Barbaric Murders
Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes
RODNEY CASTLEDEN
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: CHILD VICTIMS
St William of Norwich
Little St Hugh of Lincoln
Sarah and Sally Metyard
William Andrew Horne
Captain John Sutherland
Esther Hibner
John Bell
Revd Thomas Hunter
Constance Kent
Carl Bridgewater
Michael Helgos and JonBenet
Francisco Arce Montes
PART TWO: THE LADY-KILLERS
William Corder
James Greenacre
Oscar Slater
PART THREE: BODIES IN BOXES
Kate Webster
Arthur Devereux
Maria Goold
The Brighton Trunk Murder
PART ONE: CHILD VICTIMS
St William of Norwich
‘and the blood lie’
St William of Norwich was born in 1132. He is thought to have died on 22 March, 1144, though his body was not found until three days later, on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Day. The timing of the boy’s death in relation to the Church calendar held strong symbolic significance to the Norwich clerics, which helps to explain how both the boy and his death acquired mythic status in the Middle Ages.
The starting-point of the story is simple enough. A boy’s body was found in Thorpe Wood near Norwich; it bore signs of a violent death. No-one touched it until the feast of Easter was over. On Easter Monday the corpse was buried where it was found. In the meantime a number of boys and young men had visited the spot, which means that the body could easily have been mischievously tampered with, and significant wounds added in imitation of the wounds of Christ. Jews were suspected of murdering the boy on account of the nature of the wounds.
The body was identified as that of a boy called William, a tanner’s apprentice. It was later said that he had frequently visited the houses of certain Jews with his master, a fact which seemed to implicate the Jews.
William’s uncle, who was the priest Godwin Stuart, opened the grave to be sure of the identification. The burial service was read and the corpse re-buried. A few days later the diocesan synod met under Bishop Eborard and Godwin Stuart took the opportunity to accuse the Jews of committing the murder of his nephew. He offered to prove his accusation by ordeal. The Jews of Norwich were the king’s men and directly under the sheriff’s protection; the sheriff had to point out that the Bishop had no jurisdiction over the Jews. No formal condemnation of the Jews was possible because of the strength of character and purpose of the Sheriff of Norwich, who conscientiously and strong-mindedly protected the Jewish community from Church interference.
The only thing Godwin Stuart was able to achieve was the ‘translation’ of his nephew’s body from Thorpe Wood to the monk’s cemetery. This was done on 24 April.
An attempt was made to develop a cult of St William, but it never really caught on. A couple of miracles were reported in the five years following his death. Probably the story of poor St William’s (alleged) murder by the Jews would have faded and been forgotten, but for another murder in 1149.
The Jew Eleazar was murdered by the retainers of Sir Simon de Novers. The Jewish community demanded that the murderer should be punished. Bishop Turbe, who had succeeded to the see of Norwich in 1146, acted for the accused, who was his own tenant, and took the opportunity to bring up the murder of William five years before as a counter-charge. The case was tried before the King at Norwich, but had to be put off, according to the chronicler, because the Norwich Jews paid a large sum of money to the King and his councillors.
Bishop Turbe was keen to revive the blood lie, the dangerous myth that Jews performed human sacrifices, and this was his reason for bringing up the case of William. He was partly responsible for perpetuating the cult, as was Richard de Ferraiis, who became Prior in 1150, after the bones of St William were translated to the chapter-house. Thomas of Monmouth, the chronicler, became the saint’s personal sacrist. Thomas had three visions in which he saw Herbert of Losinga, the cathedral’s founder, ordering the boy’s body to be exhumed and reburied in the chapter-house. This was done in 1151. The body was moved again, in 1154, to the apsidal chapel of the Holy Martyrs, now known as the Jesus Chapel.
Once the body was inside the cathedral, the miracles started to multiply, and St William’s cult really took off. Thomas of Monmouth wrote down the story of what had happened to St William. This was now some long time after the boy’s death, and Thomas seems to have believed whatever anybody told him. The result is a highly coloured and prejudiced version of events, and probably does not represent what really happened at all. But this, in summary, is what he said.
William had been in the habit of visiting the houses of Jews and was forbidden by his friends to have anything to do with them. On the Monday of Holy Week in 1144, he was lured away from his mother by a messenger who offered him a job in the archdeacon’s kitchen. The next day William was seen with the messenger going into a Jew’s house. William was never again seen alive.
On the Wednesday of that week, following a service in the synagogue, the Jews lacerated his forehead with thorns, and then crucified him. A Christian servant carrying some hot water ordered by her master saw, through a crack in the door, a boy tied to a post; she assumed the water was to cleanse the boy’s body. Later she found a boy’s belt in the room. Many years later she pointed out to Thomas the evidence of the martyrdom in the same room. A month after the boy’s martyrdom, thorn-points were found on William’s head and the wounds of the martyrdom in his hands, feet and side.
(Significantly, this servant’s testimony was not produced until Thomas was preparing his book.)
On the Thursday, the Jews discussed how to dispose of the boy’s body.
(If the Jews really had premeditated the killing as a human sacrifice, they would have planned this beforehand. If there is any truth at all in Thomas’s story, the boy’s death must have been an accident, possibly some rough horseplay as at Inmestar. In ad 415 at Inmestar in Syria, some Jews in a drunken frolic accidentally killed a Christian child in a mock Crucifixion.)
On the Friday, Good Friday, Eleazar and another Jew carried the boy’s body in a sack to Thorpe Wood.
(Eleazar was a cunning choice; he had just been murdered himself, and therefore in no position to defend himself. The charge also somehow vindicated his killing by a Christian.)
On the way to dispose of the body, they were met by a man called Aelward Ded, who saw what was inside the sack. The Jews bribed the sheriff (always Thomas’s enemy, because he was the Jews’ protector) to extort an oath of silence from Aelward. It was only five years later, after the sheriff’s death and when on his own death-bed, that Aelward told his story. (Here Thomas was explaining away the late emergence of corroboration for his story. The Jews may well have stumped up large amounts of money. They were besieged, frightened people, and would naturally have resorted to paying protection money if it meant they would be left alone for a while; even if these payments were made, they do not in any way prove their guilt.)
The most destructive piece of ‘evidence’ that Thomas produced was the testimony of Theobald, who was a converted Jew and a monk at Norwich Priory. Theobald told Thomas that
in the ancient writings of the Jews it was said that they could only obtain their freedom and return to their fatherland if a certain ceremony was performed. This was the annual sacrifice, somewhere in the world, of a Christian; in the year 1144 it had been the turn of the Norwich Jews to perform this human sacrifice.
This was the infamous ‘blood lie’, which has been described as ‘one of the most notable and disastrous lies of history’. It has been widely used, right through the last thousand years, as the justification for persecuting Jews everywhere and provides the backdrop to horrors such as the Holocaust. The idea of the blood lie may seem preposterous, but there were scholars in the late nineteenth century who were ready to support it by writing learned dissertations proving that throughout history the Jews have indulged in the sacrifice of children.
The cruelly prejudiced accusation that the Jews killed St William was, thanks to Thomas of Monmouth’s lie, inevitably going to be repeated again and again in subsequent decades. There were five more such accusations in the twelfth century, fifteen in the thirteenth century, ten in the fourteenth, sixteen in the fifteenth, thirteen in the sixteenth, eight in the seventeenth, fifteen in the eighteenth and thirty-nine in the nineteenth century. The most remarkable aspect of the St William story is not that a case was fabricated against the Jews way back in the middle ages, but that the situation was far worse in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Instead of leaving medieval prejudices behind, we have exaggerated them.
What did happen to William? Unfortunately, the surviving evidence is so tainted by the prejudices and personal and professional agendas of medieval churchmen that it is impossible to tell. William was a boy apprentice, and as such he would have been exposed to both physical and sexual abuse from his master and by other, older workers; that was the common lot of apprentices. He may have died as a result of excessive punishment for inadequate work, or as a result of a campaign of bullying. The fact that the boy’s trousers were missing would in any modern murder case be interpreted as a sure sign that he had been sexually molested, though this was evidently not inferred at the time. There is, sad to say, nothing exceptional about William’s untimely death. Once the master, the bully or the sexual predator found that William was dead, removing the body to some deserted place well outside Norwich and dumping it there was an understandable act. It made it harder to connect the death and the killer – and it succeeded. One thing I am certain of, and that is that the death of St William of Norwich was nothing whatever to do with the Jews.
Little St Hugh of Lincoln
Little St Hugh of Lincoln was the son of a poor woman named Beatrice, who lived in Lincoln. Hugh was born in about 1246 and died at the age of nine or ten in 1255. His story has many parallels with that of William of Norwich, except that his body was found in the town rather than the countryside. He disappeared on 31 July, 1255, and his body was discovered a month later in a well on 29 August. He was said to have been crucified by the Jews of Lincoln. His body was found at the bottom of a well belonging to a Jew named Copin.
Copin was accused of enticing Hugh into his house. Then a large number of Jews gathered there to torture, scourge, crown with thorns and crucify the boy in imitation and mockery of the death of Christ. The story, as reported by the medieval chronicler, goes on to say that the earth refused to accept Hugh’s body, and that was why it was thrown down a well. Some time after Hugh had gone missing, his friends told his mother they had seen him following the Jew. It was on going to Copin’s house that she discovered her son’s body.
Copin (or Jopin) confessed the crime when under threat of torture, and stated that it was a Jewish custom to crucify a boy once a year. Both the confession and the annual child sacrifice will have been put into Copin’s mouth by his torturers.
A tomb was built for the boy who died the death of Christ, and miracles were claimed by those who prayed there. The canons of Lincoln translated the body from the parish church where he was first buried, burying it with great pomp in Lincoln Cathedral. A feast of Little St Hugh was instigated on 27 July. Copin himself was made to suffer a cruel death; the confession under threat of torture had done the poor man no good at all. But that might have been the end of the story, but for a series of external events.
About six months before the death of St Hugh, Henry III had sold his right to tax the Jews to his brother, Richard of Cornwall. Having lost this source of revenue, Henry III decided that he would be eligible for the Jews’ money if they were convicted of crimes. As a result, the authorities were encouraged to convict Jews. The number of charges brought against Jews was therefore not just a result of a surge of anti-Jewish feeling following the death of Little St Hugh of Lincoln; it was a result of a shift in fiscal policy. In the wake of all this, ninety Jews were thrown into prison in London, presumably on trumped-up charges. The London Jews were found guilty and condemned to death, but they were both released and pardoned when they agreed to pay large fines. Eighteen more Jews were hanged in Lincoln as well. This was the first time the death sentence was given for ritual murder by a civil government. The King was able to confiscate their property too. In this way Henry III kept his coffers filled – it was nothing to do with justice or the prevention of crime.
The ‘martyrdom’ of St Hugh became a popular theme for ballads – both poems and folk songs – in the middle ages. Little St Hugh entered the realm of popular culture. As the story spread, so the shrine of Little St Hugh became a focus for pilgrimage. Chaucer refers to Hugh of Lincoln in his Canterbury Tales. One of the popular ballads was recorded in the eighteenth century:
She’s led him in through ae dark door,
And sae has she thro’ nine;
She’s laid him on a dressing-table,
And stickit him like a swine;
And first came out the thick, thick blood,
And syne came out the thin;
And syne came out the bonny heart’s blood,
Then was nae mair within;
She’s row’d him in a cake o’ lead,
Bade him lie still and sleep;
She’s thrown him in Our Lady’s draw-well,
Was fifty fathom deep.
The untruths and internal inconsistencies here are all too obvious, but the ballad does show how a murder story has its own engine, driving it further and further from the circumstances of the actual crime. Cecil Sharp, who collected some versions of the ballad, commented that the charge against the Jews was ‘groundless and malicious’.
The cult of St Hugh continued even into the early twentieth century, when a new well was constructed in the former Jewish quarter of the city and unscrupulously advertized as the well in which St Hugh’s body was found.
As with the death of St William, it is very difficult to know whether there was any truth in the medieval account of events. We can be sure that Hugh went missing and was eventually found dead. It is quite possible that he was found dead in the bottom of a well. But that is quite a common accidental death among children. Children are often fascinated by wells, liking to peer down them and drop stones down into the water. They have often died as a result of leaning too far and falling in. If they survive the fall, there is usually no way of climbing out. The well may even have been in the garden of a Jew, but that does not incriminate the Jew Copin.
The problem is doubled by the clear evidence in the chronicler’s account that accusations were brought against Jews for the sake of extorting money from them.
The story of Little St Hugh is another example of the blood lie levelled at the Jews repeatedly during the middle ages – and later. Beside the site of the gothic shrine of Little St Hugh in Lincoln Cathedral is a plaque that tells the important part of the story:
‘Trumped-up stories of ritual murders of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later. These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives. Lincoln had its own legend, and the alleged victim was buried in the Cathedral in the year 1255. Such stories do not
redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray;
Lord, forgive what we have been,
Amend what we are,
And direct what we shall be.’
Sarah and Sally Metyard
Sarah Metyard was a milliner in Bruton Street, Hanover Square in London. Sally Metyard was her daughter and assistant. In 1758, Sarah Metyard had five apprentice girls. They had come to her from different workhouses. Among the unfortunate five apprentices were Anne Naylor and her sister.
Anne Naylor was a weak girl, physically unable to do much work, and this made her a target for some ferocious bullying by Sarah Metyard and her daughter. Their cruelty to her caused her to run away, but she was brought back and shut in an upper room, kept alive on only bread and water. She saw an opportunity to escape, and managed to get out into the street. She ran to a milk-carrier and begged for help. She feared the women would kill her. Sarah Metyard’s daughter Sally came out and dragged her back into the house. She was seized by the older woman, who held her down while the younger woman beat her with a broom handle.
Then they imprisoned Anne in a back room, tying her to the door in such a way that she could not sit or lie down. They left her like this for three days, though they did allow her to go to bed in the normal way at night – an odd concession, given the level of cruelty to which they were subjecting her. They gave her no food at all for three days. While Anne Naylor was imprisoned and tortured in this way, the other apprentices were made to work in an adjoining room, so that they could see what would happen to them if they were disobedient. They were forbidden to offer her any kind of help.
Barbaric Murders - Child victims, lady-killers and bodies in boxes (Infamous Murderers) Page 1
