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Mike Laney
Dr. Yeager
Engl 6234
17 November, 2011
“In Jerusalem and Jherico among the Jewes jentle”:
Destabilization of Identities and the Complicated Relationship Between Christians and Jews in the
Croxton Play of the Sacrament
In his article on the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, David Lawton questions the scholarly
tradition regarding the expulsion of Jews in 1290.1 For Lawton, this expulsion is not the end of the
question, but rather the beginning of a very complicated question. This complicated question which
Lawton formulates has to do with the efficacy of Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews, and asking questions
about the ways in which Jews might have stayed in England covertly, or regrouped and returned to
England years after the expulsion. In either case, the history of Jews in late medieval England becomes
problematized by Lawton’s observations, and his far reaching questions should hopefully provoke
answers from scholars over the coming years. It is in this vein of argumentation that I wish to examine the
Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Rather than accept the narrative of anti-Judaism which has been handed
down, I wish to examine the question of whether the Croxton Play of the Sacrament is anti-Judaic. In the
examination of this question, a more complicated and ambiguous portrait of late medieval English antiJudaism will develop, and while this may not answer any specific questions, hopefully it will provoke
others to find answers.
In order to understand the larger narrative of anti-Judaism in England, the Croxton play needs to
be placed in the larger context of English anti-Judaism in the middle ages. To begin this contextualization,
I will examine the development of Christian accusations against Jews concerning ritual murder and blood
libel. This particular history begins in 1144 in Norwich. There, a young apprentice by the name of
William was found dead in the woods outside of Norwich sometime during Easter. The boy’s uncle, a
local priest, accused the Jews of murdering William; the sherriff, however, took the Jews into the local
castle and there were no uprisings against the Jews that are recorded.2 A number of miracles were
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attributed to William, and he eventually became a Saint, and his body was moved to the cathedral.3 A few
decades later in 1181, a similar incident occurred in Bury St. Edmunds. Little is known of the details
surrounding the situation, however it is known that a young boy named Robert was killed, and the Jews of
Bury St. Edmunds stood accused as his murderer.4 By 1190, perhaps because of this incident, violence
broke out against the Jews in Bury St. Edmunds, and the abbot at the time, Abbot Sampson, had the Jews
banished from town.5 The final historical occurrence which I will describe occurred sixty years after Little
Robert of Bury died. In July of 1255, a young boy in Lincoln named Hugh disappeared, only to be found
dead a month later. As in the two cases described above, the Jews of the community were accused. Unlike
the two cases described above, King Henry III rode to Lincoln and ordered an official investigation into
the matter, which ended with the death of 19 Jews.6 This is particularly significant because, as Gavin
Langmuir notes, this is the first time that such an accusation was legitimized by a secular authority and
drew royal punishment.7
I will also take a moment here to include a similar account which alludes to Hugh of Lincoln, but
which is itself entirely fictional. This account is The Prioress’ Tale, written by Geoffrey Chaucer in his
Canterbury Tales and likely composed during the 1380’s.8 In the Tale, a young Christian child is
murdered while walking through the Jewish quarter of town, and his body is hidden in a latrine. The
boy’s body is found by his mother, who finds the boy because the boy is still miraculously singing.
Almost immediately the Jews are put to death, and the boy is taken to the abbot who is told by the boy
that the Virgin has enabled his miraculous singing through a grain placed under the boy’s tongue. This is
the fourth and final incident concerning the accusation of Jewish ritual murder, although there are many
more instances, both historical and literary, in England and on the continent.
These accusations, beginning with William of Norwich, consist of the Jews murdering young
Christian children, frequently by crucifying them. As the narratives and accusations develop over the span
of decades, this legend begins to take on another aspect. The Jews are then said to torture and kill these
Christian children because they need Christian blood for their rituals.9 Thus, two of the primary features
of such accusations become crucifixion and Christian blood. These are also two important features of
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another popular accusation against medieval Jews, namely host desecration. Lisa Lampert, citing R. Po
Chia Hsia, argues that these two elements link these two different types of accusations with each other.10
Both at their core are meant to be models of the Passion of Christ at the hands of the Jews, whether Christ
is represented by the consecrated host or a young, innocent Christian child. This link leads me to one last
example which does not fit in the vein either of host desecration or blood libel. In the popular tale known
as the Jew of Bourges, a young Jewish boy accompanies his Christian playmate to Easter Mass. Having
partaken of the host during communion, the boy is discovered by his father as he exits the church, and in
his rage the father throws the young Jewish boy in an oven. The boy’s mother seeks out the town’s
authorities, who immediately go to the boy’s home. There they open up the oven to find the boy
unscathed and unharmed by fire, having been protected by the Virgin Mary. The boy and his mother
convert to Christianity, however the father is sentenced to death, a sentence which is carries out by
throwing him in the very oven into which he had thrown his son. Though this story does not fit either of
the two major categories which I have discussed above, certain elements such as the involvement of the
Eucharist, the oven, and conversion bear a strong resemblance to the Croxton play.
I have taken the time to discuss these various incidents and stories in order to establish the long
tradition and context which produced the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. The Croxton play, having been
written most likely in the late 15th century or early 16th century,11 was written after the expulsion of the
Jews from England in 1290 by Edward I. Coming out of this long tradition, it is in many ways typical of
this tradition; the ending of the play, however, seems atypical. The first oddity which the reader is
confronted by is the quickness and surety of the Jews to confess their crimes to the bishop, and this is
made odder by the fact that they do this of their own free will. Michael Mark Chemers discusses an
instance of host desecration which occurred in Brussels in 1370. The Jews who are said to have
perpetrated the host desecration are confronted with a bleeding host, and they ask a Jewish woman who
has converted to Christianity to hide the evidence of their crime, but instead the woman turns them over
to the local authorities.12 Similarly, Mitch Merback describes an incident in Pulkau, Austria in 1338, in
which local Jews steal a host and try to dispose of it by either throwing it into a well or a nearby stream,
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depending upon which source is being consulted.13 In both of the incidents described, the Jews in question
attempt to hide their crimes, an act which Merback goes so far as to list as one of the paradigmatic
episodes in traditional host desecration narratives.14 In the Croxton play, Jonathas and his fellow
conspirators flaunt this convention of the host desecration narrative by going to the bishop of their own
free will. This is followed by something even stranger: the Jews convert to Christianity and go
unpunished for their crime. Chemers points out that normally the perpetrators of host desecration are put
together, an element which Merback also identifies as paradigmatic in host desecration narratives. 15 This
punishment certainly seems in line with the incidents I have outlined above, such as the events
surrounding young Hugh of Lincoln, as well as the fictional narratives such as the Jew of Bourges and the
Prioress’ Tale. Thus, we see that in the anti-Judaic which the Croxton play comes out of, crimes such as
ritual murder and host desecration are almost certainly punished with death, yet the Croxton play does not
follow that template. Rather than being put to death, the Jews convert and are allowed to leave. This
seems strange not simply in the larger historical and literary context which I have traced out, but also in
the local context in which the play was performed. Lisa Lampert argues that the image of the bloody
Christ child which bursts out of the oven would almost certainly have evoked the memory of Robert of
Bury, as scholars have identified the play originating near Bury St. Edmunds.16 The martyrdom of Robert
was in fact commemorated in a fifteenth century poem composed by John Lydgate, in which Lydgate ties
Robert to the child in the Prioress’ Tale through the language with which he describes Robert.17 The
connection that Lydgate creates between Robert and the child in the Prioress’ Tale would perhaps have
reinforced the audience’ expectation for the Jews to be punished with death in the play, if they associated
the bloody Christ child with Robert of Bury as Lampert suggests. Moreover, Robert was not the only
child martyr to have come from East Anglia. The original accusation of ritual murder occurred in
Norwich, which is not so far from Bury St. Edmunds, and if the play was truly performed by a traveling
company, then the resonance between the miraculous Christ child and child martyrs would have been felt
by audiences throughout East Anglia, who would have been familiar with history of accusations against
the Jewish communities in these areas. In light of these strong ties between regional martyrs and the
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events on stage, as well as the paradigms of the tradition as a whole, why is there such a leniency shown
to the Jews of the Croxton play?
The key to answering this question lies in the way the author constructs the identities of
characters in the play. The play opens with Aristorius reciting a lengthy monologue in which he details
the geographic extent of his trading. Lawton has identified this monologue as being closely modeled on
the speech of Herod, as he appears in the cycle plays.18 This is a particularly interesting model for a
Christian character. Herod is, after all, the Jewish king who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents in an
attempt to destroy Christ. Another characteristic of Aristorius’ opening speech is the marked difference
between the invocation to Christ with which Aristorius begins, and the paean to worldly goods with
which Aristorius ends. The dichotomy between these two aspects is exacerbated by the fact that the first
lines which Jonathas, the primary Jewish character in this play, utters are also a long monologue, in which
he details his wealth. The similarity between these two monologues is striking, as each is a celebration of
the character’s mercantile dealings and prowess. In drawing this parallel between Aristorius and Jonathas
from the very beginning of this play, the author begins to play with the idea of Aristorius as a Christian.
Despite being firmly identified as being Christian through his first few lines, Aristorius proceeds to be
tied to Herod through the style of his speech, and Jonathas through elements of parallelism between their
speeches as well as by the very fact that they share the same trade. These associations play with
Aristorius’ identity as a Christian by linking him more closely with Jewish characters than with Christian
characters.
This trend continues when Aristorius sends his clerk to “goo wele pleyn / Thorowght all Eraclea,
that thow ne wonde, / And witte iff ony merchaunte be come to this reyn / Of Surrey or of Sabe or of
Shelysdown.”19 The year in which the action of the play occurs is 1460, years after Constantinople has
fallen. Thus when Aristorius asks his clerk to see if there are any merchants from Syria, it is unlikely that
Aristorius is asking his clerk to find Christian merchants. This echoes a line in Aristorius’ opening
speech, in which he mentions that he does business “In Jerusalem and in Jherico among the Jewes
jentle.”20 This is one instance among others of Aristorius associating himself with eastern cities in his
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monologue, but this line in particular takes care to associate Aristorius with the Jews, just as Aristorius’
command to his clerk associates him with, at the very least, non-Christians.
The final example which I will explore that associates Aristorius with the Jews is the scene in
which Aristorius agrees to obtain the host for Jonathas. The first and most obvious connection in this
scene is between Arisotrius and Judas. Just as Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silve, so
Aristorius betrays Christ by selling his body, in the form of the host, to the Jew Jonathas. Thus Aristorius
moves from Herod to Judas over the course of two scenes. But this is not the only relevant aspect of the
scene. Chemers mentions that frequently Christian women were the agents through which the host was
obtained.21It is notable, however, that the specific instance in Brussels which Chemers discusses involves
the Jews themselves stealing the host.22 This sets up two traditional categories of agents through which
the host is obtained, Christian women and Jewish men. Thus Aristorius seems to be simultaneously
identified with both of these groups, although it seems that by virtue of the other associations which the
author builds up Aristorious would be more closely associated with the Jewish males who stole the host
rather than the Christian women.
In all of these examples, Aristorius is closely associated with Jews, whether through symbolic
actions such as selling the host, or through his speech, or through the parallelism which the author of the
play establishes. Regardless of the means, it is very clear that the author executes a conscious program of
destabilizing Aristorius’ identity as a Christian. How is the audience to understand Aristorius? I would
argue that through this destabilization, the author has placed Aristorius in a liminal place somewhere
between Christian and Jew.
It is not only Aristorius whose identity the author destabilizes. Jonathas and his fellow Jews are
also interesting examples of the way in which identity is destabilized in the play. Though the Jews are
Othered when Jonathas invokes Mohammed in the very first line of his monologue, just as Aristorius
invoked Christ in the first line of his speech, they are also the primary source for Christian orthodoxy in
the play. As they prepare to reenact the Passion upon the host, the Jews rehearse the tenets of the
Christian faith, the very thing they are testing. Jonathas gives a rendition of the Last Supper while Jason
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recites the story of the Virgin birth. How very strange it must have been for the audience to watch Jews
on stage reciting back to them the doctrines of Christianity. Thus, despite their references to Mohammed
and their identity as Jews, Jonathas and his fellow conspirators become the source of Christian orthodoxy
and doctrine rather than Aristorius, Isoder, or Peter Paul, the first three Christians who appear on stage.
This strangeness is compounded even further when the Jews fall to their knees after the Christ child bursts
forth from the oven and begin citing section of the liturgy in Latin. They do this freely, without the
incitement of the bishop. Thus this feat of ventriloquism associates the Jews themselves with Christianity
just as surely as Aristorius’ has been identified with Jews.
The second place in which the Jews identity becomes destabilized is a line which I have already
discussed in respect to its relation with Aristorius’ identity, namely the line in which Aristorius discusses
his dealings with Jerusalem and Jericho. In this line, Aristorius calls the Jews “Jewes jentle.” The word
“jentle” here must surely be a pun off of gentile, as Derrick Higginbotham suggests.23 This word recurs
frequently throughout the play, but only in conjunction with Jews.24 Perhaps the most salient instance of
this pun is when Aristorius greets Jonathas after stealing the host, when he says “Welcome, Jonathas,
gentill and trew!”25 Here Jonathas, through the workings of the pun, is identified as a gentile, not a Jew.
Thus, through this pun and through their speech throughout the play, the Jews become associated with
Christians, destabilizing their identities.
So far I have argued that the author destabilizes the identities of both Aristorius and the Jews in
the play, but I would now like to turn back to Lawton’s assertions. In his article, Lawton questions
whether Jews would have been completely absent from England after 1290. He suggests that they might
have maintained a covert presence in England, or that they might have regrouped and returned to England
at some point after 1290.26 This is a provocative and interesting question which Lawton poses to the
received scholarship concerning Jewish presence in later medieval England. Thus the question must be
asked, how does this play deal with the issue, or perhaps threat, of Jewish presence in England.
The authors process of destabilizing identities within the play serves a dual function. On the one
hand, the Christian Aristorius is Othered by his actions and his speech. At the same time, Jonathas and the
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other Jews are Samed through their recitation of Christian doctrine and Christian liturgy. In doing this, the
author creates a kind of middle ground of identity between Christian and Jew, and in effect creates an
anxiety about who should be identified as what. This anxiety would only be reinforced by the fact that the
actors playing the Jews on stage would have been English Christians. In this way, the destabilization of
identity is performed on stage not just through dialogue and action, but through the very presence of the
actors play Jonathas and his companions. In the context of the play, Aristorious and the Jews both seem to
provide what Paul Strohm calls “resistance” to the Eucharist, which for Strohm is a necessity in the
efficacy of the Eucharist.27 At the end of the play, both Aristorius and the Jews are subject to the triumph
of the Eucharistic miracle. It is in the Eucharist, which became a major component of Catholicism after
the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, that a single stable identity is established for the characters in the
play. This identity is as Christians. Lampert discusses the complex temporality and spatiality of the Mass
and the Eucharist, arguing that through these actions all of Christendom are united with one another.28 At
the end of the play, Aristorius is reunited fully with the religion which he has been separated from
through the author’s machinations. Likewise, the Jews are united with the rest of their new religion in this
act, fully incorporating them into the Church. And so everyone finds a stable identity through the
Eucharist.
I would now like to address the idea of David Bevington’s idea that the play is a “conversion
play.”29 Certainly the leniency that the play shows towards the Jews at the end of the play suggests the
point of the play could be conversion. This idea is compounded by the very nature of the banns. These
lines would have been recited before the play occurred, calling the local population to come see the play
itself at a later date. Thus, these very banns function as an evangelization for the play, a kind of preconversion perhaps. But the local context of the play could also suggest that the function of the play
would have been as a means of conversion. With the local history of the area, especially the connections
between the play and William of Norwich and Robert of Bury, which I discussed above, would have also
been in the mind of any Jews that might be living in East Anglia covertly, in a situation similar to the
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possibilities which Lawton entertains. These Jews would have seen these acts, through the host
desecration of the play, as a call to conversion because of the miracles which accompanied them.
The evangelistic aspect of the play is perhaps made more overt in the ending of the play.
Aristorius states that he will go back to his country and “teache this lesson to man and wife.”30 This is a
distinctly evangelical mission which Aristorius professes to undertake, which echoes the response of
Jonathas who says he will “walke by contre and cost / Owr wickyd living for to restore.”31 This in some
ways reenacts the Great Commission, in which Jesus sends his disciples out to evangelize to the world, as
Aristorius, Jonathas, and the other Jews in the play go to spread the teachings of Christianity to other
nations.32 This is reinforced by the mention in the banns that the miracle was presented in Rome. The
resolution of the play seems to be that after the Jews have been converted, and everyone’s identities have
been stabilized in the Eucharist, the plays turns outwards from Heraclea, or from Croxton, or from Bury
St. Edmunds in a call to conversion and evangelization.
There is a second side to this act, however. I’ve discussed before how Lampert argues that the
play would have reminded audiences of Robert of Bury. If this is true, it seems reasonable that the
sending out of the newly converted Jews would also have reminded the audiences of the Jews expulsion
from Bury St. Edmunds in 1190. Thus, a seemingly beneficent act, the act of evangelization, becomes
simultaneously a reenactment of a traumatic experience for the Jews of the Bury St. Edmunds
community. Perhaps, then, the position that the play offers lenience must be revisited. Does the play
really offer lenience, if it also enacts an expulsion of the Jews? I would suggest that this, too, relates to the
instability and anxiety over Christian and Jewish identities which the author creates throughout the play.
This anxiety is expelled not simply through the conversion of the Jews, but through their banishment. The
same goes for Aristorius, a Christian who could just as easily have been a Jew by account of his actions
and his speech. Thus, Aristorius can be seen as a type of converted Jew, who perhaps still shows certain
affinities to his old religion.
Through this reading it becomes clear that English attitudes towards Jews were deeply conflicted.
On the one hand the play offers conversion and evangelization, as well as lenience for past crimes. But
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these offerings are also a suspicion of conversion and banishment from the community. Just as Lawton
has problematized the question of Jewish presence in England, this argument has problematized the
attitude of the English towards any Jews who might still have been in England during the late 15th century
or early 16th century.
David Lawton, “Sacrilege and Theatricality: the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies, vol. 33 no. 2 (2003), p. 293
2
Gillian Bennett, “Towards a Revaluation of the Legend of Saint William of Norwich and its Place in the Blood
Libel Legend.” Folklore, vol. 116 no. 2 (Aug. 2005), pp. 119-120
3
Bennett, “Towards a Revaluation,” p. 122
4
Lisa Lampert, “The Once and Future Jew: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Little Robert of Bury and Historical
Memory.” Jewish History, vol. 15 no. 3 (2001), p.237
5
Lampert, “The Once and Future Jew,” pp. 236-237
6
Gavin Langmuir, “The Knight’s Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln.” Speculum, vol. 47 no. 3 (1972), p. 461
7
Langmuir, “The Knight’s Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln,” pp. 468-469
8
Larry D. Benson, gen. ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 913
9
Langmuir, “The Knight’s Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln,” p. 462
10
Lampert, “The Once and Future Jew,” p. 241
11
Tamara Atkin, “Playbooks and Printed Drama: A Reassessment of the Date and Layout of the Manuscript of the
Croxton Play of the Sacrament.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 60 no. 244 (2009), pp. 194-195
12
Michael Mark Chemers, “Anti-Semitism, Surrogacy, and the Invocation of Mohammed in the Play of the
Sacrament.” Comparative Drama, vol. 41 no. 1 (2007), pp. 43-44
13
Mitchell B. Merback, “Font of Mercy, City of Blood: Cultic Anti-Judaism and the Pulkau Passion Altarpiece.”
The Art Bulletin, vol. 87 no. 4 (2005), p.602
14
Merback, “Font of Mercy, City of Blood,” p. 599
15
Chemers, “Anti-Semitism, Surrogacy, and the Invocation of Mohamemed in the Play of the Sacrament,” p. 42;
Merback, “Font of Mercy, City of Blood,” p. 599
16
Lampert, “The Once and Future Jew,” pp. 241-242
17
Lampert, “The Once and Future Jew,” pp. 239-240
18
Lawton, “Sacrilege and Theatricality,” p. 286
19
All citations taken from David Bevington, ed. Medival Drama: An Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975),
754-788. Ln 137-140
20
Ln 105
21
Chemers, “Anti-Semitism, Surrogacy, and the Invocation of Mohamemed in the Play of the Sacrament,” p. 42
22
Chemers, “Anti-Semitism, Surrogacy, and the Invocation of Mohamemed in the Play of the Sacrament,” p. 43
23
Derrick Higginbotham, “Impersonators in the Market: Merchants and the Premodern Nation in the Corxton Play
of the Sacrament.” Exemplaria, vol. 19 no. 1 (2007), pp. 175-176
24
Higginbotham, “Impersonators in the Market,” p. 175
25
Ln 377
26
Lawton, “Sacrilege and Theatricality,” p. 293
27
Paul Strohm, “The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture.” In
Tobias Doring and Susanne Rupp, Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England,
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 36-37
28
Lampert, “The Once and Future Jew,” pp. 242-249
29
Bevington, Medieval Drama, p. 754
30
Ln 975
31
Ln 964-965
32
Matthew 28:16-20
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