Little Hugh of Lincoln, Ritual Murder, Henry III and the Crown of Sicily

This talk considers the notorious ritual murder accusation centered on little Hugh of Lincoln, the 13th century English boy buried in Lincoln Cathedral and made famous by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales. Taking it out of its usual medieval religious context, I suggest that King Henry III used this ritual murder accusation for his own ends, as a pretext to extort money from the Jews of Lincoln to purchase the crown of Sicily from the pope for his second son, Edward I.

E. M. Rose is Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Rose earned a PhD in History from Princeton and holds advanced degrees from Yale, Oxford and Columbia. Rose’s first book, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2015), was named one of the ‘Ten Best History Books of the Year’ by the Sunday Times of London and was described by the Wall Street Journal as “a landmark of historical research.