August 29 1255 – 24 Elul 5015
The body of nine-year-old Hugh of Lincoln, who’d disappeared a month earlier, was discovered in a well belonging to a Jew named Copin, covered in dirt. Copin confessed under torture, claiming that his community had crucified the boy, and was taken to London with 91 other Jews from Lincoln. He was hanged along with 18 others, while the rest were pardoned after the king’s brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall intervened.
The sordid background to this blood libel is that six months earlier, King Henry III had sold his rights to tax the Jews to his brother. He then announced that if any Jew was convicted of a crime, his property would be forfeit to the crown. As a result, the property of the Jews executed for Hugh’s murder – the first ever to be sentenced for ritual murder – was expropriated. The blood libel which had originated in 1144 in Norwich without resulting in any Jewish casualties had now become a tempting source of income for the monarch. Richard countered by interceding for the remaining Jews of Lincoln incarcerated in the Tower of London, as their deaths threatened to deprive him of subjects for taxation.
The Jews of England remained pawns to be exploited by the English nobility for another fifty years, until they were expelled by Edward I, Henry’s successor, in 1290.
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