William of Norwich

(d. 1144)

   The first English victim of a ritual murder charge. The body of William, a young skinner’s apprentice, was found in a wood on Easter Saturday. It was uncertain how he had died, but a rumour spread that the boy had been lured into a Jewish house during Passover and there crucified in mockery of the passion of Jesus. The body was buried in the cathedral and miracles were attributed to it. The Jews living in the town were protected by the sheriff, and they took refuge in the castle. A Jewish apostate, Brother Theobold, later claimed that he could give witness to the ritual murder, and that an assembly of Jewish rabbis and elders met each year at Narbonne in France to decide on the next place for a human sacrifice. This absurd story contained two sinister elements which had a tragic development in anti-Jewish propaganda - the claim that the Jews were bound to kill a Christian boy at Passover, and the assertion that an assembly of ‘Elders of Zion’ met periodically to plot the overthrow of the Christian world.