1255
On 31 July a fatherless boy named Hugh disappeared in the city of Lincoln. Told he was last seen playing with some Jewish boys, his mother insisted he had been kidnapped and crucified as part of a macabre ritual mocking Christianity. While such stories were widespread at that time, the authorities never gave them much credence. Even the papacy had come forward to denounce them. As the bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste had never been a friend of the Jews, but he was equally intolerant of injustice and superstition. He was in his grave now, where miracles were supposedly being worked, and the new bishop of Lincoln, Henry of Lexington, saw an opportunity when the boy was found, a month later, supposedly in a well owned by a Jewish man named Jopin. The canons of the cathedral had the body whisked away for burial next to the exalted Grosseteste, thereby doubling the recent fame of the diocese. Meanwhile the mother had taken her case to the king, who was in the north attending to reports that his daughter Margaret, the teenage queen of Scotland, was being mistreated by her handlers. Upon hearing the appeal of the mother, Henry decided that if the accusation was true, the Jews deserved to die. If not, she did. Unbowed, she begged him to come to Lincoln and see for himself.