William

ON SAINT WILLIAM, BOY MARTYR, AT NORWICH IN ENGLAND, IN THE YEAR 1144.

Preliminary Commentary.

William, boy Martyr of Norwich in England (Saint)

[1] How greatly the unfortunate and perfidious Jewish nation was afflicted with calamities in the kingdom of England toward the end of the twelfth century, while the King was absent across the sea for the cause of a holy expedition, William of Newburgh pursues and describes at length in book 4, chapters 7 and following: By the Jews in England, which things, although they were accomplished by popular fury, not by legitimate arms or judgments, were nonetheless most justly permitted by the supreme judge of all, God; no one will be able to deny this who reads the histories of that time and kingdom, which indicate rather than narrate the most grievous crimes of those circumcised people. One of these was published under the name of John Bromton among the ten English writers, often cited by others under the name of the Jornall Chronicle, namely of whose monastery, situated in the diocese of York, that John was the Abbot: but, as Selden rightly advised the reader in the preface, not the author, William was crucified, but the purchaser of that Codex for his own and his monastery's use. In this history or chronicle, continued up to the year 1200, the first example of this kind occurs at the column where, after explaining the deeds of King Stephen, it is added: "Also in the time of this King Stephen, in the ninth year of his reign, which was the year of Christ 1144, a certain boy named William was crucified by the Jews at Norwich."

[2] We give the martyrdom and veneration from the new Legend of England published by John Capgrave: on the day before Easter, from which, because we gather that the vigil of Easter was the last day for the innocent William, combining it with the ninth year of King Stephen and the year of Christ 1144, in which Easter was celebrated on March 26, we conclude that Wilson was right to inscribe William's name on the 25th day, and it was plainly done by an error of a wandering pen that the eleventh year of King Stephen was written instead of the ninth; and we attribute to a lapse of memory the fact that Newburgh is cited in the margin, since in his work, which we have thoroughly examined, we could find nothing about this martyrdom. likewise three others in the year 1160, The same pre-cited chronicle, whose undoubted testimony supports the legend received from Capgrave, furnishes us with another boy, crucified in the year 1160, the sixth year of King Henry, by the same Jews near Gloucester, as you have at the column. Nor was this the end of their cruelty: again in the year 1181 a certain boy named Robert was martyred at Easter by the Jews at Saint Edmund's: 1181, who, buried nearby with honor in the church of Saint Edmund, shone, as the report went, with many miracles. So writes Gervase, the monk of Canterbury, in his chronicle, which he, like the pre-cited anonymous author, brought to an end at the death of King Richard: which if Wilson had seen, Robert too would doubtless have had a name in his Martyrology; but with Acts lacking, the credibility about the cult is not so easy: since many more Innocents, slain from a similar cause both in England and elsewhere, do not everywhere obtain similar veneration, lacking the miracles that would stir the people to it.

[3] And indeed in England, Henry of Knighton, a Canon of the Abbey of Leicester, the last among the ten writers we mentioned above, asserts and one killed in 1255 in chapter 15 of book 2 on the events of the English, continued up to the year 1395, that in the year 1255 the Jews crucified Hugh, a boy of nine years, at Lincoln on the Kalends of August. From which we rightly suspect that, their spirit not broken but rather exasperated by the multiplied slaughters and punishments of their people sixty years before, they raged more frequently against the blood of innocent Christians than the historians cared to record in their chronicles, or God permitted to become publicly known. many others elsewhere, To which add, if you please, six boys of Regensburg, against whom the savage cruelty of that impious race in the year 1486 exercised its butchery, all the more harmful inasmuch as those who were tortured were more innocent. Likewise Michael, a boy of almost four years, was stolen around Easter time in the year 1540 from Sappenfeld, a village near the city of Neuburg, by the same Jews, and most cruelly tortured and killed in the district of Heidingsfeld: and most recently in the year 1650, one in Bohemia, concerning which Rader treats in volume 3 of his Bavaria Sancta, from Christopher Hofmann, a monk of Saint Emmeram, and from the preface of Johannes Eck to Christopher Madruzzo, Bishop of Trent, before his book written against the Jews' Patron.

[4] To these add in Lithuania, slain with similar ferocity, Elizabeth and Simon, each seven years old; the former in her native town and two in Lithuania in the preceding century, called Punia, killed in the year 1579 with the consent of her compatriots by a certain Joachim Szmerlowicz, whose blood received in flour is attested by the painting and inscription of a monument erected to her at Vilnius in the chapel of the Holy Cross; the latter was so atrociously cut at Vilnius by indigenous Jews in the year 1592 with knives and pincers, that more than one hundred and seventy wounds were counted on the tender body, besides those which reeds thrust under the fingernails and toenails had made, which body, buried with the Bernardine Fathers, was translated in the year 1623 to a monument established in a public place, as Albertus Wijuk Kojalowicz writes about these matters in his Ecclesiastical Miscellanies of Lithuania, chapter 1, where he treats of the patrons proper to that Grand Duchy. Moreover, in the very year 50 of this century in which we write, Kadań, a royal town in Bohemia, mourned an innocent victim of this kind, namely Matthias, a four-year-old boy, on March 11, who, because he had made the sign of the Cross before a Jew, was pierced with seven wounds; Ferdinand III erected a glorious tomb for him; the Church marveled at his triumph over stubborn impiety, when (as the epitaph composed by imperial command has it) he killed his tyrant, mutilated in hand, tongue, and straps, dying under red-hot pincers and the breaking of limbs, before the executioner killed him by the wheel; so that, having died through baptism, he might be reborn from wolf to innocent lamb. The series of events, as it was sent by the Senate to the Royal Chancellery at Prague, and transcribed from the autograph through the agency of Father Theodore Moretus, and translated from German into Latin by Father Jacob Kritzradt, we shall willingly publish when the Apostolic See has pronounced on his martyrdom.

[5] Another boy seized at Norwich in the year 1235. Now, content to have placed these first ones encountered under a single view, we leave others to be collected by others, and return to William of Norwich: for George Lily, in his epitome of the Chronicle of the Kings of England, saying he was affixed to a cross in the year 1235, undoubtedly confused him with an anonymous boy, about whom Polydore Vergil, in book 16 at the pre-cited year, writes this: "To King Henry, who had returned to London, the shameful crime of the Jews was immediately reported: for that dregs of men, erroneously confused with William, which at that time dwelt at Norwich, had secretly captured a certain Christian boy, nourished him for a whole year, so that at the approach of Easter, as if to stamp new disgrace upon our religion, they might affix him to a cross: but the most wicked butchers, a few days before they were to shed innocent blood, being accused and convicted of so great a crime, were punished with deserved penalties." Following the erring Lily, Ferrarius at March 11 imposed upon us the necessity of referring William, truly slain at Norwich ninety-nine years before the later deed, among the omitted.

[6] Norwich, or Nordovicum, is among the East Angles in inland Norfolk, a large city adorned with the title of a bishopric, situated on a river which shortly below the city, assuming the waters of the Yare's tributaries into its own name, thence meanders into the sea, around the very well-known port of Yarmouth, thirty thousand paces away. Whether here at Norwich a more solemn cult There William's body, found intact five years after death, was buried on the seventeenth before the Kalends of May, and we are persuaded that the same day was observed by the people of Norwich with an annual cult rather than the day of his Martyrdom. For if after the year 1144 you take five full years, the next year that follows will be 1150, marking the Paschal solemnity on the sixteenth before the Kalends of May, and the day preceding will be counted as the seventeenth before the said Kalends: which unless it was festive at Norwich in commemoration of this Saint, it does not appear from where Capgrave could have taken the occasion for his error, on the day of his Discovery, April 15, in writing that the glorious Martyr migrated to the Lord on the seventeenth before the Kalends of May: but if this day was venerable to the people for the commemoration of his magnificent burial, it would have been very easy

for it to be confused with the day of death, as we see happen frequently in other similar cases. We preferred, however, to choose for presenting these Acts a certain day, even if perhaps less celebrated of old, rather than to defer them to the fifteenth of April on account of a conjecture, however supported by the greatest verisimilitude.

[7] The body of Saint William seems to have had burial and veneration, as long as the schism and heresy permitted, what monks managed in the cemetery next to the Cathedral church, which Bishop Herbert in the year 1096, two years after he had migrated from Thetford, had founded in honor of the Holy Trinity and consecrated as the mother church of Norfolk and Suffolk, and had arranged to have confirmed by Pope Paschal: placing the Bishop's palace on the north side of the same church, and on the south side the dwellings of monks, sixty and more, of the Cluniac observance: of which he himself had been made Abbot of Ramsey from being Prior of Fecamp, and thence Bishop of Thetford. the care of the tomb? This foundation, just as it gave this place the occasion to rise to the eminence it now enjoys, so it explains to us how in the Acts below, at number 7, monks are found to have managed the care of adorning the tomb: and that these Acts were written by one of them, and perhaps even more fully the miracles which we now have in summary form, is most probable. Moreover, the history of the said foundation and the charters relating to it can be read in the Monasticon Anglicanum, volume 1, folios 407 and 1003, from which also the curious investigator will discover the reason why, at the cited place in the Acts, special mention is made of the feast of Saint Michael: namely because this was one of the more solemn feasts in that church, on account of the land called Saint Michael's Land, annexed to the Palace of the Earl of Norfolk, and purchased by the Bishop together with the palace itself and attributed to the church of the Holy Trinity; which because it lay before the very gates of the monastery, a chapel dedicated there to the said holy Archangel had to be demolished; only a stone Cross with an image of Saint Michael being left in the place. The feast of Saint Edmund is also noted there, namely of the Archbishop of Canterbury, under whose metropolitan authority the diocese of Norwich falls. And thus it is understood that a branch of roses, having already become a small bush, planted around the feast of Saint Michael at the tomb, miraculously produced and preserved its flowers from September 29 to November 16, with one of them surviving until the Nativity of the Lord.

ACTS

From John Capgrave.

William, boy Martyr of Norwich in England (Saint)

BHL Number: 8927

[1] For the holy William, born of his father Wenstan and mother Elwina, To the pregnant mother who earned their living by rural labor and were abundantly supplied with the necessities of life. While his mother was pregnant and sleeping, such a vision occurred to her: she saw a fish, which is called a pike, having twelve reddish fins, as if sprinkled with blood, which when she had placed in her bosom, the fish seemed to move, and gradually to grow so much that her bosom could no longer contain it: and suddenly taking wings it flew upward, and passing through the clouds, with heaven opened to it, it received itself therein. When she had related everything in order to her father, a Priest, it is predicted he will be glorified at age twelve: who had great skill in interpreting visions, he said: "Know, daughter, that you are with child, and that you will give birth to a son, who will obtain the greatest honor on earth, and raised above the height of the clouds, at the age of twelve will be exalted into heaven."

[2] When the boy had been born and weaned, and his father Wenstan had invited relatives to a banquet; a certain penitent, at his touch the penitent's iron bonds are broken: his arms entwined with iron bonds, was present among the guests, as if for alms: who, while holding the little boy in his hands as if applauding, the boy, with childlike simplicity admiring the iron bonds, touched them: and behold, suddenly the bonds were broken, flying apart in pieces. When the boy was seven years old, he began to be so much a lover of abstinence that he fasted on three weekdays: and he spent some days content with bread alone: devoted to piety from his tender years he frequented the church, said psalms and prayers, and venerated with the greatest reverence whatever pertained to God. At last, at Norwich, he was given to a certain furrier to be instructed in that craft.

[3] He is cruelly bound by the Jews, At last, at a certain feast of Easter, the Jews dwelling in the city enticingly lured the boy to enter their dwellings, and suddenly seized him, and after mocking him in various ways, drawing straps through both sides of his jaws to the back of the neck, they bound him with a most firm knot. Afterward, seizing a short cord, of about the thickness of a little finger, and tying three knots in it at fixed intervals, they encircled that innocent head from the forehead to the back of the head. Pressing the middle knot against the forehead, and the other two on the temples on either side, and making a very tight knot at the back of the head with the ends of both sides, they drew the remainder of the cord around the neck, likewise from both sides to the front of the neck under the chin; and there they completed that unusual kind of torment in a fifth knot.

[4] After this also, having shaved his head, they wounded it with innumerable prickings of thorns, and pierced, and lifting the innocent boy from the ground, they endeavored to kill him on a cross. They inflicted a bitter wound on his left side even to the innermost parts of the heart, and in order to stem the blood flowing back through the whole body, they poured boiling hot water from the head downward. And so the glorious Martyr... migrated to the Lord. On the day of Easter also, the body was placed in a sack, carried out to a wood: so that, taken outside the town to a wood, it might be more secretly buried there. As they entered the wood, a certain burgess of Norwich named Eilwerd met them, who paused a little while: he inquired where they were heading and what they were carrying: and approaching nearer, the crime discovered and laying hands on it, he discovered it was a human body. They, terrified at being detected, and having nothing to say for fear, entered the denseness of the wood in flight, and hanged the body by a linen cord from a tree.

[5] The Jews, entering into counsel, approached the Sheriff, and promised a hundred marks of silver if they could be freed from such great danger by his help. The Sheriff orders it concealed, Eilwerd was immediately summoned, and at the command and compulsion of the Sheriff, he was bound by faith and oath that as long as he lived he would not defame the Jews, and until the last day of his life would not reveal what he had seen. However, after the lapse of five years, Eilwerd, coming to the end of his life, was admonished through a vision by the sacred boy William himself, not to fear to reveal to whomever he wished what he had seen: and so it was done. but after five years, by a heavenly light While these things were taking place within the city, behold, a fiery light suddenly shone forth from heaven, which, stretching out all the way to the place of the Martyr, blazed before the eyes of many in various places. That light seemed to be divided into two rays, holding the form of a very long ladder, stretching from below upward toward the East.

[6] For on the Holy Saturday of Easter, a certain nun, setting out before sunrise with certain others, devoutly entered the denseness of the wood, the body indicated, and seeing from afar a boy lying at the root of an oak, wearing a tunic, wearing shoes, his head shaved: and seized with womanly fear, she did not presume to approach nearer. She observed, however, two crows above him, who, eager to satisfy their voracious greed, were striving to tear him apart with their beaks: found unharmed from the gaping crows, but they were in no way able to touch him or to sustain themselves, but fell from one side and the other. Having seen these things, the woman, giving thanks to God, returned home and openly narrated to all what she had seen. Therefore the crowd hastened in throngs to the wood, and having clearly considered the signs of the punishments and the deed, they affirmed that the Jews were not free from guilt, and committed the holy body to burial with joy.

[7] Certain monks transplanted a small branch, which in summertime, blooming with roses in the cloister, had already flowered, A rose planted at the tomb miraculously blooms, to the head of the holy Martyr's tomb around the feast of Saint Michael: which immediately took root in the earth and, with its leaves becoming green again, reflowered, not without great admiration of all, with all the flowers persevering on the branch up to the feast of Saint Edmund. Then a violent storm of rains and winds arose and knocked off all except one, which persevered fresh at the top of the branch until Christmas.

[8] There was a certain man, held by a long-standing infirmity, and lying weak in his whole body: A certain sick man caught up in ecstasy, as the distress of the illness at last grew worse, caught up in an ecstasy, he was led by an Angel as guide through various places, horrible and pleasant: he beheld an innumerable multitude being tortured with diverse punishments; he saw some whom he had known in life: who, conveying to him certain intimate and secret tokens, made known through him by message to certain persons still living that the same torments were prepared for them unless, repenting, they desisted from these and those crimes. He entered a flowery and most pleasant region, having beheld places of punishment and glory, saw there an innumerable multitude of people placed in the joy of inestimable glory, and thence, departing along a path strewn with various flowers, he was at last led and brought to stand before the Lord sitting on a throne, and with his gaze fixed on the splendor of the flashing light, he saw the Lord sitting on a golden throne, adorned with precious stones, and thousands of Saints before him.

[9] He also saw at the right hand of the one sitting in majesty Blessed Virgin Mary, He sees the Saint beneath the throne of God; and at the feet of the Lord he beheld a boy, about twelve years old, sitting on a golden footstool: whose garment was whiter than snow and whose face was more brilliant than the sun, and on his head gleamed a golden crown, adorned on all sides with most precious stones: and the choirs of Saints likewise congratulated him, and the Orders of Angels greatly venerated him. Having seen these things, he said to the Angel: "Who is this, Lord, to whom such honor is paid?" And he: "This is the one to whom perpetual honor is owed, whom in mockery of the Lord's passion and in reproach during these holy days the Jews of Norwich slew; and is sent to be healed at his tomb, and it is owed to his merits that you should receive the remedy of health at his tomb." And having said these things, he was immediately taken up and restored to his body. When the soul returned, his whole body suddenly trembled, and he appeared as one returned to life, and narrated in order to all everything he had seen: he went to Norwich and received health without delay.

[10] Many further miracles the Lord deigned to show for his glorious Martyr: among which he healed, freed, and released four blind, which shines with various other miracles, five mute, two dropsical, three demoniacs and epileptics, the crippled, the deaf, those imperiled by shipwreck, those in chains, the hunchbacked, and others afflicted by various diseases or dangers.