The twenty-one versions of this ballad (so far as they are not mere fragments) agree in the outline of the story and in many of the details. In N, a singular copy obtained in New York, the boy's name is corrupted to Harry Hughes, and the Jew's daughter becomes the Duke's daughter.
The story of Hugh of Lincoln is told in the Annals of Waverley, under the year 1255, by a contemporary writer, to this effect. A boy in Lincoln, named Hugh, was crucified by the Jews in contempt of Christ with various preliminary tortures. To conceal the act from Christians, the body, when taken from the cross, was thrown into a rnnning stream; but the water would not endure the wrong done its maker, and immediately ejected it upon dry land. The body was then buried in the earth, but was found above ground the next day. The guilty parties_ were now very much frightened and quite at their wits' end; a~ a last resort they threw the corpse into a well. Thereupon the whole place was fillpd with so brilliant a light and so sweet an odor that it was clear to everybody that there must be something holy and prodigious in the well. The body was seen floating on the water, and, upon its being drawn up, the hands and feet were found to he pierced, the }lead had, as it were, a crown of bloody points, and there were various other wounds: from all which it was plain that this was the work of the Jews. A blind woman, tonching the bier on which the blessed martyr's corpse was carrying to the church, received her sight, and many other miracles followed. Eighteen Jews, convicted of the crime, and confessing it with their own mouth, were hanged. Matthew Paris, also writing contemporaneously, supplies additional circumstances, one of which, the mother's finding of the child, is prominent in the ballad. The Annals of Burton give a long report of this case, which is perhaps contemporary, though the manuscript is mostly of the next century.
An Anglo-French ballad, which also appears to be contemporary with the event, agrees in mauy particulars with t.he account given in the Annals of Burton and adds new details.
The English ballads, the oldest of which were recovered abont t.he middle of the eighteenth century, must, in the course of five hundred years of tradition, have depart.ed considerably from the early form. The occurrence of Our Lady's draw-well, in A, is due to a mixing, to this extent, of the story of Hugh with that of the young devotee of the Virgin who is celebrated in Chaucer's Prioresses Tale.
Murders like that of Hugh of Lincoln have been imputed to t.he Jews for at least seven hundred and fifty years, and the charge, which there is reason to suppose may still from time to time be renewed, bas brought upon t.he accused every calamity that the hand of man can inflict, pillage, confiscation, banishment, torture, and death, and this in huge proportions. The process of these murders has often been described as a parody of the crucifixion of Jesus. The motive most commollly alleged, in addition to the contempt for Christianity, has been the obtaining of blood for use in the Paschal rites, a most unhappily devised slander, in stark contradiction with Jewish precept and practice. That no Christian child was ever killed by a Jew, that there never even was so much truth as that (setting aside the object) in a single case of these particular criminations, is what no Christ.ian or Jew would undertake to assert; but of these charges in the masg it may safely be said, as it has been said, that they are as credible as the miracles which, in a great nnmber of cases, are asserted to have been worked by the reliques of the young saints, and as well substantiated as the absurd sacrilege of stabbing, baking, or boiling t.he Host, or the enormity of poisoning springs, with which the Jews have equally been taxed. And these pretended child-murders, with their horrible consequencps, are only a part of a persecntion which, with all moderation, may be rubricated as the most disgraceful chapter in the history of the human race.
Several cases of such murders in England are reported from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The oldest is that of William of Norwich, 1144, given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle nnder u:n (ed. Plummer, I, 2(5). See The Life and Miracles of Saint William, edited by Jessopp and James, 1807.
This page most recently updated on 06-Mar-2011, 16:28:57. Return to main index
