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St. Mary’s Guild, Lincoln.
THE JEWS
This story is referred to by Chaucer, who wrote a hundred years later in “The Prioress’ Tale”:—
“O younge Hew of Lincoln sleyn also
With cursed Jewes, as it is notable,
For it nis but a litel whyle ago.”
His story makes the murdered boy reveal himself by singing “O alma Redemptoris Mater” “loude and clere,” although, as he says—
“My throte is cut unto my nekke-bon.”
and he does not stop singing till a ‘greyn’ is taken from his tongue by the abbot
“and he yaf up the goost ful softely.”
Marlowe has a similar story in his “Jew of Malta,” and ballads constantly were made on this theme. Sir Charles Anderson quotes one beginning:—
“The bonny boys of merry Lincoln
Were playing at the ball,
And with them stood the sweet Sir Hugh,
The flower of them all.
Whom cursed Jews did crucify,” &c.
He was buried, in 1255, next to Bishop Grosteste, who had died two years before.
The persistence of this medieval accusation against the Jews is singularly illustrated by a case which is reported in the papers of October 9, 1913, headed “Ritual Murder Trial.” The trial is at Kieff in Russia, of a perfectly innocent man called Beiliss, who has been more than two years in prison without knowing the reason, and is charged with the murder of a Christian boy called Yushinsky “to obtain blood for Jewish sacrificial rites.” The Times says that ritual murder is not now mentioned in the indictment. But that so monstrous a charge should be even hinted at shows how deeply these old malignant calumnies sank into the medieval mind, and how prone to superstition and how ready to believe evil we are even in the twentieth century of the Christian era. The whole idea is on a par with the abominable cruelties of the days when defenceless old women were burnt as witches, and is a cruel and absolutely baseless calumny on a long-suffering and law-abiding people, and yet there are plenty of people to-day in Russia who firmly believe in it.