"a Jew seeking to test Christian claims of the Real Presence attended Mass, saw 'an infant torn limb from limb in the hands of St. Basil' and was Christianized with all his family."
42Doubting monks and Jews are good examples of the power of the image of the child/host to convert. It is important to keep in mind that people in twelfth-century England may not have been as far from their pagan roots as the church would like and so images with the power to convert would have been useful.
Children were often the recipients of these visions. Sinanoglou suggests that this may have been because children were seen as innocent and simple.
43They are able
41 Leah Sinanoglou "The Christ Child as Sacrifice," 492.
42 Ibid., 493.
43 Ibid., 492.
to see through to the 'truth' because of their purity. That children related personally to the child they saw in the host may be supposed from the story of the child who would not go up to the priest after Mass because "he had just seen Father Peter devour a little child on the chapel altar and feared a like fate for himself."44 Such stories could conflate real children with the child on the sacrificial altar in the minds of adults as well and emotions felt for the poor dismembered Christ child who sacrificed himself for their salvation could easily be transferred to the abused body of a murdered child found in a nearby wood
The images of the bloody, dismembered body of the Christ child that lay at the heart of Christian ritual evoked more than feelings of compassion and pity. In his book, The Other Middle Ages, Michael Goodich cites Alan Dundes' conclusion that Christians felt enormous guilt at what he calls "the symbolic cannibalism of the Eucharist service, in which the body and blood of Christ ar e ceremonially consumed as a way of achieving unity with God and of expressing membership in the community of believers."45 He suggests that this guilt was displaced into blood libel and ritual murder charges against the Jews. It is not an unlikely supposition and may be applied to more than guilt over consumption of the host.
Mothers like Elviva and Beatrice who had lost track of their children, or perhaps even abused or neglected them themselves, or other members of the families who may have felt responsible, like Godwin and Leviva Sturt, would have been affected by the child/Christ/host image and its concomitant emphasis on the tender and nurturing mother. Grief over their own child combined with the guilt over their failings as mothers or caretakers would have been impetus enough to try to find someone to blame or some way to give their child's death greater meaning, especially in light of new ideas about parental responsibility.
Parental responsibility may be an important factor in another ritual in which pity for murdered children and horror at the sacrilege of the slaughter can be found: the feast of the Holy Innocents.46 This feast celebrates the massacre of the infant boys born near the time of Jesus' birth as a result of Herod's fear of the newborn king whose birth had been foretold to him. These children were presumably Jewish, but the doctrine concerning this incident emphasizes their association with Christ, that they were sacrificed for his sake and that, therefore,
4 4 Ibid., 492.
4 5 Michael Goodich, ed., Other Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 9.
4 4 See Jean Jost's article in this volume for further information on the importance of the emotions evoked by the death of children to Christian ideology especially with regard to the Slaughter of the Innocents.
they were baptized in their own sacrificial blood.47 According to Paul Hayward, church rhetoric emphasizes the suffering of these infants, an emphasis that has led to the conclusion that the church was trying to encourage a higher more loving standard of parenthood evoked by the natural sympathy felt for abused, suffering children.48
An important aspect of the cult in this regard is the image of the children being torn from their mother's arms. Hayward cites Chrysologus as saying that: "the mothers suffered in the martyrdoms of their sons... thus it is inevitable that they will be consorts in their reward, as they were companions in their passion."49 Echoes of this image are heard in the ritual murder stories where pains are taken to show the suffering of both mother and child and the mothers attain a kind of reflected sanctity of their own. This can be seen as another aspect of the pattern that conforms to the image of Christ and his mother who shared in the suffering of her son and in his subsequent glory.
One final point regarding the Holy Innocents concerns their contribution to conceptions of sanctity under discussion here. According to Chrysologus: " . . . the combination of their incapacity as infants and their sanctification is certain proof that sanctity is not earned by merit, but conferred by grace alone. For there is no voluntas or arbitrium in small boys: in them natura is held captive."50 This provides a justification for the sanctification even of boys like William and Hugh who were beyond the age of what we would consider infancy and were presumably already baptized. Also, it can be suggested that the influence of the rhetoric surrounding the cult of the Holy Innocents regarding the belief that boys in particular could be thought of as in a kind of natural state of grace might contribute to the guilt of parents or even of communities wherein the body of a brutalized young boy was found.
This is especially true in light of the belief expressed by Jacob de Voragine in his explanation as to why the Holy Innocents was one of only two Old Testament saints' feasts honored in the Western Church. Voragine said that: " . . . exception is made for the Innocents 'in each of whom Christ himself is slain.'"51 According
4 7 Shulamith Shahar, "The Boy Bishop's Feast: a Case-Study in Church Attitudes Towards Children in the High and Late Middle Ages" The Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 240-60; here 244.
4 8 Hayward, Paul, "Suffering and Innocence in Latin Sermons for the Feast of the Holy Innocents" The Church and Childhood 1994, 67.
4 9 Ibid., 70-71.
5 0 Ibid., 71.
51 Shulamith Shahar "The Boy Bishop's Feast," 244.
to R. Po-Chia Hsia, children like William and Hugh represented the innocence of the Christian community before God.
As a sacrament of peace, the partaking of the eucharist represented a ritual of communal harmony and Christian solidarity, and the children of a Christian community symbolized its innocence before God. What greater sacrilege could be committed against divinity and community when Christian children, martyrs like Christ, were kidnapped and slaughtered?52
It is ironic that while the ritual murder of a child was the greatest sacrilege, it was at the same time the greatest honor that an insignificant child such as William could play the role of Christ as the sacrificial martyr to the cause of "communal harmony and Christian solidarity." The Holy Innocents became the first Christian martyrs because of their chronological and geographical proximity to Christ and because they died in his stead.53 Herod was a dependant of the Roman overlords just as the Norwich Jews were dependents of the Norman king and his murder of the Innocents of Bethlehem can be seen as a prefiguring not only of the belief that Jews killed Christian boys, but also of the political implications of such charges.
Child martyrs had a particular importance in Anglo-Saxon England.54 The Anglo-Saxon period saw several kings and princes murdered while still children.
Although these young boys were all murdered for political reasons by those seeking to grasp royal power from the hands of a weak and vulnerable child, they were thought of as martyrs because their deaths were thought to have been analogous to the death of Christ.55 The Anglo-Saxon cults of these royal children were probably instigated and perpetuated by the laity.56 As part of their effort to maintain continuity and order in the English monasteries, Norman monastics made a point of adapting Anglo-Saxon saints to their own needs by rewriting their hagiographies and reviving their cults. The lives of the six young Anglo-Saxon royal martyrs were reworked in Norman monasteries from about 1050 to about 1130 and would have been widely circulated by 112.57 Like St. William, none of the young princes are infants or even toddlers. They are all boys or what we today
5 2 R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder, 12.
5 3 Paul Hayward "Suffering and Innocence," 77.
See the Introduction to this volume for a more general discussion of children in Anglo-Saxon England.
5 5 Hayward, Paul, "The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom in Late Tenth- and Eleventh-Century English Hagiology," Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Diana Wood. Studies in Church History, 30 (London:
Boydell and Brewer, 1993), 81-152; here 81.
5 6 Ibid., 86.
5 7 Ibid., 82.
would call adolescents, and Hayward posits that their sanctity has been reinter-preted to a substantial degree by the eleventh- and twelfth-century monks so that, even though they are princes and kings presumably surrounded and protected by the trappings of power, it is the helplessness of their youth that is emphasized.58
Hayward states that: " . . . the significant thing about all of them is the way in which they interpret their subject's death and manner of living. Much is made of the saints' youth. . . and this is associated with a singular emphasis on the saints' physical and mental purity."59 In addition, the most important element in their purity is that they maintained it through celibacy; celibacy being a central ingredient in the construction of the medieval conception of childhood as a time of innocence and an integral component in their natural state of grace.60 These qualities apply equally, if not more particularly, to William who was not a king or prince and was not born at the same time and in the same town as Jesus.
Moreover, Hayward points out that "these saints are not innocent martyrs because they died blameless deaths, but because their guiltless deaths, miracles, and youth prove that they were pure and innocent."61 These are the same elements that go into the image of innocence and sanctity constructed for young William.
While William's story owes something to the legends of Anglo-Saxon royal child martyrs, his status marks him as part of a new trend in the making of martyrs that began to take hold in the twelfth century. That is, the development among the laity of the creation of martyrs from among the most humble and insignificant members of society. As Miri Rubin says:
Here is a sort of popular understanding of martyrdom, one which identified that supreme sacrifice in the suffering of the virtuous, of the pure, of the good, in sufferings undeserved, unmerited, and wantonly inflicted. . . innocence sullied, purity misunderstood, created not only sympathy, but a drive to remedy this breach of the cosmic order in acts of expiation through veneration and posthumous loving and tender care for the 'martyr'... once recognized as a martyr's death, that death is made into a significant marker: of one group as opposed to another, we and they, Christian and pagans, o r . . . righteous villagers and misguided lord.62
58 Ibid., 85.
59 Ibid., 83.
60 It must be noted that not only was there an awareness that this innocence was fragile and could be easily corrupted (Ibid., 88), but also that not even in the monastic world was there a consensus on childhood as a state of innocence. Depending on who you read, children could also be portrayed as devious and wicked, (personal communication from Paul Hayward).
61 Paul Hayward "The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom," 84.
Miri Rubin, "Choosing Death? Experiences of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Europe," Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Diana Wood (London: Boydell and Brewer, 1993), 153-83; here 162.
The story of our young martyr can be seen in this light as an example both of this popular understanding in its evocation of sympathy and of its role as a focus for expiation. Whether his death was seen as a wrong in itself or represented, as is more probable, a host of wrongs that had long gone unacknowledged, William bruised body provided an outlet for an oppressed group to express their pain and to unite, eventually, with the oppressors against a common enemy.
Rubin posits that what she calls "the most powerful area of affective anxiety"
centered on concern for children and that the murder of a child created the most insistent call for the recognition of martyrdom from the people.63 She uses the case of William of Norwich and the subsequent rash of ritual murder accusations as examples of this suggesting that such charges eased anxieties about Jews and their strange behaviors.64 I agree with Cohen that they relieved tensions about events and conflicts within the Christian community as well. Establishment of these cults without, or perhaps in spite of, ecclesiastical approval at a time when the church was making progress at controlling and regulating saints' cults demonstrates how strongly these children appealed to the populace. A look at changing ideas of childhood in the secular world may shed more light on the milieu in which such popular enthusiasm flourished.
There is ample evidence to show that death of children from accidents, abuse, neglect, or infanticide was common in the Middle Ages. Accidents occurring to children of William's age may have been more of the child's own making, but they would still have been subject to disease or violence and abuse from parents, other family members, teachers, guardians, or masters to whom they were apprenticed.65
Zefira Entin Rokeah has found evidence of a number of deaths of older children that give no indication of the cause of death.66 The case of William or of the other children whose bodies were found in mysterious circumstances would not then have been unusual or distinguished in any way except for the charges that were made against the Jews. Rokeah says that the fact that Christians had come to accept the accidental, deliberate, or unnatural death of children as a natural part of their cultural experience, may have encouraged the belief that Jews would kidnap and kill Christian children.67 It was even not unusual or unlawful for poor
6 3 Ibid., 164.
6 4 Ibid., 165.
Zefira Entin Rokeah, "Unnatural Death Among Christians and Jews in Medieval England," History of Childhood Quarterly. The Journal of Psychohistoryl8, 2 (1990): 181-226; here 195.
6 6 Ibid., 196.
6 7 Ibid., 206.