday, and that his body was hidden in the wood on Good
Friday, discovered on Saturday, and buried on the following Monday.71Similarly,
near the end of the first book, where he describes the exhumation of William's
corpse and its translation from the wood to the monks' cemetery,Thomas specifies
that the transfer took place on 24 April, and he notes that the monks were amazed
to find the body fresh and incorrupt thirty-two days after the boy's death.72But
following the Latin convention of counting the days at both ends of a period and
placing William's murder thirty-two days before 24 April fixes it on 24 March-
the date of Good Friday in 1144.73
69
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 366. For a microfiche reproduction of the manuscript with
an introduction by W. O. Hassall, see The Ormesby Psalter, Medieval Manuscripts in Microform, 1/
3 (Oxford, 1978). The most extensive study of the manuscript appears in S. C. Cockerell and M. R.
James, Two East Anglian Psalters at the Bodleian Library, Roxburghe Club (Oxford, 1926). Cockerell
edited the Ormesby calendar, noting variants from the three Cambridge texts, and the month of March
appears, ibid., p. 6. For a recent description and bibliography, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic
Manuscripts, 1285-1385, 2 vols., A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 5 (Oxford,
1986), 2:49-51. The Ormesby Psalter also contains a litany added about the same time as the calendar
in which William appears among the martyrs. Also in Two East Anglian Psalters, pp. 41-42, M. R.
James presents excerpts from the calendar (c. 1300) of the Bromholm Psalter,Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Ashmole 1523. This text from outside Norwich apparently makes no mention of William.
70 Customary (see n. 66), p. 73. The customary does not generally include the dates of the festivals
it describes, but a note in the text indicates that William's feast was on the day before the Annunciation,
which was universally celebrated on 25 March. It appears on that date in all of the Norwich calendars
(Cockerell) and in all of Wormald's post-1100 calendars.
71
Life 1.4, 5, 10-11, 12.
72
Life 1.17, pp. 50, 51-52, "Cum et enim iam xxxta.ii. a die mortis eius pertransissent dies."
73 In addition to this reference to a
competing death date, Thomas speaks of several other examples
of veneration of William that existed independently of the "official" cult at his tomb. Most of these
involved relics: iron bands from his weaning miracle in the parish church at Haverlingland, Life 1.2,
pp. 12-13; two teeth, a shoe, and "other relics" that Thomas had in his possession, 3.1, pp. 122-23;
This review of the English evidence external to Thomas's account suggests a
variety of conclusions. On the one hand, the accounts of other boy martyrs raise
the possibility that general knowledge of the Norwich affair may have enjoyed
some dissemination. However, sources that place a premium on more precise in-
formation-a death date for liturgical texts or a year for annals-suggest a dif-
ferent conclusion. Liturgical commemoration of William was probably restricted
to Norwich cathedral, and annalistic references to his death spread slowly. Most
of the chronicles that mention him present verbally similar accounts, showing that
they acquired their information by borrowing from one another rather than by
independently exploiting a written or oral tradition. They are, however, nearly
unanimous in placing the murder in 1144, in blaming it on the Jews, and in
describing it as a crucifixion. All of these facts correspond to those Thomas pro-
vides, but the accounts are too brief to establish conclusively that they are ulti-
mately derived from the vita he composed. Only the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle pro-
vides more details. Even here, however, the brevity of the narrative and the
difference in language make it difficult to establish the direct influence of Thomas's
work. Nevertheless, the nearly contemporary composition of these two accounts
reduces the likelihood that the Peterborough chronicler borrowed from Thomas.
Moreover, a few factual differences between the two narratives increase the prob-
ability that they are independent of one another. The vernacular annalist's state-
ment that the Jews buried William's body seems insignificant by itself, but it gains
importance in combination with his pronouncement that the boy died on Good
Friday. Other, later sources from St. Benet of Hulme and Norwich itself support
the date presented by the Peterborough annalist. Finally, whatever its relationship
to Thomas's vita, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which places William's death in
1137, is clearly not the source of the Latin annals, where the event appears under
1144.
All of this suggests that information about William's death that was independent
of Thomas's hagiography circulated at least within a limited geographical area.
This tradition apparently paralleled Thomas's version in asserting that the boy
died by crucifixion, but it differed from Thomas on the date. The discordance
within Thomas's composition between the dates he used in the narrative of the
murder itself and in the account of the translation to the cemetery suggests that
he, too, was aware of the Good Friday tradition and rejected it. But in the one
case where he spoke in terms of the number of days between two events, he failed
to notice and eliminate the inconsistency.
4. CONTINENTALEVIDENCEFOR KNOWLEDGEOF WILLIAM'SDEATH
Continental evidence corroborates the conclusion that information about Wil-

liam's murder spread independently of Thomas's text. The best-known Continen-
4.8, pp. 173-74; 4.9, pp. 174-75; andtheteaselemployed by theJews,5.5, pp. 192-93. Thomas
alsorecountsa visionin whichWilliamtolda womanshewouldfinda healingspringunderthetree
wherehisbodywasdiscovered, andWilliamdescribed thatspotas his "hermitage,"4.10,pp. 179-
80. Thehermitage wasprobably identicalwithWilliam's
caveat thesiteof hisfirstburial,7.13,p.
272.
tal reference to William's death occurs in the chronicle of Robert of Torigny, abbot
of the Norman monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel, who was generally well in-
formed about English affairs. In his annal for 1171 Robert reports that Count
Theobald of Chartres burned a number of Jews from Blois on the charge of cru-
cifying a Christian child in the Easter season.74He then cites several other incidents
to demonstrate that the Jews regularly commit such outrages at Easter time when
they have the opportunity, offering William as his first example: "They did the
same with St. William in England at Norwich in the time of King Stephen. He is
buried in the cathedral, and many miracles occur at his tomb." The brevity of this
description effectively precludes drawing any conclusions about the source of Rob-
ert's information. His references to the place of William's tomb and the miracles
correspond to some of the contents of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but Robert
makes very similar statements about St. Richard of Paris, his final example of
Jewish brutality.
Robert's chronicle represents one of the numerous continuations of the early-
twelfth-century annalistic work by Sigebert of Gembloux,75and two other contin-
uators of Sigebert's work also found William's death worthy of note. Annalists at
the Cistercian monasteries of Mortemer and Ourscamp both inserted notices of
William's death under the year 1146: (Mortemer) "A Iudeis in Anglia puer Wil-
lelmus crucifigitur die parasceve urbe Norico";76 (Ourscamp) "Apud Norwicum
Angliae civitatem Iudei crucifixerunt puerum quendam christianum, nomine Wil-
lelmum, quem etiam foras civitatem ab eis sepultum, divina lux, ut ferunt, super
eum emicans declaravit; sicque a fidelibus inventus, honorabiliter est in ecclesia
positus."77The brief annal from Mortemer is similar to those in the English chron-
icles, noting simply that the boy William was crucified by the Jews in Norwich,
but it differs from the English texts in placing the event under the year 1146, and
it specifies that William died on Good Friday (die parasceve). By contrast, the
entry from Ourscamp omits all reference to the Easter season but inserts additional
narrative elements: that the Jews buried William outside the city; that a divine
light revealed the location of his body; and that following his discovery by the
faithful he was buried with honor in the church. The Ourscamp chronicler's brief
reference to the heavenly light demands notice because it contains the only verbal
parallel to the text of Thomas's vita we have yet encountered.78However, precisely
these words are linked with the phrase ut ferunt ("as they say"), which implies the
possibility of an oral source rather than a written one. Moreover, the minor verbal
similarity between the Ourscamp text and Thomas's life is less impressive than
74 Robert of
Torigny, Chronicle, ed. Richard Howlett, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry
II, and Richard I, Rolls Series 82 (London, 1884-89), 4:251-52; ed. D. L. C. Bethmann, MGH SS
6:520. Robert Chazan, "The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Intercommunal Organization,"
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968), 13-31; idem, MedievalJewry
in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore, 1973), p. 48.
75
On Sigebert and his chronicle, see Wilhelm Wattenbach, Robert Holtzmann, and Franz-Josef
Schmale, eds., Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter: Die Zeit der Sachsen und Salier (Darm-
stadt, 1978), 2:727-37.
76
Sigeberti auctarium Mortui Maris, ed. D. L. C. Bethmann, MGH SS 6:465.
77
Sigeberti auctarium Ursicampinum, ed. Bethmann, MGH SS 6:472.
78 Cf. Life 1.19, p. 31: "ignea de celo desuper lux subito emicuit" (my emphasis).
the factual parallels between the contents of this Continental notice and that of
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
D. L. C. Bethmann, who edited the chronicles of Sigebert and his continuators,
indicates that the core text of the Mortemer annals was transcribed in 1155, and
he identifies the reference to William as one of a series of additions inserted within
the following decade.79He also declares that the Ourscamp compiler copied the
beginning of his notice about William from the Mortemer text, expanding it with
information about the fate of the child's body drawn from another, unspecified
source.80 This probably represents an oversimplification of the relationship be-
tween these two works, but despite their significant variations in detail, the annals
of Mortemer and Ourscamp are surely not entirely independent of one another,
for the houses themselves were closely linked.81Nevertheless, each author includes
data the other omits, indicating that during the second half of the twelfth century
more information about William was available in northern France and Normandy
than either of them individually chose to record.
Whatever the exact relationship between these two entries may be, the shorter
notice in the Mortemer chronicle ultimately proved the more influential in spread-
ing information about the cult of St. William to Continental audiences. As in
England, however, the process was slow. The first evidence of this diffusion ap-
pears in the early-thirteenth-century chronicle of Helinand of Froidmont. Heli-
nand's monastery in the diocese of Beauvais was a daughter house of Ourscamp,
so it is not surprising that he should employ as one of his sources the annals of
the similarly affiliated abbey of Mortemer. Under the year 1146 he transcribed
the Mortemer author's brief notice of the death of St. William, supplementing it
with an account of a vision in which a youth, also named William, saw the martyr
in heaven.82Helinand's work achieved only limited distribution, but around the
middle of the thirteenth century the famed Dominican encyclopedist Vincent of
Beauvais copied Helinand's entry, including the vision, into his Speculum histo-
riale, a work that came to enjoy great popularity and influence.83Of the many
later historians who borrowed from Vincent's Speculum, the most notable for the
case of St. William was Hartmann Schedel of Nuremberg. Working in the late
fifteenth century, Schedel employed Vincent's work or one derived from it when
he prepared his own chronicle.84 He, too, copied the brief report of William's
79
Bethmann, MGH SS 6:463.
80
Bethmann, MGH SS 6:472.
81 Mortemer was
originally an independent Benedictine foundation, but in 1137 it affiliated with
the Cistercian order as a daughter house of Ourscamp: L. H. Cottineau, Repertoire topo-bibliogra-
phique des abbayes et prieures, 2 (Macon, 1939), cols. 1990-91, 2160-61.
82 Helinand of Froidmont, Chronicon, PL 212:1036-37. On Helinand's life and work, see Anselme
Hoste, "Helinand de Froidmont," in Dictionnaire de spiritualite, ascetique et mystique, doctrine et

histoire, 7/1 (1969), 141-44; and the supplement by R. Aubert in Dictionnaire d'histoire et de geo-
graphie ecclesiastiques, 23 (1990), 905-6.
83 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculumnhistoriale 28.84-85 (Strasbourg:Johann Mentelin, 4 Dec. 1473),
4, fols. 96v-97r; or Speculum historiale 27.84-85, in Bibliotheca mundi seu Speculum quadruplex, 4
(Douay, 1624; repr. Graz, 1965), cols. 1125-26.
84 For a brief review of Schedel's career with substantial bibliography, see Beatrice Hernad and F. J.
Worstbrock, "Schedel, Hartmann," in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd
ed., 8/2 (1991), 609-21.
death, which remained virtually unchanged from the Mortemer annal. He also
included a reference to the vision, but he omitted the text and inserted in its place
a woodcut depicting William's martyrdom.85Jessopp and James describe Schedel's
illustration, and unaware of the tradition through which he obtained his infor-
mation, they simply cite his work as the only image of St. William they could find
outside of Norfolk and Suffolk.86This tradition is clear and direct, and no great
interest attaches to the entries in Vincent's Speculum and Schedel's chronicle, for
both simply pass along information they found in obvious sources. Helinand, on
the other hand, demands close attention because he provides a narrative that, in
its general form, closely parallels portions of Thomas of Monmouth's hagiogra-
phy.
In book 2, among his proofs of William's sanctity, Thomas recounts two visions
that attest to William's presence in heaven. This practice of citing visions as evi-
dence that the soul of a holy man or woman has attained a glorious reward is a
common device in hagiographical literature, and the records of the First Crusade
show that apparitions were especially important in establishing that the pilgrims
who died on the expedition were martyrs.87Thomas's seven books contain ac-
counts of more than thirty dreams and visions, and nearly all of these are quite
typical of hagiographical texts. Most of them involve visits by William to a wide
range of visionaries, offering cures, revealing secrets, foretelling the future, de-
manding gifts, and administering punishment.88Less common, but by no means
unprecedented, are endorsements of William's saintliness and thaumaturgical
powers by better-known residents of heaven: the Virgin Mary, St. Catherine, St.
Edmund, and, at the end of the work, Thomas Becket.89In book 2, however,
Thomas presents two stories that depart from the typical hagiographical pattern
and correspond more closely to the literary genre of visions of heaven and hell,
of which the best-known example is Dante's Divine Comedy.90
In these accounts, instead of merely receiving supernatural visitors, the vision-
85 Hartmann
Schedel, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 12 July 1493), fol. CCIv.
The scene of William's crucifixion is one of a series of images depicting sacrilege by and persecutions
of Jews. On Schedel's chronicle and its context, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder:
Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, Conn., 1988), pp. 45-47.
86
Life, pp. lxxxvii-lxxxviii.
87 Colin Morris, "Martyrs on the Field of Battle before and during the First Crusade," Studies in
Church History 30 (1993), 103-4.
88 On visions in Thomas's work generally, see Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind (see above, n.
8), pp. 74-75. Apparitions occur most frequently in book 4, where seven of eleven chapters include
at least one vision: Life 4.1-3, 7-10.
89
Life 3.6, pp. 130-31; 3.23, pp. 155-56; 6.10, p. 238; 7.19, pp. 291-93.
90 On visions
generally, see Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteraturim Mittelalter, Monogra-
phien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 23 (Stuttgart, 1981); idem, Revelationes, Typologie des Sources
du Moyen Age Occidental 57 (Turnhout, 1991); and H. Fros, "Visionum medii aevi Latini reperto-
rium," in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. W Verbeke et al. (Louvain, 1988),
pp. 481-98. Eileen Gardiner,Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook (New York, 1993),
provides extensive bibliography concerning the particular subgenre, and Jacques Le Goff offers a brief
review of common features of these narratives in "The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys
in the Otherworld in the Middle Ages," in Steven L. Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture:
Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Berlin, 1984), p. 24.
aries are themselves transported to infernal and celestial regions. The first of
Thomas's stories, about four hundred words in length, involves a man named
Lewin who, while gravely ill, passed into a three-day trance.91Leaving his body
just before Easter of 1144, he was conducted by an angel to a place where he saw
many people in torment. Thomas offers no details of their sufferings, but he says
that Lewin saw people he had known in life. Lewin and the angel then entered a
delightful region, where he saw the Lord sitting on a throne with the Virgin at his
right hand and a boy of about twelve at his feet. The boy had a radiant face, was
dressed in white, and wore a gold crown set with gems. All the saints and angels
in heaven did him honor. Lewin inquired about the youth, and his angelic guide
replied that this was William, whom the Jews had killed in Norwich in mockery
of the Lord's passion, and that Lewin would find a cure for his illness at William's
tomb. Thereupon, Lewin awoke and told his story, and his father set off for Nor-
wich to find the promised remedy.
Thomas's second account of William's appearance in a vision of the hereafter
comes immediately after the first, and the author states explicitly that although
the visions were granted to different people at different times, he has placed them
together because of the similarity of their subject matter.92The differences in detail
are fairly numerous. The visionary is a young girl, not in need of a cure but
religious for her age, who was visited by a white dove and was herself turned into
a dove for the duration of her journey. Her story is somewhat longer than Lewin's,
although still less than five hundred words, and Thomas narrates it in the first
person, claiming to have heard it from the damsel herself. These differences be-
tween the girl's report and Lewin's are minor compared with their similarities.
The maid flew with her guide to a place of punishment. She refers to the stench,
darkness, heat, and cold, and she states generally that she witnessed souls suffering
a variety of punishments, but she declares that she lacks the power to describe the
details of what she saw there. The doves then flew to the heavens where the maiden
saw the Lord in his judgment seat with his mother Mary on his right. Standing
next to the Virgin was a beautiful boy dressed in a garment that seemed to be cut
from the same cloth as the Lord's, and all the residents of heaven did him great
honor. The girl asked who the boy might be, and her guide said he was William
the martyr,killed by the Jews at Norwich in derision of Christ's passion. The dove
added an explanation of the child's dress: "because by that death and passion of
his he followed Christ, so Christ has not disdained to make him equal to Himself
in the honour of his purple robe." Then, after hearing a voice from the throne
commanding her to preserve her virginity and accept William as her special patron,
the girl flew home.
Helinand's vision story is somewhat longer than either of Thomas's, extending
to more than 550 words. In this case the visionary, a fifteen-year-old youth named
William, saw in his sleep the splendid figure of a man who led him on a journey
91 Life 2.4, pp. 67-70. It is tempting to regard Lewin as a youth. The other visionaries who saw
William in heaven were children, and Lewin's father did much of the work required to obtain his son's
cure. But Thomas usually refers to Lewin simply as eger, "the sick one," and does not mention his age.
Thomas does in one instance apply to Lewin the term homo (p. 67), but he never calls him vir.
92Life 2.5, pp. 74-77.
that lasted nearly four days. The pair traveled first to a realm in which souls
suffered punishment, and in contrast to the vague references in Thomas's narra-
tives, Helinand describes seven distinct forms of torment. The boy then gazed into
the mouth of hell, and an evil spirit began to accuse him of many grievous sins.
Although nearly overcome with fear, the child fortified himself with the sign of
the cross, and the pit disappeared. Then the boy and his guide proceeded to a
realm of great light. There they saw enormous crowds of the blessed in various
stages of glory, and they came upon a group of splendid men who waited upon
one of their number, who wore a gold crown decorated with twelve gold crosses.
The escort told his young companion that this would be his place if he lived as he
should. The guide also identified the honored member of the group as the boy
William, whom the Jews had crucified in Norwich, and he added, "Although he
is now in great glory for his brief suffering, he shall at length have still greater
distinction. However, he is not yet worthy to look upon the face of the Redeemer,
nor are his companions, whom you see in such great glory."93Then, reminding
the boy that he could return to this place if he labored well on earth, the guide
took William back to his home, where he awoke.
Clearly, William's vision as described by Helinand shows striking similarities to
the experiences of Lewin and the girl that Thomas recounts. However, the signif-
icance of Helinand's account depends upon its origin. If it ultimately derives-
even indirectly-from Thomas's vita, then it offers unique testimony to the influ-
ence of that work. But if it has another source, then it constitutes a major addition
to the evidence indicating that information about St. William spread indepep-
dently of Thomas's hagiography.
Besides the broad parallels that are obvious at a glance, a number of minor
similarities raise the possibility of a connection between William's vision and
Lewin's. In the first place, the names-WillelmuslGuillelmus and Lewinus-con-
tain enough comparable elements to facilitate confusion, and Helinand introduces
the name of the dreamer immediately after his brief report of St. William's cruci-
fixion. Similarly Helinand's statement that William received his vision at age fifteen
does not conflict with the implied, but never explicitly stated, youthfulness of
Lewin. Finally, both accounts place the visions in the Easter season.
Despite these similarities, Helinand's account differs sharply from Thomas's in
its focus. In its concrete descriptions of souls in torment and specific details about
the realm of glory, Helinand's story is typical of its visionary genre. By contrast,
both of Thomas's tales are quite vague about the particulars of hell and heaven,
except insofar as they contribute to the image of St. William occupying a place of
honor near Christ. Even these differences, however, might arise from easily expli-
cable editing by one or both of the authors. Thomas's purpose was hagiographical,
and he might well have reworked the stories he had heard, reducing details of
punishments and pleasures to sharpen the narrative focus on William. Indeed, the
similarity of his two reports in this regard makes such editing seem very likely.
But Helinand could equally well have taken a story that emphasized William and
93 "Hic, licet jam sit in magna gloria pro brevi poena, longe tamen adhuc majorem habebit. Nondum
tamen faciem Redemptoris contemplari meruit, nec socii ejus, quos in tanta gloria cernis," Helinand,
Chronicon, col. 1037.
added details about the visionary's journey. Other passages in his chronicle attest
to his extensive acquaintance with the conventions of the genre. Clearly an avid
collector of such reports, Helinand tells of William's vision under 1146; earlier in
his chronicle he presents the vision of Charles the Fat (888), and later he recounts
the visions of Tundal (1149), a monk of Melrose (1160), and Gunthelm (1161).94
William of Norwich is central to both of Thomas's stories, and in each case,
the purpose of the narrative is to offer proof that the company of heaven honors
him as a martyr. For Helinand, on the other hand, the inclusion of William is only
a minor variation on a standard theme, a variation that justifies inserting the story
into the annal for 1146 in conjunction with the notice of William's murder. This
difference in the two authors' points of view provides the key to interpreting the
significance of the most fundamental inconsistency in their stories. In both of his
narratives Thomas stresses that William is not merely in heaven or even in the
presence of Christ, but that he is physically close and nearly equal to his Lord.
Helinand, however, states quite explicitly that-despite the manner of his death-
William does not yet merit the beatific vision.
This variation supports the view that Helinand's account is not ultimately de-
rived from Thomas's vita. Either of our authors could have edited his text, and it
easy to see why Thomas, encountering this element in a story he had heard, might
have chosen to delete the qualification of William's sanctity. On the other hand,
it is difficult to imagine why Helinand or some intermediary author, beginning
with a story of the sort Thomas tells, would have altered the tale to demote Wil-
liam from the ranks of those associated most closely with God himself, a position
of honor that is central to both of Thomas's vision stories.
,Given this situation, the likelihood that Helinand's account derives from
Thomas's seems extremely remote. Thomas himself describes two visions of Wil-
liam's reward, and there may have been more. Thus, it seems most likely that the
similarities between Helinand's narrative and Thomas's are due to their derivation
either from a common source or from parallel stories that began to circulate fol-
lowing William's death.
To demonstrate conclusively that Helinand's story came directly from Norwich
is impossible. Nevertheless, the appearance of St. William is not the only evidence
of its English origin. When Helinand's young visionary stared into the mouth of
hell-an element common to such stories but without parallel in either of
Thomas's narratives-he estimated its depth to be greater than the distance from
Dorobernia to London. Dorobernia can refer either to Canterbury or to Dover,
but this ambiguity does not affect the fundamental point that this narrative, al-
though preserved in a Continental chronicle, was originally directed at an English
audience.
Helinand's report adds to the evidence that information about St. William cir-
culated both in England and on the Continent independently of Thomas of Mon-
94 Cols. 875-78,
1038-55, 1059-60, and 1060-63. For literature on these visions, see the works
cited in n. 90 above.
mouth's hagiography. However, nearly all of that evidence appears in sources
composed after Thomas's vita. The one exception is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
which is approximately contemporary with Thomas's composition. Thus, in every
case, the date of the text makes it difficult to preclude absolutely the possibility
that the central elements of ritual murder and of crucifixion in particular do not
derive from oral transmission of ideas that originated with Thomas, even when
direct influence of his text is lacking.
In this situation, particular significance attaches to the appearance of a notice
for St. William in a German martyrology that dates from the middle of the twelfth
century. The core of the text is an eleventh-century martyrology attributed to
Herman the Lame of Reichenau, but it has been augmented with the addition of
some four hundred brief notices commemorating individuals or groups of saints
not mentioned in Herman's original.9 This enlarged edition of Herman's work
exists in four manuscripts, all from the twelfth century and all from religious
houses in Bavaria.96None of the manuscripts contains any specific indication of
who was responsible for the expanded redaction, but external evidence establishes
that it was the work of Paul of Bernried, probably with the collaboration of his
lifelong companion, Gebhard.97 Both men spent much of their careers in and
around Regensburg, and they were active in the circle of Gregorian reformers in
southern Germany in the first half of the twelfth century.98Paul's martyrology is
particularly noteworthy for the wide geographical range of saints it eulogizes, and
it presents the following entry under 17 April: "Apud Anglos Willehelmi pueri a
Iudeis crucifixi."99The day assigned to the notice is unattested elsewhere,100,but
there can be no doubt that the boy-saint commemorated is William of Norwich.
And the text specifies that he suffered crucifixion.
Paul's martyrology is undoubtedly the result of a process of compilation that
extended over many years, and the time at which he added this particular notice
is uncertain. Nevertheless, a combination of internal and external evidence does
95Neither Herman's martyrology nor the augmented Bavarian recension has been published. On
Herman's work in general and his martyrology in particular, see Franz-Josef Schmale, "Hermann von
Reichenau," in Verfasserlexikon (see above, n. 84), 3 (1981), 1082-90; Arno Borst, "Ein Forschungs-
bericht Hermanns des Lahmen," Deutsches Archiv fir Erforschung des Mittelalters 40 (1984), 379-
477; Ernst Diimmler, "Das Martyrologium Notkers und seine Verwandten," Forschungen zur
deutschen Geschichte 25 (1885), 208-20; and John M. McCulloh, "Herman the Lame's Martyrology
through Four Centuries of Scholarship," Analecta Bollandiana 104 (1986), 349-70.
96Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 1071 from Oberaltaich, Clm 5256 from Chiemsee, and
Clm 2258 from Wessobrunn; as well as Linz, Bundesstaatliche Studienbibliothek, cod. 332 (olim 258)
from Suben am Inn.
97McCulloh, "Herman the Lame's Martyrology," p. 353, n. 16. On Paul and his work, see Rudolf
Schieffer, "Paul von Bernried," in Verfasserlexikon (see above, n. 84) 7/2 (1988), 359-64.
98Claudia Martl, "Regensburg in den geistigen Auseinandersetzungen des Investiturstreits," Deut-
sches Archiv fiir Erforschung des Mittelalters 42 (1986), 145-91, esp. pp. 179-80.
99Diimmler, "Das
Martyrologium Notkers," p. 216.
100Although no other text mentions 17 April (XV Kl. Mai.), it is quite close to several other dates
associated with St. William: John of Tynemouth's Sanctilogium assigns the Life of William to 15 April
(XVII Kl. Mai.); William's first translation, the transfer of his corpse from the wood to the monk's
cemetery, occurred on 24 April (VIII Kl. Mai.) 1144; and his second translation, from the cemetery to
the chapter house, on 12 April (II Id. Apr.) 1150. Given the association of William's death with the
Easter season, the incidence of Good Friday on 18 April (XIIIIKl. Mai.) in 1147 may also be significant.
suggest a period within which the text as we now know it began to circulate.
William is the most recent saint common to all the manuscripts of Paul's compi-
lation, so his death in 1144 establishes the terminus before which the work could
not have been finished. The latest possible date is less easy to fix, but several
indications suggest that it was before Thomas composed the earliest books of his
Life of St. William. For one thing, the deaths of the compilers seem to fall in the
late 1140s and early 1150s. Paul of Bernried was alive in 1146, but there is no
datable evidence for later activity on his part, and Gebhard may have survived
until 1151, but he was certainly dead by 1156.101
Internal evidence from the martyrology likewise points to the later 1140s as the
time the text began to circulate. The four extant manuscripts of Paul'smartyrology
fall into two groups based on their contents. As noted, all of the four present a
common core drawn from Herman's martyrology and supplemented with addi-
tional entries, including that for St. William. However, two of the copies preserve
a somewhat later stage in the ongoing compilation, for they contain nearly two
dozen notices that the other manuscripts do not share.102Most of the saints in-
volved are figures from centuries past who had somehow escaped Paul's notice
earlier, but one of them was another recent martyr, a bishop of Edessa, whom
Paul identified as Samuel.
The Armenian city of Edessa had become the seat of a Latin principality in 1098
in the course of the First Crusade, but in 1144 it was invaded by Zengi, the Turkish
atabeg of Mosul. After a four-week siege the city fell on Christmas Eve, and among
the many inhabitants who died in the conquest was the bishop. Within a few
months, several embassies from the crusader states appeared at the papal court
requesting aid, and when Pope Eugenius III issued a bull on 1 December 1145
summoning the faithful to assist their brothers against the Muslims, he cited the
fate of Edessa as a concrete example of the infidel threat.103The result of Eugenius's
appeal was the Second Crusade, which enlisted the participation of both King
Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany. Although the expedition
itself was a failure, the crusade was frequently mentioned by the historians and
chroniclers of Latin Europe, and the symbolic value attributed to the capture of
Edessa assured that many of these authors reported that event as well.104Some of
these writers also noted the death of the bishop, but not a single one of them
mentioned him by name. The only author to identify this cleric was the renowned
101Franz Fuchs,
Bildung und Wissenschaft in Regensburg: Neue Forschungen und Texte aus St.
Mang in Stadtamhof, Beitrage zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters 13 (Sigmaringen,
1989), p. 87. The possibility that Gebhard was alive in 1151 is based on a forged charter of the
thirteenth century.
102 The two manuscripts containing the additions are those from Chiemsee and Suben; see n. 96
above.
103 On the embassies and Eugenius's response, see Virginia G. Berry,"The Second Crusade," in K. M.
Setton, gen. ed., A History of the Crusades, 1, 2nd ed. (Madison, Wis., 1969), pp. 466-67.
104 Reinhold Rihricht, Beitrige zur Geschichte der Kreuzziige, 2 (Berlin, 1878), pp. 92-93, lists
both Eastern and Western sources that refer to the fall of Edessa, and Wilhelm Bernhardi, Konrad III.
(Leipzig, 1883; repr. Berlin, 1975), pp. 513-14, n. 25, names additional Western texts.
historian of the Latin East, William of Tyre, who wrote between about 1170 and
1184, and he called the prelate not Samuel but Hugh.105
The universal failure of Western writers to identify the man whose death reified
the Muslim threat to the Holy Land makes it virtually certain that his identity
was unknown in Europe when the preaching of the Second Crusade began in
1146. Most likely, then, either Paul of Bernried obtained his name for the bishop
later, perhaps from a returning crusader, or he simply invented it. The inaccuracy
of Paul's appellation suggests that it might be fictitious, but evidence from other
sources indicates that Paul took pains to ensure the accuracy of his information.
Several of his letters reveal his unwillingness to insert a notice for a saint when he
knew the individual's name but not the date of his death.106Furthermore, a name
was not an absolute prerequisite to commemoration in a martyrology. Paul's ad-
ditions to Herman's text include no case in which an unnamed individual is the
primary object of a eulogy, but he does memorialize several famous groups-the
one thousand martyrs of Armenia on 22 June and the eleven thousand virgins of
Cologne on 21 October-without naming any of their members. Moreover, on a
number of occasions Paul follows a common practice of martyrologists and com-
memorates a named martyr along with his unnamed companions. One such case
is that of Samuel, who, Paul says, died in Edessa with "very many other clerics of
various grades and lay folk of the city."107
In all likelihood, then, Paul of Bernried did not invent "Samuel"of Edessa, and
the evidence that this ecclesiastic was widely recognized as a symbol but virtually
unknown as an individual suggests that Paul did not glean the name from the first
reports out of the East or from the official papal attempt to provoke a response.
He might, however, have heard it reported among the rumors that circulated in
the year between August 1146, when preaching of the crusade began in Germany,
and July 1147, when the French army followed the path of the German contingent
through Regensburg.108Thereafter, returning crusaders could also have brought
news from points east at any time from the date of their departure to the return
of the last pilgrim, and King Conrad was back in Germany by the summer of
105 Willelmi
Tyrensis archiepiscopi Chronicon 16.5, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum,
Continuatio Mediaeualis, 63A (Turnhout, 1986), pp. 720-21. On the date of William's composition,
see Peter W. Edbury and John Gordon Rowe, William of Tyre:Historian of the Latin East (Cambridge,
Eng., 1988), p. 26. Although the Latin bishop died at Edessa, two other pontiffs survived: the Syrian,
Jacobite bishop Basil and the Armenian bishop John; see Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades
(Cambridge, Eng., 1951), 2:240.
106 Paul and Gebhard wrote two letters to Martin, treasurer of the cathedral of Milan, stating that
they had omitted Bishop Ampellius of Milan from their martyrology because they did not know the
date of his death and asking about the date for Peter Damian as well: Marco Magistretti, "Una cor-
respondenza ambrosiana del secolo XII," La scuola cattolica 25 (1897), 502-3.
107 (. .. et aliorum plurimorum diversi ordinis clericorum et laicorum civitatis." Several
examples of
notices, apparently related to the crusading movement, in which all of the martyrs are anonymous
appear as unique additions to the Oberaltaich manuscript: 20 April, "Item xl peregrinorum a Turcis
pro Christo occisorum"; and 14 June, "Eodem die decem episcoporum et aliorum plurimorum pere-
grinorum in mare pro Christi amore submersorum."
108 On the events of this period, see Berry (see above, n. 103), pp. 472-87, and Bernhardi (see above,
n. 104), pp. 522-62, 591-604.
1149.109 Paul, whose additions to the working copy of his martyrology probably
took the form of notes on interleaved pieces of parchment or entries in the margins
of the book, would probably have inserted the information shortly after he ob-
tained it. Indeed, the longer he waited, the less likely he would have been to
commemorate this particular cleric. William of Tyre reported that the populace
of Edessa criticized the bishop for hoarding money that could have helped finance
the city's defense and that he died, not in glorious martyrdom, but in flight, crushed
in the crowd trying to escape the Turkish onslaught. This information, probably
unknown in the West when the crusade began, could well have been current in
the East when the crusaders arrived. Moreover, the wave of discouragement and
recrimination that moved over Europe in the wake of the unsuccessful crusade
also suggests that an earlier date would be preferable to a later one. Many Western
historians found little they wished to record about the expedition,'10 and the mar-
tyrologist could well have shared their pessimism. Indeed, one of the most vocal
critics of the crusade, Gerhoh of Reichersberg, was associated with the circle of
Regensburg reformers, to which Paul and Gebhard also belonged.ll
The absence of a notice for the saintly emperor Henry II also suggests that the
second redaction of Paul of Bernried'smartyrology was already in use by the later
1140s. Despite Paul's clear sympathies with the Gregorian reform party, the corpus
of his additions to Herman's martyrology reveals a notable desire to include the
names of royal figures who had gained recognition for sanctity. Seven kings and
three queens are among the saints common to all four manuscripts of his work,112
and Paul's continuing eagerness to commemorate royal saints is attested in his
second edition by an entry on 2 April for Matilda, the wife of King Henry I of
England and mother-in-law of Emperor Henry V. With all these other entries for
holy rulers, the absence of the emperor Henry II from Paul's martyrology is par-
ticularly striking. Henry died in 1024, and he was canonized by Pope Eugenius
III in 1146. Yet only one manuscript of Paul's work includes a notice for Henry
as part of its text as originally written, and this addition is certainly independent
of Paul's compilation.ll3
Like most medieval texts, Paul of Bernried'smartyrology defies absolute dating.
109Giles Constable, "The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries," Traditio 9 (1953), 266,
estimates that news of the crusaders' defeats probably reached the West "before the end of 1147."
Conrad left the Holy Land on 8 September 1148 and arrived in Salzburg before 21 June 1149: Bern-
hardi (see above, n. 104), pp. 680, 757.
110 Constable, "Second Crusade," pp. 215, 266-76.
111Peter Classen, Gerhoch von Reichersberg: Eine Biographie (Wiesbaden, 1960), pp. 25-26, 34,
55-56; and Martl, "Regensburg" (see above, n. 98), esp. pp. 158, 179-80.
112 The kings include the Frank Clodoald (St. Cloud; 7 September), the Dane Cnut (10 July), the
Norwegian Olaf (29 July), the Hungarian Stephen (20 August and his son Henry at 28 June), and
three English monarchs, Edward the martyr (18 March), Oswald of Northumbria (4 August), and
Edmund of East Anglia (20 November). The royal women are Balthild, queen of the Franks (30/31
January), and Edith (7 August) and Adalheid (18 December), both wives of Otto I of Germany.
113 A notice for Henry was written as part of the original text in the manuscript from Suben (S). For
the most part the contents of this codex correspond so closely to the text of the Chiemsee manuscript
(C) that S appears to have been copied from C. C also contains a notice for Henry, but it is in the
form of a marginal notation by a hand much later than those that wrote the texts of the two manu-
scripts.
Nevertheless, its transmission in two versions representing different stages pro-
vides some chronological points of reference. William's commemoration in the
first stage ensures that it was completed after March of 1144, and the reference
to the fall of Edessa indicates that the second stage appeared after December of
the same year. The latest possible date for each of the stages remains undetermined.
Nevertheless, the indications that do exist-the likely death dates of Paul and
Gebhard, the notice for Samuel, and the lack of one for Henry-all suggest that
even the later version of Paul's martyrology began to circulate before 1150, well
before Thomas of Monmouth wrote his Life of St. William.
This conclusion carries several significant implications. In the first place it con-
firms the other, later evidence that information circulated about William of Nor-
wich that did not derive from Thomas of Monmouth's hagiography. Second, it
indicates that this independent tradition included the claim that William had been
crucified by the Jews. Third, it demonstrates that the earliest extant documentary
evidence, regarding not only his death but also his veneration as a saint, comes
not from England but from Bavaria.
5. FROMNORWICHTO GERMANY
How did William, whose cult is generally thought to have been very restricted,
come to be known so far from home? Certainly, Paul of Bernried could have
obtained his information directly from England through a personal contact. Such
contact is not verifiable, but the unusually broad geographical representation of
the saints in Paul's martyrology attests to his wide-ranging connections.114Indeed,
Paul's additions to Herman's martyrology include twenty-six commemorations of
English saints, many of whom were unknown-or nearly so-on the Conti-
nent.115Yet compared with the others, the child martyr of Norwich appears out
of place both chronologically and geographically. Except for William in his first
edition and Queen Matilda in his second, all of Paul's English saints are from the
Anglo-Saxon period,l16and many of them find no mention in liturgical texts from
Norwich and its diocese.117Apparently, then, Paul acquired his information about
William independently of the source or sources that underlie his other English
notices.
Two bishops of Norwich traveled to the Continent in the 1140s. Everard of
Calne, who was bishop at the time of William's death, resigned his position in
114McCulloh, theLame's
"Herman (seeabove,n. 95),p. 353.
Martyrology"
115 2 Laurentius,
February: 4 Mathildis;March:2 Ceadda,18 Edwardus; April:17Willehelmus,19
Elphegus, 24 Egbertus,
29/30Erchenwaldus; May:3 Eadbertus, 19Dunstanus, 26 Beda;July:2 Swithi-
nus,7 Ethelburga,13/14Mildreda, 17 Erchenwaldus; August:4 Oswaldus; September:5 Guthlacus,
19 Theodorus, 30 Honorius;October: 7 Ositha,11 Ethelburga,
13Wilfridus, 20 Acca;November: 10
Iustus,17 Hilda,20/21 Eadmundus. Matilda(4 February) andBede(26 May)appearonlyin the
secondedition.
116Themostrecent is themartyredarchbishop Alphege(IElfheah) of Canterbury,whodiedin 1012.
Englishsaintsin Paul'smartyrology,
117 Of thetwenty-six onlythreearecommonto thecalendars
examinedby Cockerelland James,Two East AnglianPsalters(see above, n. 69): Dunstan,Oswald,
andEdmund. ThetextsfromNorwichcathedral addOsithandWilliam,buttheypresentWilliam
on
24 Marchas opposedto 17 Aprilin themartyrology.
1145 and retired to the Cistercian monastery of Fontenay in the Cote-d'Or.118His
successor, William Turbe, attended Eugenius III'sgreat council at Reims in 1148,
a meeting that drew representatives from throughout the western church.119Either
of these men or some member of his entourage could have borne news of St.
William to Europe, but at the time of their respective journeys neither bishop was
an enthusiastic promoter of William's sanctity.120Moreover, these are only the
most visible examples of contacts by which this information might have traveled.
A century ago, Elphege Vacandard opined that William's story could have
helped to incite anti-Jewish violence during the preaching of the Second Crusade
in 1146; and although he lacked any solid basis for that view, others have accepted
the logic of his suggestion.l21 Hitherto the strongest evidence for this possibility
was circumstantial: first, the rough chronological coincidence between William's
death and the wave of anti-Semitism that accompanied preparations for the ex-
pedition; and second, the murder at Wiirzburg in 1147 that was attributed to the
Jews. The discovery of Paul of Bernried's eulogy of St. William that dates from
this same period encourages a reexamination of these events.
The crusades, from their inception, were accompanied by violence against Jews.
Tensions between the religious majority and minority had existed for centuries,
and brutal attacks on Jews were not unprecedented.122However, the months be-
tween December 1095 and July 1096, the period of preparation for the First
Crusade, marked a turning point in Christian-Jewish relations: the gathering of
forces in preparation for war against the enemies of Christ in the East brought
with it the first large-scale pogroms against the presumed enemies of Christ at
home. First in France and then in the Rhineland, crusaders attacked Jewish com-
munities, killing and pillaging the inhabitants, often despite attempts by ecclesi-
astical authorities to protect the victims.l23 A half century later, after receiving
118
John Le Neve, Fasti ecclesiaeAnglicanae,1066-1300, 2: MonasticCathedrals(Northernand
SouthernProvinces),compiled by Diana E. Greenway(London, 1971), pp. 55-56; Christopher
Harper-Billin EnglishEpiscopalActa, 6: Norwich,1070-1214 (Oxford,1990), p. xxxiii.
119Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, 1/2, ed. D. White-
lock, M. Brett, and C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 1981), pp. 817-20; Christopher Harper-Bill, "Bishop
William Turbe and the Diocese of Norwich, 1146-1174," Anglo-Norman Studies 7 (1984), 143. On
attendance from the province of Salzburg, see Classen, Gerhoch von Reichersberg (see above, n. 111),
p. 134.
120 Everard's failure to
promote the cult has been universally recognized, and the view that Bishop
William did accept the child's sanctity has been almost unanimous as well. Lotter, however, has recently
pointed out that even Bishop William hesitated to commit himself until sometime after the third trans-
lation in 1151, "Innocens virgo et martyr" (see above, n. 8), pp. 32-33, 40-42.
121 E.
Vacandard, Vie de saint Bernard, abbe de Clairvaux, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1897), 2:286-87; Run-
ciman, A History of the Crusades (see above, n. 105), 2:255 n; Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich
(see above, n. 62), p. 57n. Vacandard cites only the notices of William's death in the annals of Mor-
temer and Ourscamp; Runciman and Lipman refer to Vacandard.
122 For
developments before the First Crusade, see Robert Chazan, "1007-1012: Initial Crisis for
Northern European Jewry," Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 38-39 (1970-
1971), 101-17; idem, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (see above, n. 74), pp. 12-13; Daniel F
Callahan, "Ademar of Chabannes, Millennial Fears, and the Development of Western Anti-Judaism,"
Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995), 19-35; and Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the
Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989-1034 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 40-46.
123 All of the standard histories of the First Crusade review these
events, e.g., Runciman, A History
word of the fall of Edessa, Pope Eugenius III undertook to launch a second major
expedition to defend the Latin states that the first crusaders had established in
Outremer. Hoping to enlist Louis VII of France as the leader of the new crusade,
Eugenius relied on his own former teacher, Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, to win
Louis to the cause. The effective leader of the burgeoning Cistercian order, the
most prominent churchman in Europe, and a preacher of extraordinary power,
Bernard managed to recruit the king and enlist widespread support among the
French knightly class.
While Bernard toured the kingdom exhorting potential participants and sup-
porters, Rudolph (or Radulf), another Cistercian, spread a more radical message
in northern France and the Rhineland. Although he lacked authorization for his
preaching, Rudolph provoked an enthusiastic response when he urged the Chris-
tians to attack not only the Muslims abroad but also the Jews at home.124His
visits to Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer,Strasbourg, and other cities led to violent
persecutions of the Jewish populations and an impassioned response from Bernard
as well. The abbot sent letters and messengers to recall his monk to obedience,
but without success. So Bernard had to travel personally to Mainz in early No-
vember 1146 to bring the episode to a close. Even then, Rudolph's popular fol-
lowing was so large and enthusiastic that only Bernard's reputation for sanctity
protected him from the renegade's supporters. Whether Rudolph's sermons con-
tained references to William of Norwich remains uncertain, but the preacher
would undoubtedly have exploited the case if he had known of it. Surely the claim
that the Jews had recently crucified a Christian child would have added immediacy
to the message that they already deserved punishment for the killing of Christ.
Indeed, Rudolph's use of this example, or at least its dissemination during the
period of his anti-Jewish activity, could explain one noteworthy characteristic of
the Continental annals that record William's death. With the exception of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the English reports place the child's murder in 1144, but
the interrelated chronicles of Mortemer, Ourscamp, and Helinand of Froidmont-
all Cistercian compilations-assign this event to 1146. Rudolph sowed his mes-
sage of hatred in the summer and autumn of that year, and it would be hardly
of the Crusades(seeabove,n. 105), 1:134-47; FredericDuncalf,"TheFirstCrusade:FromClaremont

to Constantinople,"in Setton,Historyof the Crusades(see above,n. 103), 1:263-65; andJonathan
Riley-Smith,The First Crusadeand the Idea of Crusading(London,1986), pp. 50-57. Recentspe-
cializedstudiesincludeRobertChazan,EuropeanJewryandtheFirstCrusade(Berkeley, Calif.,1987);
J. Riley-Smith,"TheFirst Crusadeand the Persecutionof the Jews,"Studiesin ChurchHistory21
(1984), 51-72; and NormanGolb, "New Lighton the Persecutionof FrenchJews at the Timeof the
FirstCrusade,"Proceedingsof the AmericanAcademyfor JewishResearch34 (1966), 1-63. Gavin
I. Langmuirrelatestheseeventsto long-termdevelopmentsin Christianityin "FromAmbroseof Milan
to Emichoof Leiningen:The Transformation of HostilityagainstJews in NorthernChristendom,"in
Gli Ebreinell'altomedioevo,Settimanedi Studiodel CentroItalianodi Studisull'AltoMedioevo26
(Spoleto,1989), 1:313-68. Yuval,"Vengeanceand Damnation"(see above,n. 5), sees the eventsof
1096 as providingthe basisof the ritualmurderlibel.
124 Vacandard,Vie de saint Bernard(see above, n. 121), 2:284-91; JuliusAronius,Regestenzur
Geschichte der Juden im frdnkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Berlin, 1902; repr.
Hildesheim, 1970), nos. 232-39, 242-43, pp. 107-12; Bernhardi, Konrad III. (see above, n. 104),
pp. 522-25; and Berry, "The Second Crusade" (see above, n. 103), pp. 472-73.
surprising if the atrocity that seemed to substantiate the continuing crimes of the
Jews should come to be popularly assigned to the immediately preceding Easter.
A few months after the Rhenish pogroms, anti-Jewish violence erupted again
following a murder that shows some parallels to the case of St. William. In late
February 1147, as soldiers gathered in Wiirzburg to accompany Conrad III on the
march to the Holy Land, the Christians discovered the dismembered body of a
man named Theodoric.125Blaming the Jews for his murder, both crusaders and
inhabitants set upon the city's Jewish population, killing more than twenty. The-
odoric's remains were carried to a hospice below the town and buried outside the
church, where miracles began to occur at his tomb. The crusaders venerated him
as a martyr, and as Easter approached, they demanded official approval of his
cult. When they met with opposition from the clergy, they attempted to stone the
bishop and terrorized the cathedral canons before finally departing for the Holy
Land.
This case of a murder blamed on the Jews in which the victim was popularly
regarded as a saint has led some scholars to see it as an indication that rumors of
William's death in Norwich had reached Germany by 1147.'26 Others have ques-
tioned this connection, emphasizing the lack of evidence for any ritual element in
the Wiirzburg case.127Most recently, Israel Yuval has set the entire debate on its
head. Emphasizing that Thomas of Monmouth wrote his life of St. William after
the Wiirzburg incident, Yuval contends that the ritual murder accusation surfaced
first on the Continent and that its appearance in Norwich represents, not a pattern
for, but a copy of, its European manifestation.
The full significance of the Wiirzburg case is difficult to determine because the
information about it is limited. Knowledge of William's case or any other ritual
murder accusation was certainly no prerequisite for treating Theodoric as a saint,
for the records of the First Crusade provide ample evidence of a popular desire to
regard any death on the expedition as a martyrdom, even when it involved no
contact with the foe.128Likewise, given the recent history of Christian violence
against Jews, the crusaders certainly thought of the Jews as their enemies and
125
AnnalesHerbipolenses,s.a. 1147, ed. GeorgPertz,MGH SS 16:3-4; Ephraimof Bonn,Sefer
Zekhirah,in ShlomoEidelberg,trans., TheJews and the Crusaders:The HebrewChroniclesof the
Firstand SecondCrusades(Madison,Wis., 1977), p. 127; Aronius,Regesten,no. 245, pp. 113-14;
Lotter,"Innocensvirgo et martyr"(see above, n. 8), pp. 48-49; and PeterHerde, "Problemeder
Beziehungenin Mainfrankenim Mittelalter,"Wiirzburger
christlich-jiudischen Diozesan-Geschichts-
bldtter40 (1978), 85.
126 Most
recentlyLotter,"Innocensvirgo et martyr"(see above, n. 8), p. 49, who emphasizesthe
venerationof Theodoricandthe lackof any evidencefor otherritualmurderchargesin Germanyuntil
the 1230s.
127 Herde, "Probleme" (see above, n. 125), p. 85; GavinI. Langmuir,"Labsenced'accusationde
meurtrerituela l'ouestdu Rh6ne,"Juifset judaismede Languedoc,Cahiersde Fanjeaux12 (Toulouse,
1977), pp. 236-37.
128 For a surveyof varietiesof martyrdom duringthe FirstCrusade,seeJonathanRiley-Smith,First
Crusade(see above, n. 123), pp. 114-19, who shows that even victimsof diseasewere regardedas
martyrs;cf. Langmuir,"L'absence andthe First
d'accusation,"p. 237. H. E. J. Cowdrey,"Martyrdom
Crusade,"in PeterW. Edbury,ed., Crusadeand Settlement(Cardiff,1985), pp. 46-56, esp. p. 50,
notes that referencesto martyrdomappearmore frequentlyin the works of authorswho stayedat
home thanthose who took part in the crusade.
would be predisposed to believe they could commit a particularly heinous crime.
Thus the Wiirzburg case is one that could easily arise in the climate of crusading
fervor in general and anti-Jewish sentiments in particular,but reports that the Jews
had murdered a child in England would certainly have contributed to that climate
and to the popular willingness to see them all as vicious killers.
The notice in Paul of Bernried's martyrology confirms the rapid spread of in-
formation about William of Norwich to Germany, and it represents the strongest
evidence yet discovered that the crusaders in Wiirzburg in 1147 could have heard
of William's death. By contrast, no similar documentation has appeared to support
the view that information about any specific case of ritual murder might have
traveled from the Continent to England. The existence of Paul's eulogy for William
also calls attention to the absence from his martyrology of a corresponding notice
for Theodoric of Wiirzburg and assures that Theodoric's omission does not reflect
a general skepticism on Paul's part about ritual murder. This omission could also
indicate that Paul had died before the Wiirzburg incident, but if that were the
case, it would likewise offer assurance that news of William's death had arrived
before then. The more likely explanation is simply that Paul doubted Theodoric's
sanctity. He certainly knew that responsible clerics rejected the claims that The-
odoric was a martyr,129but he was probably unaware that similar skepticism about
the circumstances of William's death existed in Norwich. Viewed in this light Paul's
notice for William simultaneously buttresses the claims for the priority of the ritual
murder accusation in Norwich and increases the likelihood that the Wiirzburg
case had a ritual element as well.
6. THE ORIGINS OF THE RITUALMURDER CHARGEIN NORWICH
The external evidence considered thus far, especially the Continental evidence,
argues very strongly that the legend of William's crucifixion was well established
before the translation of his body in 1150, and the internal evidence for the date
of The Life and Passion of St. William makes it virtually impossible that Thomas
of Monmouth could have invented the charge. Evidence from the narrative sup-
ports the same conclusion. Thomas describes the crucifixion as a matter of fact,
but when he relates what contemporaries said about the event, he does not identify
anyone who specified the manner of the child's death. Langmuir assumes that
attributing the crucifixion story to a third party would have strengthened
Thomas's case for William's sanctity and that he would have done so if he could
have. Therefore, his failure to do so is evidence that the crucifixion charge was a
product of Thomas's imagination.130In fact, however, Thomas makes the case that
belief in the crucifixion was widespread. In his description of a visit to the murder
scene, he states that he knew on the basis of common report (ut fama traditur)
the structure of beam and posts that the Jews supposedly employed in place of a
129
Word of the confrontations in Wiirzburg would have come to Regensburg with the crusading
army, and Gerhoh of Reichersberg roundly denounced the belief in Theodoric's sanctity and miracles,
De investigatione Antichristi 1.66, MGH Ldl 3:383.
130
Langmuir, "Thomas of Monmouth," pp. 840-42.
cross. Then in a later reference to the same visit, he specifies that the Christian
serving maid had pointed out the traces of William's martyrdom on the posts.131
But the maid was not his only witness. The monks who prepared the corpse for
burial in their cemetery inspected it closely. They discovered the puncture wounds
in William's scalp with pieces of thorn that they pulled out and preserved. They
also found signs of his suffering in his hands, feet, and side.132The likelihood that
the men who washed the body misinterpreted what they saw is very great. The
corpse had lain exposed for several days, and it had been interred for a month.
Nevertheless, the monks interpreted what they saw as evidence for the kinds of
tortures that Thomas describes. Moreover, they certainly related their observations
to their confreres, and some of these witnesses-direct or indirect-must have
been available to inform and correct Thomas when he committed his account to
writing at least five years later.
Given the situation in Norwich in 1144, the crucifixion libel probably began as
a rumor rather than as a conscious creation. The basic elements of the case are
clear. Citizens discovered the mutilated body of a child on the day before Easter,
and shortly thereafter the Jews were accused of the crime. Once those two strands
of the story became intertwined in the public mind, the thought of a crucifixion
could easily have occurred to many Christians. Even the initial suspicion of the
Jews might have arisen from the at least approximate coincidence of the crime
with the commemoration of Christ's passion,133and Thomas suggests that the very
brutality of the murder led to widespread speculation that the Jews were respon-
sible.134But when he moves from generalities to specifics, when he begins to iden-
tify the people who first cast suspicion upon the Jews, all of the individuals he
mentions are members of the victim's family.
William's uncle, the priest Godwin Sturt, accused the Jews of his nephew's mur-
der at a diocesan synod held about two weeks after Easter, and the public nature
of this assembly offers some assurance that Thomas's account has a historical
basis. Thomas also refers to other incidents, which had supposedly occurred ear-
lier, that pointed to Jewish guilt, but these anecdotes are of the sort that might
have been added later to a developing legend. In any case, they all emphasize the
role of William's close relatives in directing attention to the Jews. While William
was a skinner's apprentice, Godwin was one of two men who warned him to limit
his association with Jewish customers.135On the day William went off with the
"cook," Godwin's wife Leviva sent their young daughter to follow the pair, and
Life 1.5, pp. 21-22; 2.9, p. 91.

131
132
Life 1.18, pp. 52-53.
133
By anothercoincidence,the day William'sbody was discoveredwas not only the Saturdaybe-
tween Good Fridayand EasterSunday.In 1144, that Saturdayfell on 25 March,the dateregardedas
the actualanniversaryof Christ'sdeath.The nineteentexts in Wormald'sBenedictineKalendarsafter
A.D. 1100 (see above,n. 65) provideonly two examplesof the CrucifixioDomini on this date (1:53,
70), but the Annunciation,celebratedon the same day, is universal.Almost as commonas the An-
nunciationis the commemorationof the Resurrection,which appearson 27 Marchin seventeenof
the calendars.Similarly,three of the four Norwich calendarsthat Cockerellconsidersplacethe Re-
surrecciodominiprimaon that date:Two East AnglianPsalters(see above,n. 69), p. 6.
134
Life 1.11, p. 35; 1.12, p. 36.
135
Life 1.3, p. 6.
the girl saw them enter a Jew's house.136Then, as soon as Godwin reported to her
that he had identified William's body, Leviva remembered an ominous dream in
which Jews had torn off her leg.137Shortly thereafter, when William's mother
learned of his death, she began publicly to bewail her loss, denouncing the Jews
in her lamentations.138Finally, Thomas reports that within days of William's death
the Jews sought to mitigate their problems by offering a bribe to the victim's
brother Robert, "to whom the business of the accusation was chiefly entrusted."139
Following Godwin's accusation in the synod and the Jews' refusal to answer the
charge, anti-Jewish sentiment quickly spread far beyond William's immediate fam-
ily, and it became so intense that the Jews had to seek refuge with the sheriff in
the royal castle. In the beginning, however, William's relatives, apparently under
the leadership of Godwin Sturt, led the way in accusing the Jews in the boy's
death.
A further indication that Godwin planned and orchestrated a campaign to lay
the blame for William's death upon the Jews is his action in opening the child's
grave in Thorpe Wood. This interment was obviously temporary, and canon law
specified that the dead should be laid to rest in their home parishes.140Yet Godwin
did not exhume his nephew's corpse and take it away for a proper burial. Instead,
he dug down to the level of the body, laid bare the face to establish the child's
identity, and-apparently after performing some minimal obsequies-reclosed
the grave. Thereafter Godwin appeared before the synod, charging the Jews in
William's death.
Thomas reports the accusation in the form of a speech that he attributes to
Godwin.141In this address the priest states that he wishes to speak, not about a
private injury, but about "an outrage which has been done to the whole Christian
community," and he declares that the Jews, "the enemies of the Christian name,"
are guilty in the death of his nephew. By way of proof he states, "And that the
facts are so you yourselves can judge, as well from the practices which the Jews
are bound to carry out on the days specified, as from the manner of the punishment
inflicted and the character of the wounds and the many confirmations of circum-
stances which agree together." Thereafter he cites the evidence of his wife's vision
and William's mother's charge. Clearly, we cannot accept this reported speech as
a transcript of Godwin's presentation, nor do we need to believe that he referred
specifically to a Jewish ritual associated with the Easter season. We can be sure,
however, that his accusation contained some religious or ecclesiastical element.
In twelfth-century England the Jews as a group were directly subject to the
king.142Nevertheless, Godwin must in fact have raised the possibility that the Jews
had not only committed murder but insulted the Christian religion, for subsequent
Life 1.5, p. 19.

136
137
Life 1.14, pp. 40-41.
Life 1.15, pp. 41-42.
138
Life 2.10, pp. 91-92.

139
140 Council of
Westminster, 1102, in Councils and Synods (see above, n. 119), 1/2:678, 681.
141
Thomas presents his account of the synod and its immediate aftermath in Life 1.16, pp. 43-49,
where Godwin's speech appears on pp. 43-45.
142
Thomas has a Jew address the king with the words, "Nos iudei tui sumus," Life 2.14, p. 100.
events demonstrate that Bishop Everard and the synod believed they had some
jurisdiction in the matter. The bishop summoned the Jews to appear before the
assembly. They sought help from the sheriff, who could be expected to defend the
king's jurisdiction in such a case, and on his advice they refused to appear. Indeed
Sheriff John informed the bishop "that he had nothing to do with the Jews, and
that in the absence of the King the Jews should make no answer to such inventions
of the Christians." Bishop Everard consulted with certain learned men attending
his synod-Thomas mentions specifically Aimar, Cluniac prior of St. Pancras at
Lewes in Sussex-who urged him to stand firm: "They declared unanimously that
a manifest outrage was being done to God and Christian law, and they advised
that it should be straightway vindicated with rigorous Ecclesiastical justice." After
a second and third summons proved no more fruitful than the first and the synod
was at an end, the bishop called on the Jews once more, threatening a peremptory
sentence if they did not heed his demand. Thereupon the Jews came before the
bishop, accompanied by the sheriff. Godwin insisted that the question of their
guilt should be settled by an ordeal, a characteristically Christian mode of proof,
and the Jews asked for a delay.143Godwin refused, and the Jews left with the
sheriff, taking refuge in the royal castle until the king issued an edict guaranteeing
their safety.144
At this point, Bishop Everard allowed the matter to drop, fearing, as Thomas
says, "openly to oppose the king and his officers." In a case of this sort the king
certainly had traditional rights of jurisdiction on his side. Equally important, how-
ever, the actions of the synod and bishop demonstrate their conviction that some
aspect of the crime fell within ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and that could only have
been the case if Godwin Sturt had accused the Jews of some crime against Chris-
tianity. We can never know for certain whether he actually charged them with
performing nefarious rites, but his accusation surely opened the way to the im-
putation of ritual murder.
Thomas hints that William's family also intended in the beginning to bring
charges in a royal court,145and several years later Bishop William Turbe told King
Stephen that Godwin was still prepared to present his case,146but the king post-
poned the hearing indefinitely. In the longer term, however, William's kin benefited
from his growing fame. His brother Robert became a monk in the cathedral priory,
143 Jews had

commonly been exempted from ordeals since the Carolingian age: Moore, Persecuting
Society (see above, n. 7), p. 127 n; Stow, Alienated Minority (see above, n. 7), p. 60.
Life 1.16, pp. 46-48. Thomas refers again later (Life 2.11, p. 95) to the protection the Jews
144
enjoyed as a result of this edicturn, which suggests that Stephen did issue some document, presumably
in the form of a writ.
145 Thomas
provides no details of any charges except those leveled by Godwin, but he does say that
within days of the murder William's brother Robert had primary responsibility for accusing the Jews
(see p. 734, above). Most likely Robert was designated to bring charges for murder, concealed homi-
cide, against the Jews in a royal court. Only a male related by blood to the victim could present such
a charge, and Robert was William's closest living kinsman. See Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus
regni Anglie qui Glanvilla vocatur, ed. and trans. G. D. G. Hall (London, 1965), pp. 174-75;Frederick
Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I,
2nd ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1899), 2:486.
146
Life 2.14, p. 107.
and his mother Elviva came to be closely associated with the convent as well.147
For his part, Godwin turned his nephew's celebrity as a thaumaturge into a source
of personal income. Thomas reports that, having obtained the teasel with which
the child had been gagged, the priest used it to perform cures and charged for the
service. 148
These advantages that William's family enjoyed were certainly real, but they all
derived from the belief that he was-or at least might be-a saint, and Thomas
offers no indication that Godwin made any such claim in the beginning. As a
priest Godwin would have been aware that William's youth, his lack of a con-
spicuously holy life, and even his social and economic status would make him an
unlikely candidate for sanctity. Indeed, Thomas reports that William's critics
raised these very objections.149Instead, Thomas gives credit for recognizing the
potential value of William's body as a relic to a cleric from another diocese, Aimar,
the prior of St. Pancras, who attended the Easter synod.150Thomas states that
Aimar closely queried a priest about the circumstances of the boy's death and then
asked for permission to bury the body in his own church. This expression of
interest from an outsider encouraged Bishop Everard to translate the corpse to
the monks' cemetery. The unnamed priest who told Aimar of the child's wounds
could have been Godwin, but he need not have been. Moreover, Aimar would
have been alert to the appeal of boy martyrs as Pancratius, the patron of his own
monastery, was venerated as a youthful victim of Roman persecution.151
Godwin's goals were probably more explicitly materialistic. Thomas depicts the
Jews of Norwich as wealthy moneylenders who could afford fine clothes and
handsome bribes,152and this association of Jews with finance was widespread in
147
ThomasidentifiesRobertas a monk, Life 2.10, p. 91. Elvivawas one of Thomas'sinformants.
Shealso helpedsecurea crossfor herson'sfirsttomb in the church,andthe monksburiedherin their
cemetery,5.21, pp. 213-16.
148 Life 5.5, pp. 192-93, whereThomasdescribesWilliam'spunishment of his uncle'sgreed.At 4.8,
p. 173, Williamappearsto a man, offeringto assisthim in returnfor two candlesmadeby Godwin.
WhetherGodwin'sexploitationof his nephew'srenownnormallyincludedthe manufactureof votive
objectsis unattested.
149 Thomasmentionsall of these
pointsin Life 2.8, pp. 85-88. On the lack of evidencefor a holy
life, see also 2.1, pp. 60-61; and 2.2, p. 64. On the matterof socialclass, Andr6Vaucheznotes that
non-noblesbecamecommonamong lay saints in Italy duringthe twelfth centurybut not until the
thirteenthin the north:"LayPeople'sSanctityin WesternEurope:Evolutionof a Pattern(Twelfthand
ThirteenthCenturies),"in RenateBlumenfeld-Kosinski andTimeaSzell,eds., Imagesof Sainthoodin
MedievalEurope(Ithaca,N.Y., 1991), pp. 26-27. On the generalpredominanceof the upper-class
saints,see AlexanderMurray,Reasonand Societyin the MiddleAges (Oxford,1978), pp. 337-41,
405-12; andDonaldWeinsteinandRudolphM. Bell,SaintsandSociety:TheTwo Worldsof Western
Christendom,1000-1700 (Chicago,1982), pp. 194-219.
150 Life 1.17, pp. 49-50. On Aimar,see Knowleset al., Heads of ReligiousHouses (see above,n.
41), p. 119.
151 Pancras's cult was widespreadin England:D. H. Farmer,The OxfordDictionaryof Saints,3rd
ed. (Oxford,1992), p. 377; and Thomasmentionshim amongthe childmartyrswith whom he com-
paresWilliam,Life 2.8, p. 87.
152 As a skinner's
apprentice, William worked on fur garments that Jews owned or had taken in
pawn, Life 1.3, p. 15. Eleazar of Norwich, "the richest Jew of them all," was murdered by the retainers
of a knight who owed him money, 2.13, pp. 97-99. Thomas speaks of bribes accepted or merely
offered at 1.8, pp. 28-29; 2.10, pp. 91, 92-93; 2.14, p. 110.
his day.153Godwin may well have sought to turn a family tragedy-the murder
of a child by an unknown sadist-into a financial windfall, accusing the Jews of
the crime in the hope of gaining compensation or at least a substantial bribe to
drop the charge.
Moreover, it is not surprising that Godwin's accusation should have struck a
responsive chord. The Jews were a new element in the society of Norwich, prob-
ably settling in the city within the decade preceding William's death,154and an
unsavory reputation certainly preceded them. Their association with finance con-
tributed to their unpopularity, but that was by no means the only factor. All Chris-
tians knew them as the villains of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' execution, and
growing evidence suggests that Christians saw the celebration of Purim as an
offense against their beliefs. This festival, which often falls in Lent or even in the
Easter season, commemorates the events related in the Book of Esther in which
Queen Esther and her uncle Mordecai rescued the Jews of the Persian empire from
the threat of a massacre planned by Haman, the king's favorite. Characterized by
a carnival spirit that encouraged role reversal and defiance of authority, the cele-
bration culminated with the destruction of an image of Haman, which was
mocked, hung from a gibbet-sometimes in the form of a cross-and burned.155
No medieval account explicitly links the Purim celebration with ritual murder,156
but the festival did involve the reenactment of the execution of an enemy of the
Jewish people. Not surprisingly, Christians regarded it as a mockery of the cru-
cifixion, and Thomas of Monmouth described William's death in the same
terms.157
In this context, special importance attaches to the fact that Jews were also re-
153
Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1978), pp. 42-46, offers a brief summary.
154
Thomas's Life constitutes the earliest evidence for the existence of a Jewish community in Nor-
wich. Kevin T. Streit, "The Expansion of the English Jewish Community in the Reign of King Stephen,"
Albion 25 (1993), 177-92, regards the Norwich settlement as still relatively "new" in 1159, p. 189.
See also Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich (see above, n. 62), p. 4.
155 The classic formulation of the view that these rituals contributed to the ritual murder charge is
Cecil Roth, "The Feast of Purim and the Origins of the Blood Accusation," Speculum 8 (1933), 520-
26. Langmuir reviews the development of this idea and disputes its validity in "Historiographic Cru-
cifixion" (see above, n. 8), pp. 119-21. Recent studies reemphasize the role of Jewish rituals in shaping
Christian attitudes toward Jews, including the ritual murder accusation. Yuval, "Vengeance and Dam-
nation" (see above, n. 5), considers rituals associated with Yom Kippur and Passover as well as Purim,
but other scholars emphasize Purim: Gerd Mentgen, "The Origins of the Blood Libel" (in Hebrew),
Zion 59 (1994), 343-49 (English summary, p. xvii); idem, "Uber den Ursprung der Ritualmordfabel,"
Aschkenas 4 (1994), 405-16; Elliott Horowitz, "'And It Was Reversed': Jews and Their Enemies in
the Festivities of Purim" (in Hebrew), Zion 59 (1994), 129-68 (English summary, pp. x-xi); and idem,
"The Rite to Be Reckless: On the Perpetration and Interpretation of Purim Violence," Poetics Today
15 (1994), 9-54.
156 Langmuir,
"Historiographic Crucifixion" (see above, n. 8), p. 121. However, according to
Thomas, the convert Theobald stressed that Norwich had been chosen by lot as the site of the annual
human sacrifice (see above, p. 703), and purim is the feast of lots, so called because Haman used them
to determine the day for his intended slaughter. The text of the Vulgate Bible emphasizes the equiva-
lence of purim and sortes and identifies the festival as dies sortium, Esther 9.24, 26, 28, 31.
157 Statements that William died in dominice
passionis obprobrium or other similar formulations
appear repeatedly in Thomas's Life, e.g., 1.3, p. 15; 1.5, p. 21; 1.17, p. 49; 2.4, pp. 69-70; 2.5, p. 77.
738 Jewish RitualMurder
puted to be child killers. Clear evidence of this belief survives in the form of a
story that circulated in the West from the sixth century onward. The tale tells of
a Jewish boy who took communion on Easter with his Christian companions and
then revealed the deed to his parents. Overcome with rage, his father heated a
furnace and sealed him inside, but his mother sought help from neighboring Chris-
tians. When they broke open the oven, they found the boy unharmed, and he
revealed that he had been protected by the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus. This
story gained currency in the high Middle Ages with the growing popularity of the
miracles of the Virgin, but of particular interest for William's case is its appearance
in a sermon for Christmas day by Herbert Losinga, the first bishop of Norwich.158
Herbert expressed similarly negative opinions of the Jews in his sermon for Palm
Sunday. There he referred to their malice and murderous intent toward Jesus as
well as to their perfidy, concluding that Christ "humbled himself before the Jews
so that he might be crucified by those same Jews."159In the context of the early
twelfth century, these views do not represent extraordinary animosity toward the
Jews. Nevertheless, their expression by the pastor of the church of Norwich makes
clear why members of both clergy and laity might give heed to a priest who
charged the Jews with a heinous crime.
Contemporary scholarship has also demonstrated that for Christians of the
twelfth century, at least on the Continent, ideas familiar from ancient legend found
confirmation in recent events. In 1096 the crusaders invaded Jewish communities,
offering their victims conversion or death. But in many cases the trapped Jews
chose an alternative their persecutors had not foreseen. In a ceremonious display
for their Christian attackers, mothers slaughtered their children, husbands killed
their wives, and then rabbis slew the other men, one another, and finally them-
selves. That such scenes would not have influenced Christian perceptions of Jews
and Judaism seems inconceivable. But historians have generally held that medieval
Christians remained largely ignorant of these events.160Only quite recently have
scholars begun to recognize that the Christian majority was well aware of Jewish
martyrdom, and this awareness confirmed existing conceptions of Jewish obsti-
nacy and cruelty.161 Clearly, then, by the 1140s the popular preconceptions char-
acteristic of Western Christendom in general and of Norwich in particular had
158 A recent examination of this

exemplum places it in the broadercontext of Christianperceptions
of Jewishcruelty:MaryMinty,"Kiddushha-Shemin GermanChristianEyesin the MiddleAges"(in
Hebrew),Zion 59 (1994), 209-66 (Englishsummary,pp. xii-xiv), esp. pp. 239-47 (p. xiii). On the
wide distributionof the storyand Herbert'suse of it, see also JamesW. Alexander,"Herbertof Nor-
wich, 1091-1119: Studiesin the Historyof NormanEngland,"Studiesin Medievaland Renaissance
History6 (1969), 193-94. Herbert'ssermonis editedand translatedin EdwardMeyrickGoulburn
andHenrySymonds,The Life,Letters,and Sermonsof BishopHerbertde Losinga,2 (Oxford,1878),
wherethe storyappearson pp. 30-33.
159 Ibid.,
pp. 114, 118, 120, "... quoniamhumiliatusest ante iudeos. adeo ut ab eisdemiudeis
crucifigeretur."
160
Chazan,EuropeanJewryand the FirstCrusade(see above,n. 123), pp. 213-14.
161 In additionto
Yuval,"Vengeanceand Damnation"(see above, n. 5), see Minty,"Kiddushha-
Shem"(see above,n. 158). Minty'sexpositionof GermanChristianawarenessof Jewishmartyrdom
eliminatesone source of objectionsto Yuval'sthesis that these actions lie at the base of the ritual
murderaccusation.
Jewish RitualMurder 739
prepared the way for Christians to accept and to act upon the belief that Jews
would sacrifice Christian children.
The extent to which the legend may have developed even before the Norwich
incident remains unknown, but the preceding discussion has established some
grounds for speculation. Several characteristics of Thomas of Monmouth's nar-
rative suggest that people in Norwich chose to explain a local event in terms of a
paradigm of ritual murder that they already accepted as true. For the first example
of an emerging literary genre, Thomas's Life of St. William is surprisinglyfinished.
It describes the international "conspiracy" of the Jews and their purchase of the
victim, their mockery of Christ's passion in both the time and manner of the
murder, their attempts to hide the corpse, and the divine revelation of its resting
place. In short, all of the elements of the fully developed ritual murder myth occur
in the first recorded example.162The second striking feature of Thomas's work is
its isolation. Thomas had no identifiable literary models for a ritual murder nar-
rative. More important, his work did not serve as a pattern for others. The pub-
lication of Thomas's composition was strictly limited, and the information about
William that spread beyond Norwich traveled independently of it. Thus the nu-
merous parallels in ritual murder stories cannot be traced to Thomas's influence.
Rather, it seems likely that Thomas and other early writers on this topic repre-
sented views that circulated in the communities where putative ritual murders took
place and that these views in turn were themselves based on a widespread popular
belief that Jews sacrificed Christian children. If this was the case, then William's
murder may have been seen less as a novelty than as concrete evidence in support
of the accepted belief that the Jews were accustomed to commit crimes against
Christ and his faithful.163
Reexaminingthe questionof Thomasof Monmouth's rolein thecreationof the

ritualmurdermythin generalandthecrucifixiontoposin particular
hastakenus
downseveralpaths,andon a numberof pointsabsoluteproofremainselusive.
maybe the mostthatwill everbe achieved.Yetin manycasesthese
Probability
challengeacceptedopinions.Thereviewof thedateof Thomas's
probabilities Life
and Passion of St. Williamoffers evidenceto support the conclusion that the
authorcomposedthe firstsix booksof his text in 1154-55. Thisconstitutesno
changein the accepteddatingof books2-6, but it wouldmeanthatThomas
wrotebook 1 somefiveyearslaterthanhas generallybeenthought.Giventhe
problemsinherentin datingmedievaltexts, an adjustment of half a decadeis
usuallyminor.In thiscase,however,it justifiesreopeningthequestionof priority
in theritualmurderaccusationanda reviewof the externalevidenceforknowl-
edgeof William's death.
A surveyof Englishsourcesyieldslittlein the way of new data,althoughit
confirmsthatthe distribution of Thomas'sworkwasverylimited.It alsoreveals
the existenceof a traditionindependentof ThomasthatplacedWilliam'sdeath
162
Lotter, "Innocens virgo et martyr" (see above, n. 8), p. 70, also lists the commonplaces of the
genre. Gilbert Dahan offers a somewhat different list in Les intellectuels chretiens et les juifs au mnoyen
age (Paris, 1990), p. 25.
163
Cf. Life 1.16, p. 44; 2.8, p. 88.
on Good Friday. The earliest explicit reference to that day appears in the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle, and the redating of Thomas's work makes it clear that the an-
nalistic entry is not merely a brief retelling of Thomas's story in which the author
got the day wrong. Rather it is a contemporary witness to a separate tradition of
information about William, a tradition that included the element of crucifixion
and circulated far more widely than Thomas's composition. The investigation of
Continental texts reveals evidence for knowledge of William and the manner of
his death in sources that have escaped consideration by previous investigators.
The notice in Paul of Bernried's martyrology confirms a breadth and rapidity of
distribution of William's story about which earlier scholars could only speculate.
Indeed, Paul's brief eulogy suggests that during the late 1140s William may ac-
tually have enjoyed more renown on the Continent than he did in England, for
these are the years that Thomas identifies as a period of quiescence in William's
cult at Norwich. The vision story in the chronicle of Helinand of Froidmont offers
a different kind of testimony. It appears in a text written a full half century after
Thomas recorded visionary evidence for his saint's presence in heaven, but signifi-
cant differences in detail indicate that Thomas's account incorporates only part
of the information that circulated about William. In sum, not only did Thomas
write later than previously thought, but information about William that was in-
dependent of his composition traveled farther, faster, and in greater detail than
hitherto supposed.
Thomas's account of the events following William's murder makes it clear that
the boy's relatives openly accused the Jews in his death and that Godwin Sturt
must have claimed a religious motive for the crime. Thereafter the conclusion that
William had died by crucifixion must have seemed obvious to many who heard
of the case. Ultimately, however, the significance of the crucifixion myth does not
lie in its origin, for it could arise from the mind of a single person as the calculated
creation of an evil individual or as the idle speculation of a misguided one. Rather
the myth acquires its importance from its rapid acceptance by the Christian com-
munity at large. Obviously, Europeans of the twelfth century were already pre-
pared to believe that the Jews as a people were capable of extraordinary inhu-
manity. Thomas of Monmouth accepted that view, and he offers us a unique
window onto a specific manifestation of it-the spreading myth of ritual murder.
Thomas did not invent the myth, and his literary expression of it remained without
influence. The value of his Life of St. William for understanding anti-Jewish at-
titudes in the twelfth century is enormous. Yet the text remained virtually un-
known outside of Norwich, and it is better seen as a manifestation of the ritual
murder libel than as the source of the tradition. Thomas of Monmouth certainly
reflects the anti-Jewish mentality of his age, but he made no significant contribu-
tion to creating it.
John M. McCulloh is Professor of History at Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS

66506-1002 (e-mail: jmmcc@ksu.edu).

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Medieval Academy of America

698 Speculum 72 (1997)

6 Out of the vast literature on these

1. WILLIAM OF NORWICH AND THOMAS OF MONMOUTH

3. ENGLISH EVIDENCE FOR THE DISSEMINATION

57 Purchase of the victim is a common element in the stories of ritual murder:

Liebermann, Ungedruckte anglo-normannische Geschichtsquellen (Strasbourg, 1879; repr. Ridge-

4. CONTINENTALEVIDENCEFOR KNOWLEDGEOF WILLIAM'SDEATH

Continental evidence corroborates the conclusion that information about Wil-

Hoste, "Helinand de Froidmont," in Dictionnaire de spiritualite, ascetique et mystique, doctrine et

of the Crusades(seeabove,n. 105), 1:134-47; FredericDuncalf,"TheFirstCrusade:FromClaremont

6. THE ORIGINS OF THE RITUALMURDER CHARGEIN NORWICH

Life 1.5, pp. 21-22; 2.9, p. 91.

Life 1.5, p. 19.

Life 2.10, pp. 91-92.

143 Jews had

158 A recent examination of this

Reexaminingthe questionof Thomasof Monmouth's rolein thecreationof the

John M. McCulloh is Professor of History at Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS

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