The Rest Is History - 582. The Body in the Woods: A Medieval Murder Mystery

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Why was a boy grotesquely and mysteriously murdered in a wood in Norwich in the 12th century? Who was his killer? Was it a ritual child sacrifice? Why was the murder blamed on Norwich's Jewish community, and in what appalling way? How did the incident set in motion a whole wave of Jewish persecution across the world, as more and more children disappeared and were found ritually murdered? And, what can this chilling story tell us about mediaeval attitudes to Jews? Join Tom and Dominic as they retell the terrifying story of Blood Libel, one of medieval England’s most terrifying mysteries.  The Rest Is History Club: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to full series and live show tickets, ad-free listening, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestishistory.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestishistory. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude  Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is, therestishistory.com. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFrills.ca. The manuscript from which the work of Thomas of Monmouth is printed here, and it is the only copy of his work which is known, formed part of a library bequeathed about the year

1700 to the parish of Brent Ely in Suffolk by a certain Mr. Edward Coleman, sometime of Trinity College Cambridge. The collection included some nine manuscripts, and among them were two of no ordinary interest. One was the Gospel Book of St. Margaret of Scotland, which was purchased by the Bodleian Library in 1887. The other was the volume containing the life of St. William. Seven out of the nine manuscripts are now in the university library at Cambridge. And since I'd been myself to some extent instrumental in procuring these books, it was with... You're doing so well, Dominic. You're doing so well.

It was with extreme pleasure that on examination I discovered first that here was a copy of Thomas of Monmouth's Life of St. William, and next that no other copy seemed to be known. It is written in a fine hand or two hands on good parchment in double columns. It retains its original wooden boards, formerly fastened by a strap and pin. Its date I should place somewhat before 1200." So if you like ghost stories, especially the classic ghost stories of the late Victorian early 20th century period, people in the Sputter Viola scene I did a sort of necromantic gesture. Yes, you did. Very frightening. It evoked the spirit of a Christmas ghost story, Dominic,

even though we're recording this in the middle of June. That's great. Well, listen, if you love a ghost story, you will recognise there the prose of Montague Rhodes James, M.R. James, whose tales of ghosts and of horrific goings on usually in churches in East Anglia, they are surely the most chilling stories ever written. And he wrote that passage in 1896 and by the time of his death 40 years later he had established an international reputation, hadn't he Tom, as he was the Shakespeare of the ghost story, the Dickens, the Mozart of the horror story. I guess, I mean, his only conceivable contemporary rival for the title of the greatest horror

story writer would have been H.P. Lovecraft in America. And Lovecraft was a huge admirer of M.R. James and wrote, Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their most shocking forms and will certainly stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darks and province. And I think that you in that reading really powerfully evoked that sense of fright and hideousness. Good. Essentially that's quite a boring passage, but my goodness, the chills that went down

the spine as you read it. That literally took about 30 takes for me to read that and get through it. So let's just talk about some of James's, before we get into today's subject, talk a little bit about some of James's stories and their characteristics and why you've chosen to kick off with him. So many of his stories, the really kind of canonical ones like digging up sacks and grounds and all of that kind of thing, they're often set in the kind of flat fields of East Anglia, which form this sort of brooding, slightly unearthly kind of landscape backdrop to the tales. And they're often about a church or a cathedral or a library

or something like that. So the protagonist is often a scholar. So I was hoping to convey scholarship. You really did Dominic. Good, because I knew my own voice would not be up to it actually. No, you spoke like the incredible radio actor that you've become. Because you were in Sherlock and Co. weren't you? So you've played what was it, an irascible solicitor accused of killing a builder and now you've played an elderly scholar with something terrible to reveal.

Literally no role is beyond me Tom, I think it's fair to reveal. Literally no role is beyond me, Tom. I think it's fair to say. As well as being set in, say, an East Anglian cathedral city, as well as featuring a scholar with a kind of specialist knowledge of the ancient past, the plot will often revolve around the discovery of some antiquarian object. So it might be a whistle, you blow on the whistle and something terrible comes, or more commonly, an old forgotten manuscript. And the discovery of this kind of very ancient antiquarian object, whether it's a whistle or a manuscript, will conjure up from the grave some ancient unspeakable horror. And a huge part of the horror is that this ancient horror is now unleashed on the modern world. And all those elements are present in the

book from which that passage you so magnificently read comes from. And it's a book called The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich. But Dominic, here's the thing. That book is not a work of fiction. What a bone shell. It's actually a real book. It a work of fiction. What a bullsh-t. It's actually a real book. It's a factual book. It's a real book. So when James wrote horror stories about scholars discovering ancient manuscripts and being

haunted by the terrors conjured up from the grave that he finds in these manuscripts, I mean, he knew whereof he spoke because he was himself a very distinguished scholar. And over the course of his career, he served as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the provost of King's College, also in Cambridge, and the vice chancellor of Cambridge University, also in Cambridge. So there's an East Anglian theme developing there. He also discovered a manuscript fragment that led to the discovery in Barry St Edmunds, also in East Anglia, of the graves of various 12th century abbots. And there's some very eerie photos showing the opened tombs and

the skeletons of the abbots lying in them. And also, as described in the passage that you read so brilliantly, he sourced a large number of medieval manuscripts for the Cambridge University Library. And his book, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, is about one of those manuscripts. And it describes not just the murder of a child, but the birth of a horror, I think, infinitely greater than any of those that James portrayed in his ghost stories and which still stalks the world to this day. And there's a little clue, isn't there? It's the theme of that manuscript, The Life of

Miracles of St. William of Norwich, in a story that James wrote in 1895. And that story is called Lost Hearts. So tell us a bit about that story. This is presumably while he's preparing and maybe editing the book on St. William that comes out the year later. It's a very short story. So you can access it online. It will take you about 10 minutes to read. And it describes a young orphan boy who's age 12, who is invited to stay with his much older cousin, who is a very distinguished scholar of ancient cults, particularly in late antiquity. And he stays there and he starts to see the ghosts of two children. And when he sees them up close, he realizes that these children have had their

hearts cut out, that their chests have been smashed open and their hearts removed. And so when the summons comes one evening from his cousin to come to him late at night and before the cousin has arrived, the little boy goes there early and he finds us a brassiere there and an old silver gilt cup full of what looks to be red wine, but might be something else. And his cousin sprinkling some incense on the brassiere from a round silver box. You know, the implication is this isn't great. The prospects aren't good for him. This isn't going to be a fun evening.

So the theme of a ritualized child sacrifice was evidently much on James's mind as he was preparing the life and miracles of St. William of Norwich. And so with that kind of preview listeners may be wondering, well, what is this text about? Well, just to give some context, it was written in the second half of the 12th century. So as James said shortly before the year 1200, by a monk from Monmouth in Wales called Thomas, who sometime between 1146 and 1150, so the middle of the century, had joined the monastery in Norwich, which is in East Anglia, and this monastery was attached to the cathedral that had been built there in the wake of the Norman conquest. And the story that Thomas of Monmouth tells has

at its heart a murder. The date is March 1144, so almost a century after the Norman conquest. The setting for this murder is Thorpe Wood, which is a wooded stretch of the heathland that rises north of the city of Norwich, and Norwich is in the northeast of East Anglia. And the plot is centered around events that happen in Holy Week. So on the evening of Good Friday, according to Thomas, a fiery light suddenly flashed down from heaven and descended on the wood. And this strange phenomenon is witnessed by a nun who is the widow of a Norman aristocrat called the Lady Legada. And the Lady Legada and her various other nuns gaze out at this extraordinary phenomenon and they see that the light is continuing to blaze in the wood and it seems, and I quote Thomas

of Monmouth, to divide into two rays which took the shape of a very long ladder extending from below into the sky to the eastward. So at dawn the next day, Lady Lagarda and various of her fellow sisters get up, it's Easter Saturday, but they head out into the woods to investigate. And they go to the place where they had seen the light rising and it turns out to be an oak tree. And they're hanging from one of the branches of the oak tree. Lady Lagarda discovers, and again I quote, a boy dressed in his jacket and shoes, his head shaved and punctured with countless stabs. And according to Thomas of Monmouth, various carrion birds, so ravens and so on, are circling around the body trying to feed on it, but they can't settle on the body. And so it seems that the body is being protected from desecration by some supernatural power.

Right. Legarda approaches the corpse. She and her sisters drive off the carrion birds. They pray over the body, and then again, I quote, commending the boy over to the care of his saviour, she returned home with her companions rejoicing. And people may think it's a bit odd to rejoice over the corpse of a boy who's hanging from a tree. She's rejoicing because she knows that the boy in some way must have been holy to God, and therefore presumably has been taken up to heaven. So

the corpse of the boy is left hanging from this tree as Lady Ligarda and her fellow nuns head off. And shortly afterwards, a forester called Henry de Sprouston rides into the wood. And he is looking for, not for poachers, but for people illegally harvesting timber, because there's quite a shortage of timber in East Anglia. Norwich is a boom town. He wants to make sure that people aren't illegally removing the timber. And in the forest, he finds a peasant who is removing timber. And clearly the peasant is anxious about being taken into custody. And so he says, you'd never believe it, over there, there's a boy hanging from a tree. And so Henry de Spouwsten is obviously distracted and he goes over to

where the body is and he investigates the corpse and he finds that the boy, in addition to being stabbed, has been very, very brutally gagged with a piece of rope with knots in it. So kind of the, as the rope has been tightened in his mouth, the knots have gouged into the back of the head. So very horrible. Jesus. So do we know who the boy was? Well, De Sproustain investigates this and it doesn't take long for him to identify the boy and it turns out to be an apprentice leather worker called William. And this apprentice leather worker is 12 years old. So like the boy in MR James's story who has the sinister

cousin. Yeah. In lost hearts. William, he's been working in Norwich. Originally he'd come from the countryside. This doesn't mean that he was an uneducated peasant. It seems that as well as his native English, he spoke of a smattering of French and maybe even a bit of Latin. And there's a brilliant study of, of this case, the murder of William of Norwich by

E.M. Rose. And she's done a lot of research into the possible background of William, and she suggests that his father may well have been a moneyer. So that's a very kind of upwardly mobile job for someone to have. And we know for sure that his uncle was a priest because it's this priest, Godwin, who according to Thomas of Monmouth, formally identifies the body. And by this point, when Godwin comes to identify the body, William has already been buried out in the woods, in unconsecrated ground, and they exhumed the body. And when the body is brought out, an absolute miracle.

Though so many days had passed by since the time when they suspected he had been put to death, yet there was absolutely no bad smell perceptible. But what seemed more deserving, their wonder was that though there was never a flower there nor any sweet smelling herb growing there about, yet there the perfume of spring flowers and fragrant herbs was wafted to the nostrils of all present. So what this suggests is that the body is intact, and an intact body is an absolutely certain signifier of a kind of saintly status. So you think of St Cuthbert buried in Durham Cathedral after many, many wanderings around the northeast. the intact nature of St Cuthbert's body is the marker of his sanctity.

And so it seems that William likewise is one of the blessed who has been gathered up into the arms of God. So it's a very, very mysterious case. So very mysterious case, Tom, who was the killer? Or was there more than one killer? Was it a collective thing thing or ritualistic thing. Why the gag and why so many stab wounds why was william this boy even in the wood in the first place.

If his father is a is a money from norwich or was he killed in norwich and then his body moved to the water was he taken to the wood to be killed well a lot of mysteries there Poirot but first of all why don't we put this into the its historical context because i suspect that will be really important because we are in the anarchy so 1144 and this is the war between Matilda Henry the first's daughter, and her what, cousin? Stephen, Stephen of Blois, who is a terrible king. Well, yeah, I mean, he's busy fighting a civil war and it goes on for ages. So actually from 1138 to 1153. So in 1144, we're absolutely bang in the middle of it. And it's famously

described by chronicler in Peterborough, which is about 60 miles from Norwich, so very much in the eye of the East Anglian storm, as a time when Christ and his saints sleep. So we can be fairly confident that when this chronicler in Peterborough, who is updating the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is still going at this point, even after 1066. And he's describing how armed gangs of thugs are roaming the countryside, targeting anyone who might have money, robbing them, killing them. He is definitely describing conditions that prevailed in the countryside around both Norwich and Peterborough. And just to give a passage from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the horrors of the anarchy,

no martyrs were ever tortured as these victims, so the victims of the robbers were. They were hung by the thumbs or by the head, and corselets were hung on their feet. Notted ropes were put round their heads and twisted till they penetrated to the brains. I neither can nor may tell all the wounds and agonies which they inflicted on the wretched men of this land." So what do you make of that, Hastings? Yes, that I think is very telling, isn't it? So, these thugs have a particular modus operandi and young William, I guess, is he the kind of, I mean, he's a boy, he's from's from you said an upwardly mobile family, he's working

as an apprentice or something like that, is that right? Yeah, so he might have a bit of money jingling in his purse. So would he not be an obvious target for these ne'er-do-wells, these ruffians, and in fact the gag, the hanging, hung by the thumbs or by the head, corsets on the feet, they were tortured, blah blah blah, blah blah blah. I mean that just looks like he's a standard victim of the anarchy, of this kind of wave of banditry that's swept across England, no? You might think that, but it has to be said, this is not the explanation that ultimately came to be favoured and it's certainly not the explanation that Thomas of Monmouth, whose

reliability we will have to stress test over the course of this episode. It's not the conclusion that he comes to. And the reason for that is that Godwin and the rest of William's family, they do not think that William has been the victim of bandits and robbers. They come to identify Williams murderers as even more sinister figures. Men who Godwin thinks of as figures of literally diabolical evil, who live not out on the roads where poor travelers can be captured and tortured to death, but chillingly within Norwich itself. Ooh, that is chilling. So who are these people and what are they doing within Norwich itself. Oh, that is chilling. So who are these people and what are they doing in Norwich? Okay, some setting first.

So Norwich first of all, by this point, it's the second largest city in England, which isn't to say much actually, population probably around 5,000 people. But it's grown because it's the centre of a region that's very rich in crops. Soil is very fertile, lots of sheep, so wool, there's cattle, so hides and beef and so on. And it's linked very conveniently by rivers to the sea. So it's in pole position really. And like so many key places in England, it is now dominated by a vast castle built out of stone and also by a cathedral that was begun in 1096 and it's one of the most impressive Norman ecclesiastical structures ever built. So these are all markers of how

significant Norwich is, but there is another marker of Norwich's importance and prosperity and that is the presence within the city of a community of Jews. And Jews had first come to England after the Norman Conquest, but they'd come to Norwich really only a generation before the murder of William. And they work in Norwich in finance, as moneyers, as doctors, as scholars, as artisans, and as a community, they're very, very successful. And across England, the only community of Jews that pay more tax to the royal exchequer than Norwich is London. And so Stephen, embroiled in this civil war with his cousin Matilda, he essentially has East Anglia under his control, and he needs money to fight the civil war.

And so he loves the Jews. I mean, he thinks they're great. They're making him lots of money and giving him taxes and so he can carry on fighting. And yet throughout history, people who make a lot of money in a time of chaos, also people who are already regarded with suspicion because they are different from their neighbors. Such people often tend to incur resentment, conspiracy theories, hostility, and as we know, violence. And is that the case at this point with the Jews of Norwich? Well, as you say, there are obvious reasons for their unpopularity. Another is that they are associated with the Normans,

and so they are associated by colonized people with their colonizers. And there might be a kind of parallel with the way that Asians were regarded in Idi Amin's Uganda. Asians who'd been brought over by the British. But obviously, Norwich is a Christian city, and so there are deeply rooted theological reasons which go all the way back to the very beginnings of Christianity as to why Christians might have negative stereotypes of Jews. So they are viewed by Christians as aliens who have willfully shut themselves off from the universal, which in Greek is Catholic, community of Christian souls. So that's an obvious cause of hostility. They are believed to have an intense malevolence towards Christians, so

they are blamed for the sufferings of Christ on the cross. They are also, because Herod was a Jew, and Herod is the man who launches the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem when he's trying to kill Jesus. The innocents over the course of the 12th century are increasingly being cast as Christians, and so there's a sense that Jews have a particular animus against children. And there is a broader feeling that they have been cursed by God, that they're favored by the devil, that they've been driven into exile because they slew the Messiah, that they've been exiled from their homeland, and that essentially they kind of bear the mark of Cain on their brows.

So there's a whole swirl of very negative stereotypes that Christians can draw on if they want to. But you ask, you know, are relations between Christians and Jews in Norwich at this time unremittingly hostile? Absolutely, they're not. Because even though there are kind of currents of popular hostility to Jews, by and large, both the church and Christian kings are influenced in their attitude to Jews by centuries of relative, and I emphasize the word relative tolerance. So the popes, for instance, have always employed Jews. They've always served as the patron of Jews in Rome and the lands ruled by the popes. So in 598,

Gregory the First, Gregory the Great had decreed that the Jews in their communities were in no way to suffer a violation of their rights. The Frankish kings, so the Merovingians, Charlemagne and his heirs had recognized them as a people with their own law, their own religio, their own kind of relationship to God. And it's possible for, say, bishops to view Jews not just with a kind of grudging toleration, but with almost a sense of admiration. So in 1084 in Speyer on the Rhine, a bishop decrees that the presence of Jews in his diocese does it honor. I mean, most bishops don't go that far, but there is clearly a basis there for a kind of modus vivendi in Latin Christendom that enables

Jewish communities to thrive, which is essentially what they have done for centuries. There isn't a kind of a mood of violence and persecution in the kind of the early Middle Ages towards the Jews. And certainly in England, the 12th century is a pretty peaceful period for the Jews who settled there. There are no real outbreaks of violence. There's certainly no royal or ecclesiastical persecution. And I think the Jews of Norwich, far from people in Norwich thinking, oh, they're a menace, I think they're, well, they're certainly acknowledged by the city authorities as a key ingredient to its success. Diversity is Norwich's strength, I think, would be the message of the Norwich town authorities.

So, at what point, I mean big spoiler alert, the Jews are going to get blamed for this murder. At what point does the finger of blame start to point towards the Jews and how many people believe it, would you say? It seems to be William's family who point the finger. So Thomas of Monmouth says that his mother comes from the country into Norwich and is told that William had been offered a job as a cook and had gone to a house of one of the leading Jews in Norwich to talk about it and had vanished into this Jews house and was never seen again. I mean, how reliable that is, we will discuss later. But the person who really seems to push the accusation is this priest Godwin, so William's uncle. He's the guy who takes

the case to the Bishop of Norridge and says, it's the Jews collectively who have killed my nephew. And so the bishop then takes this case to the local sheriff, a man called John Duchesne. And John Duchesne says, this is ridiculous. This is, I mean, you have absolute nonsense. And not only does he reject the accusation, but he actively assists the Jews. So first he tells the Jews, if the bishop tries to launch prosecution against you, ignore it. As non-Christians, you are not under the remit of the ecclesiastical courts. And then he takes them under his direct protection in Norwich Castle. So there they are effectively completely secure. And I think

it's understandable that he should have thought these accusations against the Jews are improbable, particularly coming as they do from this priest Godwin who had gone out into the wood and had seen the place where William had been found dead. And I guess that Duchesne is thinking possibly two things. I mean, we don't know for sure, but it's likely. So I suspect that Duchesne thinks either this is an attempt by William's family to extort money from the Jews. You accuse them and they try and basically buy the accusers off. Or I think there's possibly a darker reason, which is the one thing we're told that I think we can absolutely rely on is that William is found hanging from a tree because Thomas of Monmouth, he rather lets

it slip. It's not a detail that he dwells on. And so there might be a possibility that William had hung himself. You know, he's a young boy alone in the city. You could think of any number of reasons why he might have wanted to kill himself. And a person who hangs himself from a tree for Christians, and certainly for a priest, would immediately conjure up thoughts of Judas who betrayed Christ and then hung himself. And it's this that marks suicide out as a crime in the opinion of the church. Although that wouldn't explain the gag and it slightly, it conflicts with the idea, which I find very persuasive that this is a modus operandi of lots of thugs in the area during the anarchy. Is that not the simplest?

I think that is the simplest, but it is possible that Duchesne doesn't trust the accounts at all. And I guess that because there's association with Judas, that might be what puts, you know, you could imagine Godwin the priest worrying about this. And so he starts thinking about the Jews and then he thinks, well, maybe the Jews did. We can't know for sure. We're at such a distance. Thomas of Monmouth's account is the only one we have. And as we'll see, we can't 100% rely on it. But I guess that the chief reason why de Chesney would be skeptical about the idea that the Jews had killed William of Norwich is why would they have done it? I mean, what conceivable reason would they have had for doing it? And so it's not surprising, I think, that first in the weeks and then

in the months and then the years that follow the discovery of William's corpse, there isn't any serious investigation into the murder and certainly there is no prosecution. And as you say, the times are evil. The circumstances of William's death are murky and there are lots of people who are dying horribly in the fields and woods of East Anglia at this time. And I think that there's a general feeling on the part of the town authorities that the accusations that William's family have brought against the Jews are ridiculous. But then, Tom, six years later, six years after the death of William of Norwich, everything changes, doesn't it? A shadow falls across the Jews of Norwich and this is a shadow

that stretches all the way from Palestine. And we'll pick up on that story after the break. after the break. Let 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. One 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. And the case is absolutely open and shut. And Stephen, who is very anxious to signal his support for the Jewish community, he is very keen on the taxes that they pay him. He's keen to make an example of de Novas, you know, bang him up, hang him, whatever. Let's, let's convict this guy. But even though Stephen is basically set on finding De Novas guilty, this isn't what happens because the longer the trials go on, the harder it becomes for Stephen to convict De Novas. 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. We 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's never punished for the murder of Eliaza, 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, Eliaza, you're gutted about this. This De Novas has got away with it, it's got free.

And so why has that happened? I mean, because if De Novas, if it's an open shut case and De Novas 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 Eliazze. And the first of them is brilliantly teased out by EM Rose in her book on this whole case. And she argues that De Novas had borrowed money from Eliezer and why had he done that? 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. So 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. So 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 Sepulcher 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 and 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 en 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. And on the river Maine, 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 Crusader 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 Wurzburg, 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. And out in the countryside, there are lots of Christian Castellans who, a bit like

Duchess near Norwich, when the Jews there were threatened, they sheltered 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. fighting Muslims. And that at the same time, that is being that the sort of mirror image of that is people

fighting Christ's enemies in Christendom itself, in Europe itself. So 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.

And the answer to 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 again, 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 Novas'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 Turb. And the Bishop of Norwich is a very,

very able man. So 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 EM Rose, an experienced courtroom authority, sophisticated, well-travelled, 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. And 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 Turbur 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 Cuthbert, Westminster Abbey has the body of Edward the confessor. And I think that probably William Turb is thinking, hmm, you know, if we can promote this little boy who's been possibly murdered by the Jews as a martyr, then brilliant. You know, we fill the gap that my cathedral has.

So 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. You know, I'll impress people with my oratory, I'll get this very presumably influential and powerful person off, but also I will really boost my cathedral, we'll get the relics, we'll get pilgrims. Do you think 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 the needs of God have often coincided, I mean, and often do throughout medieval history. William Turbys, he's a monk through and through, and he's a man of knowledge through and through, and he's been personally chosen by the monks of knowledge, 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 that's presumably what God wants. I'm sure that would

be his thinking. 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 William Turb is doing is saying that Eliezer, the murdered Jew, deserved everything he got. So to quote him, and this speech of William Turbis is quoted by Thomas of Monmouth, that Jew of whose death the night, so that's de Novas, 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 Thorpewood, 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? And supposedly Alward had sworn an oath to the Sheriff, Don Duchesne, 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 Alward 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, and 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. So 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, inasmuch 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. And the third witness is, and I quote, a certain poor Christian woman who had worked as a maid for Eliazza in his household. And 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 site. 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." So 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, you know, he has decent relations with the Jews of England, right? So 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 the 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 has just

killed, because he owed this bloke money, is 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. So that lent Thomas's 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 la Zinga, 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. And 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 MR James and published. And H.P. Lovecraft, the great American writer of horror stories, described the quality he found embodied in James' 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. William 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 EM Rose, the hard-headed Norwich merchants, artisans and aristocracy were not persuaded

of William's sanctity. And Thomas of Monmouth, who's very much the guy in charge of the branding, is absolutely irate by this. He 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 thought wood and everything else. So the issue of how exactly he was wounded, where he was found,

everything else is essentially kind of supposition. 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 very rapidly proves to be devastating. 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. You

have the presentation of Jews not as individuals, but as kind of malevolent archetypes. And these archetypes are reaching back to Herod, to Cain, to Judas, to the crowds who were called on pilot to execute Christ. And just as these are 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, although actually in Thomas of Monmouth's account, the miracles are brilliant. I mean, they're nothing incredible. And also interestingly,

they don't relate to the Jews. So they are, you know, 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, stories can spread very quickly. I suppose you might say it's like a meme. It's like a meme that spreads, wouldn't you? So only a few years after Thomas of Monmouth's story has appeared, something similar is being told about in Blois, where Jews end up being burnt

by the Count of Blois. And of course, 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 in 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. Yeah, that seems 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, into the sort of populist outrage, and they start to join in the persecutions.

They 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. 18 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. Even though the papacy itself very pointedly refuses to confirm the canonization,

this does not inhibit the growth of the cult of little Saint 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 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 share a common humanity. So already

in 1215, a Lateran council held by Innocent III, the most powerful of all the great medieval popes, the guy who had launched the Alpergenzian 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, you know, 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. So 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. And 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. We will see you next time for something hopefully a little bit more cheerful. Bye bye. Bye bye.