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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Boy Killed

A Boy Killed

On Easter Sunday, 1144, the dead body of a boy of twelve was found in a wood outside Norwich. He had been stabbed, and there was some evidence of torture inflicted before death. In our own times such an event would be reported sensationally in certain newspapers; some would gloat, some would pity, and sooner or later an abnormal person would be judged guilty (or guilty but insane) and spend the rest of his life in new circumstances. But in Norwich, in the twelfth century, things took another course.

It is hard for us to re-enter the labyrinth of the medieval mind. Intense prejudices, ferocious legal penalties, a welter of superstitions co-existed with a profound sense of ritual, a closely-knit hierarchical social order, and a semi- tribal awareness of one’s neighbours’ activities. Above the maze stood the two great powers of Church and Crown, each more nearly autonomous than we would consider just or possible.

In this context occurred the terrible and recurrent phenomenon of Christian anti-Semitism, held in check by some kings (in England the Jews were under the special protection of the Crown) – by some popes (prejudices wore thin in Rome, where Christian minds were at least partly open to the true ethos of the Synagogue) – and by those people of a finer calibre who come to the surface in any age. But popular superstition and prejudice, sharpened by envy and avarice, are powerful forces.

In Norwich the local cathedral needed a miracle-vending saint. And the local Jews were affluent, sometimes unwisely ostentatious. A boy was killed, and the old hideous charge of ritual murder was revived. Some agreed; some disagreed. Miss Anderson analyses the contradictory statements in a twelfth- century text, The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, and examines the wholly circumstantial evidence.

page 708

I do not find myself much affected by the details of the development of the cult of William of Norwich – they seem to me to belong to the long history of religious pathology, which, like a grotesque shadow, accompanies the growth of Christian ritual and doctrine – but I find myself enormously affected by the re-creation of the atmosphere in which the life and liberty of Jewish people were in danger whenever a child happened to be murdered or a monk happened to have a dream. If this book helps to dissipate any vestige of the evil fog of anti-Semitism existing in the mind of any reader, then Miss Anderson is to be commended for writing it.

1965 (341)