There were about 200 Jews living in Norwich at the time of William’s murder. Most of them lived in the Jewry, which was close to the markets and the castle. While there were some very wealthy Jews who worked as moneylenders and engaged in foreign exchange, others were physicians or worked at other trades.
On the whole, relations between Norwich’s Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors were good. In fact, there is evidence that young William had several interactions with local Jews, who may have sought him out for some leatherwork. And despite the family’s accusation that Jews had killed William, there wasn’t any violence against the community. Indeed, the incident was soon forgotten – until it was taken up five years later by a new arrival to the city: a Benedictine monk named Thomas of Monmouth.
The Blood Libel
It took Brother Thomas more than twenty years to complete his multi-volume work The Life and Passion of Saint William of Norwich, which is our only contemporaneous account of the events that accompanied William along the road from murder victim to miracle-performing saint. However, the lengthy period of writing wasn’t due to Thomas’s desire to ferret out the truth. He himself admitted he wasn’t writing a factual account. His was a book of martyrdom, whose purpose was to inspire – and help spread the cult of Norwich’s very own saint.
During the medieval period, many churches got at least part of their income from pilgrims in search of holy relics that could heal or bless. Although Norwich was an important center of commerce and learning, until the death of William and his subsequent elevation to sainthood the cathedral lacked the drawing power of an important relic. To help remedy this situation, William’s body was exhumed and reburied within the confines of the cathedral. Reports of miraculous healings were duly recorded. However, despite the efforts of Thomas and other members of Norwich Cathedral Priory, the cult never really caught on in a big way.
What did catch on was Thomas’s imagined description of William’s death, which became the blueprint for many of the blood libel accusations that were to follow.
The story, in brief, is that a man claiming to be a cook employed by the Archdeacon approached William’s mother and offered William a job in the kitchen. Cooks were held in high esteem during the Middle Ages, and so William went off with this person. The next day the two supposedly paid a visit to William’s aunt, who became suspicious and told her daughter to follow the pair. The girl reported that she saw them enter the house of a local Jew, which was the last time anyone saw William alive.
Thomas helps the story along by adding the “testimony” of several key witnesses. A Christian servant woman employed by the Jew happened to see through a chink in the door a boy who was bound to a wooden post. A man named Aelward, who died before Thomas arrived in Norwich, supposedly confessed on his deathbed that he had encountered two Jews in the woods carrying the body of the dead boy in a sack.
Although all these events happened during the week of Pesach, which that year coincided with Easter Sunday, there was no claim that the Jews used the boy’s blood to bake their matzos; that version of the blood libel would only turn up in the next century. Instead, the Jews supposedly tortured the boy and then nailed him to a post, in mockery of the Christian religion. As E.M. Rose mentions, this sort of death was in line with the Cult of the Holy Innocents, which was popular at the time.
