Halfway down the south choir aisle in Lincoln Cathedral, described by John Ruskin as “the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles”, stands a nondescript stone base. It’s just a foot high, and as you stroll past you might easily miss it. Yet this is all that remains of perhaps the most shameful monument in English history: the shrine of Little Hugh of Lincoln, supposedly kidnapped and murdered by the Jews in 1255.
For anybody who doubts that antisemitism is deeply embedded in England’s history, the story of Little Hugh serves as a terrible rebuke. The most famous version comes from the medieval chronicler Matthew Paris, who recorded that in late July that year, “the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy called Hugh, who was about eight years old. After shutting him up in a secret chamber, where they fed him on milk and other childish food, they sent to almost all the cities of England in which there were Jews, and summoned some of their sect from each city to be present at a sacrifice to take place at Lincoln.”
Then, according to Paris, Hugh’s kidnappers subjected him to a dreadful ritual, in mockery of the suffering of Christ. “They scourged him till the blood flowed, they crowned him with thorns, mocked him, and spat upon him … and kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus, the false prophet. And after tormenting him in diverse ways they crucified him, and pierced him to the heart with a spear.” And then, wrote Paris, they dismembered his corpse, “for the purpose of their magic arts”.
The story was a lie, of course. It was the latest iteration of the antisemitic “blood libel”, which had originated a century earlier in Norwich: the claim that every year, England’s tiny Jewish population held a secret ritual, in which they ritually murdered a little Christian boy. The pattern was always very similar. A boy went missing; his body was found; rumours spread that the Jews were responsible. The local monks would then set up a shrine. When miracles inevitably followed, thousands of pilgrims would flock to the scene, providing a welcome boost to the local economy. Everybody won. Except, of course, for the little boy. And the Jews.
As the story of Little Hugh reminds us, the blood libel was not just a cynical marketing plot, but a lie with lethal consequences. When he disappeared in Lincoln, a royal official called John of Lexington arrested a local Jewish man, known as Copin, and questioned him under torture. Then the king, Henry III, arrived in the city and took a personal interest in the case. On his orders, the hapless Copin was dragged through the streets and hanged.
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But this was only the beginning. On his return to London, Henry ordered 92 Jews to be rounded up and held in the Tower, accused of complicity in the non-existent conspiracy. Eighteen were hanged immediately, having refused to acknowledge the court. The others languished in prison for months before being convicted and sentenced to death, only to be released after an intercession by the king’s brother, Richard of Cornwall. Sadly, their names and thoughts are lost, so we can only imagine their sheer confusion, terror and trauma.
Historians have often wondered why Henry, a long-serving but relatively ineffectual king, was so quick to believe such flimsy accusations. One answer is that he was chronically short of cash and keen to squeeze the wealthy Jewish community for all they were worth. But another, more troubling explanation is that he was predisposed to think of Jews as murderers and torturers because antisemitism was already so deeply rooted in English society and culture.
Jews had lived in England since the Norman Conquest, though they did so as “royal serfs”, answerable to the crown. At first antisemitism seems to have been relatively mild, but by the 12th century — the age of the first Crusades, in which religious excitement reached fever pitch — the mood had turned ugly. The first blood libel, in Norwich, dates from 1144, and was followed by a rash of similar stories about Jewish child murders.
Worse was to follow. In the winter of 1189-90, as Richard the Lionheart was preparing to embark on the Third Crusade, pogroms broke out in towns across the country. In York, at least a hundred Jewish men, women and children took refuge in the castle, under siege from a furious mob demanding they submit to Christian baptism. On the orders
of their leader, Rabbi Yom Tov, they began to kill themselves; then Yom Tov set fire to the tower, so their bodies would not be mutilated. Only a handful surrendered and agreed to convert. The mob slaughtered them anyway.
Even centuries later, such stories still make for harrowing reading. To many of us, the resurgence of antisemitism in recent years, especially among supposedly high-minded, moralistic people on the liberal wing of the political spectrum, seems a baffling and distressing phenomenon. But we should face the fact that antisemitism has always had a distinctive British pedigree, from the legend of Little Hugh to the yellow badges imposed by Edward I, and from caricatures such as Shylock and Fagin to the spectacle of people making excuses for Hamas’s atrocities earlier this month.
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British antisemitism has, of course, evolved over time, from the overtly religious antagonism of the Middle Ages to the explicitly racialised contempt of the Victorians and the reactionary conspiracy theories of the 1920s. But it remains the most potent conspiracy theory in our political and cultural life, a poison that shames and stains our national conversation.
If you visit the shrine of Little Hugh at Lincoln Cathedral today, you will see a heartfelt prayer, drafted in consultation with local Jewish groups, calling for “an end to bigotry, prejudice and persecution”. It’s tempting to tell ourselves that such things belong in the past, alongside the blood libel and the York pogrom. But as the past few weeks have made depressingly clear, we have not travelled as far from the spirit of 1255 as many of us might like to think.
