582. The Body in the Woods: A Medieval Murder Mystery

28:54Let the careful reader here observe how just was the judgment of God, and how worthily he dealt out retribution, in that the Jew, who with wicked hands had enticed a Christian into his house and killed him, when he had killed him, had flung him into a wood, and there had exposed him to the dogs and the birds. This same man was enticed out of his own house, was killed by the hands of Christians in a wood, and in exactly the same way was left in the open air and exposed to be torn to pieces by dogs and birds. So that was Thomas of Monmouth, and he is reporting on two sensational trials that took place in 1150.

29:39One of them was in Norwich, and the other one was in London, and they were presided over by King Stephen himself, because a second murder victim had been found in a ward outside Norwich. But this time, Tom, it was not a Christian it was a Jew so what's going on that's right and not just any Jew but the man who according to Thomas of Monmouth at any rate had masterminded the murder six years previously of the 12 year old Christian apprentice William and so this was the Jew into whose house supposedly William had vanished never to be seen again by any Christian soul and the Jew who is named by Thomas as Eliezer, had been killed out on the roads beyond Norwich by a knight named Sir Simon de Novas, who was very deeply in debt to Eliezer and couldn't pay him back.

30:34And the case is absolutely open and shut. And Stephen, who is very anxious to signal his support for the Jewish community, you know, he is very keen on the taxes that they pay him. He's keen to make an example of Denova's, you know, bang him up, hang him, whatever. Let's convict this guy. But even though Stephen is basically set on finding Denova's guilty, this isn't what happens. Because the longer the trials go on, the harder it becomes for Stephen to convict Denova's. And finally, the trial in London, which follows the trial in Norwich, basically he gives up on the whole thing. And he says, we have been fatigued by a good deal of discourse today and yet have some business which keeps us.

31:19We are unable, therefore, to give the requisite attention to so weighty a matter. So in other words, he's basically washing his hands of it. He's saying, I don't have time for all this. De Novas isn't, he's not acquitted, but he's able to go free. And he, you know, he's never punished for the murder of Eliezer, which he undoubtedly committed. I mean, it's a slightly comical verdict from Stephen that, you know, we've run out of time and I can't be bothered. And yet, gross injustice. I mean, if you're the family of this guy, Eliazze, you're gutted about this. This Denova's has got away with it scot-free.

31:53And so why has that happened? I mean, because if Denova's, if it's an open-shut case and Denova's is obviously guilty, why has he got away with it? Okay, so I think there are two reasons, and both of them contribute to a hardening of the mood against the murdered Eliezer. And the first of them is brilliantly teased out by E.M. Rose in her book on this whole case. And she argues that DeNovas had borrowed money from Eliezer. And why had he done that? And Rose argues that it was because he had needed to fund his participation in the great collective Christian enterprise of the age, which is the campaign to Palestine, to the Holy Land that we remember as the Second Crusade.

32:39So this had been launched in 1147, so three years after the murder of William. And it had resulted in a mood of often literally murderous hostility to Jews across Latin Christendom. And one of the things that Jewish communities over the previous century and more had come to their horror to realize was that bad news from Palestine, from the Holy Land, was invariably bad news for them. And even though, obviously, Jews in England or Germany or France or whatever have nothing to do with what is going on in the Holy Land, invariably there is blowback and Jewish communities in Western Europe tend to get the blame for what is going on in Palestine.

33:26So to give you some examples, in 1009, the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim, aka the Muslim Caligula, orders the destruction of Constantine's great church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. And this has incredible blowback in Europe. Everyone's massively upset there, understandably. And lots of Christians immediately blame the Jews for it with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. And so this is the first real mass display of anti-Jewish campaigns. So there are all kinds of examples of forced conversions, expulsions of Jewish communities across Germany, across France. Then in 1096, the First Crusade is launched.

34:06And as the bands of knights are starting to form and these great bands of armed pilgrims head out to the Holy Land, so it inspires pogroms along the length of the Rhineland. So particularly notorious pogrom in Mainz, where over a thousand Jews are killed. And even in Speyer, where the bishop only 12 years earlier had been saying, you know, it's a privilege to have Jews here. Jews there also get attacked and killed. so now we're in the mid-12th century and a new crusade the second crusade and i suppose inevitably a new wave of pogroms and persecutions yes some of the details of this are horrible so there's a rabbi who's based in england who's trying to get home from cologne where he'd been on a visit and on route he gets seized and beheaded there's another rabbi in france who is mutilated by a band of crusaders and they mutilate him in a very precise way they inflict the five wounds suffered by Christ in his passion on the rabbi, and then they dump his body.

35:06And on the River Main, which is a tributary of the Rhine, so again, this sense of the Rhineland as kind of center of these atrocities, a child is found in the river. He's dead. And the Crusaders say it was the Jews who did this. There are lots of Christians who are appalled by these displays of violence. So chief among them is the great preacher Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian whose sermons had played a huge role in inspiring the Second Crusade. He tours the Rhineland trying to refute the allegations that the Crusaders are bringing against the Jews. In Würzburg, the bishop, he finds the bodies of the Jews who've been slain and he washes them and he anoints them and he buries them in the grounds of his own garden.

35:55And out in the countryside, there are lots of Christian castellans who, a bit like to Chesney in Norwich, when the Jews there were threatened, they shelter the Jews in their castles. So the story isn't unremittingly a dark one, but it is clearly darkening. And, you know, it's essentially Jewish communities now across Western Christendom are having to live with the knowledge that religiously motivated violence might be provoked any time there is a kind of geopolitical crisis in Palestine. Now, superficially, there's an obvious explanation for this, which is that the Crusaders are going off to do what they see as God's work, fighting the enemies of Christ in the Holy Land, i.e.

36:36fighting Muslims. And at the same time, the sort of mirror image of that is people fighting Christ's enemies in Christendom itself, in Europe itself. In other words, in this case, Jews, that the violence that they are exporting to the Holy Land, they are also now replicating within their own communities against non-Christians. But you think there's something more than that? There's another dimension to it. Yeah, because the question is, why does what happens in the Holy Land, why does it reverberate back so profoundly into Latin Christendom? I mean, there are all kinds of wars and things happening across the Mediterranean and the Near East, but they don't have the impact.

37:14And the answer for that, obviously, is that this is the Holy Land. This is where Christ was born. It's where he died. It's where he rose from the dead, Christians believe. So the Holy Land is where the innocents had been massacred on the orders of Herod, king of the Jews. And it's where Christ's suffering had been cheered on by the crowd who had refused Pilate's offer to release him, who in turn are Jews. And if you look at the accusation of child slaying, you know, this child found in the river echoes there of the massacre of the innocents. Or you look at the wounds of Christ inflicted on this rabbi.

37:49Again, it's drawing on the New Testament narratives. And so I think that these are part of the swirl of emotion and anger on the part of Christians that Stephen, when he's presiding over the trial of De Novas, has to take account of. But he also has to take account of something else. And this is the readiness of de Nova's defense team to weaponize the almost completely forgotten murder of the apprentice boy, William, six years before. And when I say de Nova's defense team, I mean specifically the guy who is leading the defense, who is the Bishop of Norwich himself, a man called William Tubb. And the Bishop of Norwich is a very, very able man.

38:35So he's not a royal appointee, as bishops tend to be in Norman, England. He's a monk in Norwich, who had been an oblate, so given by his parents to the monastery as a child. He's a man of Norwich through and through. He'd been elected as bishop by his fellow monks. And to quote E.M. Rose, an experienced courtroom authority, sophisticated, well-traveled, well-read, mature, and a noted orator. And for William Turb, the chance to plead before Stephen, the king himself, is a massive opportunity for him to raise his profile, because as we said, he's not a royal appointee. So this is a chance for him to make himself known to the king, but it's also a chance for him to raise the profile of his cathedral.

39:21And so by emphasizing William's status as someone who's been murdered by the Jews and therefore perhaps could rank as a martyr, it gives William Turber the chance to potentially provide Norwich Cathedral with what up to this point it has very badly been lacking, namely some really good, authentic saintly relics, because this to be a top-class cathedral is what you need. So we mentioned Durham Cathedral has the body of St. confessor. And I think that probably William Turb is thinking, if we can promote this little boy who's been possibly murdered by the Jews as a martyr, then brilliant. We fill the gap that my cathedral has.

40:08So do you think that this guy, William Turb, the Bishop of Norwich, is so cynical that these thoughts have genuinely gone through his mind? The cogs have turned, he's thought, it's win, win, win. I'll impress people with my oratory, I'll get this very presumably influential and powerful person off but also i will you know really boost my cathedral we'll get the relics we'll get pilgrims we'll get you know do you think he's he he's done that cold-bloodedly or do you think he has drunk his own kool-aid as it were and it just happens to match or you know it's one of those things that he actually genuinely believes or thinks he genuinely believes it but it also you know works to his advantage well self-interest and uh the needs of God have often coincided.

40:52I mean, and often do throughout medieval history. William Turb is, he's a monk through and through, and he's a man of Norwich through and through, and he's been personally chosen by the monks of Norwich. And he must feel that this reflects the will of God, and that God would want the cathedral to be hallowed, perhaps, by the body of a martyr. And therefore, to be sure, I mean, he's trying to get de Novas off, that's his job. But if at the same time he can raise the profile of his cathedral then you know that's presumably what god wants i'm sure that would be his sinking i mean you might describe it as cynical but cynicism can often be given a kind of dare i say sacral flavoring so i mean it is a really spectacular display of victim blaming because essentially what what uh william turb is doing is saying that eliazza the murdered jew deserved everything he got so to quote him and this speech of william turb is quoted by Thomas of Monmouth.

41:49That Jew of whose death the night, so that's Denova's, though innocent, is accused, did, in conjunction with the other Jews then in the city, in his house, as report says, miserably torment, kill, and hide in a wood a Christian boy. And the key word there is report. What does he mean by report? Well, the bishop by this point has sourced various witnesses, proving, as he thinks, the murder of William of Norwich by the Jews. So one of these witnesses is a burgess of the city called Alward, who supposedly had run into Eliezer and a fellow Jew out in Thorpe Wood, disposing of William's body. And you may wonder, well, why hadn't Alward, who by this point very conveniently is dead, why hadn't he revealed this at the time?

42:39And And supposedly, Alwood had sworn an oath to the sheriff, Don de Chesney, who is also dead, never to reveal this. And only on his deathbed had he confessed it. And Thomas of Monmouth, who reports this, notes with immense satisfaction that both Alwood and John de Chesney, the sheriff, had suffered very horrible deaths. So due punishment for their lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting the Jews. So that's one piece of evidence. Then there is a monk in Norwich who is a Jewish convert to Christianity called Theobald. And Theobald, as someone who had been a Jew, is able to reveal one of the Jews' darkest secrets.

43:18And this, according to Theobald, is their belief that without the shedding of human blood, they will never be able to return to their homeland, to what had been Judea, Israel. Has he dreamt that up or does that draw on an older tradition? I think drawing on the notion of the mark of Cain, the idea that Jews are sentenced to wander and therefore perhaps as Cain had killed Abel, a blood sacrifice, so a blood sacrifice must be offered to remove the mark of Cain. I mean, it's obviously a fabrication. There is no authentic tradition about this in Jewish thought at all. But Theobald anyway, I mean, he's all over it.

43:57So to quote Thomas of Monmouth's account of what he said, hence it was laid down this is Theobald saying by the Jews in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world to the most high God in scorn and contempt of Christ that so they might avenge their sufferings on him in as much as it was because of Christ's death that they had been shut out from their own country and were in exile as slaves in a foreign land so there you have the idea of a ritual killing designed to bring about the return of the Jews to the promised land. Then the third witness is, and I quote, a certain poor Christian woman who had worked as a maid for Eliezer in his household.

44:36And she is the key witness because, yes, if the autopsy on William's body is accurate, you know, so if he had been gagged, if he had been stabbed with thorns, then there is evidence there for kind of ritual torture. but it's the maid who had peeped through a chink of the door, supposedly, who had seen the literally killer sight. And again, I quote Thomas of Monmouth, while these enemies of the Christian name were rioting in the spirit of malignity around the boy, some of those present had judged him to be fixed to a cross in mockery of the Lord's passion, as though they would say, even as we condemn the Christ to a shameful death, so let us condemn the Christian, so that uniting the Lord and his servant in a like punishment, we may retort upon them the pain of that reproach which they impute to us.

45:27So what is being done there? William is being tortured in the way that Christ had been tortured. It's a very, very specific anti-Christian form of death. And the people responsible for it, according to this maid, and therefore by extension, the Bishop of Norwich and Thomas of Monmouth, who is reporting all this, it's not just Eliezer who's the guilty party. It's all the Jews of Norwich. And by extension, every Jew who lives in Christendom. The implication is that they are all doing this. So now I suppose you can see why Stephen abandons the trial in such a cack-handed way. Because on the one hand, he has decent relations with the Jews of England, right?

46:11So he doesn't want to endorse these mad conspiracy theories. And yet at the same time, he can't ignore them, I suppose, or can't just dismiss them because there's a kind of populist enthusiasm for them. Is that what he's worried about? That people will say, oh, he's a friend of the Jews, and we've heard that they're out to kill lots of Christians and blah, blah, blah. So he just thinks, I'll shut this down. Yeah, he doesn't want to seem like he's applying two-tier justice, you might say. Yeah, very good. And so the result of that is that this bloke, Simon de Novas, who's a murderer and who's just killed because he owed this bloke money.

46:46Is that basically the it's pure self-interest. He killed this bloke that he owed money to and he's got away with it. But there's another profoundly more momentous consequence of this, which is that William's status as a martyr is kind of redeemed from oblivion and very powerfully confirmed. But there are still two further steps which are needed to absolutely consolidate William of Norwich's elevation to the ranks of the saints. And both very tellingly are set in this year 1050 that witnesses the two trials in Norwich and London. And both of them involve the same guy who is none other than Thomas of Monmouth.

47:25So that Lent, Thomas is resting in the monk's dormitory after Matins, and he has a vision. It's a vision of the founder and first bishop of Norwich Cathedral, a guy called Herbert de Losinga. And Thomas describes him as being a man of venerable looks with grey hair, clothed in episcopal robes that glistened with an incomparable whiteness. and the bishop instructs Thomas of Monmouth to inform both the bishop and the prior, so the head of the monastery, that the body of the martyred boy, the martyred 12-year-old William, who originally had been buried in unconsecrated ground out in Thorpewood, that his relics must be translated as a matter of urgency into the cathedral itself.

48:11And Thomas goes to the bishop, He goes to the prior, he reveals this spectacular visitation, and they obediently place William of Norwich's relics inside the cathedral. But the key step that Thomas of Monmouth then takes is to write a life of the martyr. And this is the very same life that one day will be discovered by M.R. James and published. And H.P. Lovecraft, the great American writer of horror stories, described the quality he found embodied in James's stories as an almost diabolic power of calling up horror. But I think that nothing that James ever wrote could begin to compare with the diabolic power of the life and miracles of St.

49:00William of Norwich, which Thomas of Monmouth wrote, nor with the horror of its enduring impact. because although it's barely remembered today, although there was only the single copy that M.R. James found, you could argue that this is one of the most influential texts ever written in England. Now, interestingly, its influence on Norwich itself doesn't seem to have been that profound. So essentially, people in the city don't take this boy martyr to their heart. So to quote E.M. Rose, the hard-headed Norwich merchants, artisans and aristocracy were not persuaded of William's sanctity. And Thomas, who's of Monmouth, who's very much the guy in charge of the kind of the branding, is absolutely irate by this.

49:50He kind of records all kinds of details about how people just laughed at him. And I guess that they're laughing at him because you would imagine that people with local knowledge are much better qualified than outsiders to evaluate the degree of fabrication that has gone on. And I guess that most people in Norwich would probably have thought that there's nothing really that can be said with any certainty about the fate of the poor boy who died, beyond that he had died too young and that his body had been found in Thorpe Wood and everything else. So the issue of how exactly he was wounded, where he was found, everything else is essentially kind of supposition.

50:30yeah and so i think that that's why people are skeptical and a bit embarrassed about it i think in norwich but the problem is is that further afield where people don't have that local context the influence of thomas's story um very rapidly proves to be devastating um and what he has done is to provide essentially the building blocks for a story that can just be kind of endlessly recycled. So over the decades and the centuries that follow, the elements that feature in Thomas of Monmouth's account of William's murder are kind of recycled and recycled over and over again. So you get the innocent child who is brutally, ritualistically put to death.

51:14You have the presentation of Jews, not as individuals, but as kind of malevolent archetypes. And these archetypes of reaching back to Herod, to Cain, to Judas, to the crowds who had called on Pilate to execute Christ. And just as these figures in the Bible are sinister archetypes, so you have the sense that these archetypes are enduring into the present day. And you have the figure of the distraught mother looking for her child, the inquisitive maidservant who is always looking through the keyhole at these terrible murders, the perfume quality of the martyr's corpse, the miracles performed by his relics.

51:56Although actually, in Thomas of Montserrat, the miracles aren't brilliant. I mean, they're nothing incredible. And also, interestingly, they don't relate to the Jews. So you've got an ingrown toenail, you go, it's cured. It's that kind of level. They're not miracles that continue to harp on the theme of kind of Jewish iniquity. But then you get refinements, don't you, as the story spreads. So even though this is an age before print um stories can spread very quickly i suppose you might say it's like a meme it's like a meme that spreads mind you so only a few years after thomas of monmouth story has appeared something similar is being told about in blois where jews end up being burnt um by the count of blois and of course there are the links between stephen's england and blois are very obvious because stephen is the count of blois so you can see it how it's kind of spreading But it's in Germany that there's a terrible new refinement.

52:49In Fulda in 1235, right? Yes, because in Fulda, the bodies of five boys are found on Christmas Day. And they say that the Jews had murdered these boys, not because they were kind of reproducing the horrors of the crucifixion, but for a different reason, namely to mix the blood of the children with the Passover unleavened bread. And obviously, I mean, this is mad. The whole point is that Jews don't drink blood. And it's hard to know how and why this particular refinement comes about. Maybe it's to do with anxieties on the part of Christians themselves around the idea that they drink Christ's blood.

53:29Yeah, that seems the obvious. I mean, that seems, I think, is generally the kind of probably the most popular scholarly explanation for it. But the consequences are terrible. So in Fulda, 34 Jews, again, are burned to death. and these stories just keep on happening and happening and happening. Even though the notion of Jews torturing children to death, whether to replicate the crucifixion or to mix their blood with unleavened bread, is condemned very explicitly as a libel, first by an imperial commission in Germany and then in 1253 by the papacy itself. But that begins to change, doesn't it? Because soon even the authorities, the secular authorities, who previously have by and large tried to protect their Jewish populations, they give in to the kind of conspiracy theory and to the sort of populist outrage and they start to join in the persecutions.

54:23They do. So in 1255, which is only two years after the papacy has officially condemned the blood libel, a terrible discovery is made in Lincoln. And again, it features a murdered child. So a small boy named Hugh is found at the bottom of a well and 90 Jews are arrested for the boy's murder. And this time it's done on the orders of the king himself, Henry III, who takes them to the Tower of London. Eighteen are hanged. The murdered boy is entombed in Lincoln Cathedral and hailed by locals as a martyr. And he is kept there as a kind of, you know, one of the great saints of Lincoln Cathedral right the way up to the Reformation.

55:00even though the papacy itself very pointedly refuses to confirm the canonization. This does not inhibit the growth of the cult of Little St. Hugh as he comes to be called. You can see the stone base of his shrine in Lincoln Cathedral to this day and there's now a sort of a statement drafted by kind of the church and local Jewish groups about you know bigotry and persecution and stuff but it's a reminder of how widespread and how popular actually this kind of stuff was. Yeah. And by this point, even the church itself, which in its higher echelons had tried to stand against this blood libel. By now, church councils, church scholars, even they are starting to repudiate the notion that Jews and Christians might kind of share a common humanity.

55:50So already See, in 1215, the Lateran Council held by Innocent III, the most powerful of all the great medieval popes, the guy who had launched the Albigensian Crusade, had ordered Jews at all times to be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their clothing. In 1267, sexual relations between Jews and Christians are banned by the formal decree of another church council. And in 1275, a Franciscan in Germany draws up a law code, which makes it a capital offence for Jews and Christians to have sexual relations. And in 1290, Edward I, so he's the son of Henry III, the King of England, he pushes the logic of this baneful trend, I guess, to its kind of ultimate conclusion, when he orders all the Jews in England to leave for good, and they will not return until the time of Oliver Cromwell.

56:43So I guess you could say that in that sense, even though the people of Norwich laughed at Thomas of Monmouth for promoting William as a saint. It's Thomas of Monmouth who has the last kind of sinister laugh. Yeah, the last baneful laugh. So his book, That Life of William of Norwich, that's what we began with. You know, the title sounds very boring, but actually you could argue it is one of the most sinister, poisonous and influential texts ever published in England. yeah because the blood libel continues to be repeated even to this day all right well what a chilling and instructive story tom thank you very much uh we will see you next time for something hopefully a little bit more cheerful bye-bye bye-bye