"Sir Hugh", also known as "The Jew's Daughter" or "The Jew's Garden", is a traditional British folk song, Child ballad No. 155, Roud No. 73, a folkloric example of a blood libel. The original texts are not preserved, but the versions written down from the 18th century onwards show a clear relationship with the 1255 accusations of the murder of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln by Jews in Lincoln, making it likely that the known versions derive from compositions made around that time.
The title is a corruption of "Little Saint Hugh".
Synopsis
Some boys are playing with a ball, in Lincoln. They accidentally throw it over the wall of a Jew's house (or castle). The daughter of the Jew comes out, dressed in green, and beckons to a boy to come in to fetch it. He replies that he cannot do this without his playmates. She entices him in with fruit and a gold ring. Once he has sat down on a throne, she stabs him in the heart "like a sheep". There is much blood.
When the boy fails to come home, his mother concludes that he is skylarking. She sets out to find him, with a rod to beat him. From beyond the grave, the boy asks his mother to prepare a funeral winding sheet, and that he is "asleep". In some versions he asks that if his father calls for him, the father is to be told that he is "dead". In some versions the boy's corpse shines "like gold". In some versions the Jew's daughter catches the blood in a basin and puts a prayer book at his head and a bible at his feet.
Background
The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich (1173) popularised the medieval accusation against Jews of ritual murder based on the murder of William of Norwich (1144). Henry III's (r. 1216–1272) court purchased and abused Jewish loans to acquire land from less well off barons and knights, causing many to blame Jews for their insecurity. In the 1230s, some English towns expelled Jews, and organised violence against Jews took place in the 1260s.
The death of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1255) falls into this period. The facts of the original story are obscure. An admission of ritual killing was extracted from a Jew named Copin by John Lexington, a member of the Royal court and the brother of the Bishop of Lincoln. The Bishop stood to gain greatly from the establishment of a cult of martyrdom, as it would attract pilgrims and donations. The King intervened, executed the man who had confessed and ordered the arrest of a further 90 Jews. Eighteen were hanged for refusing to take part in the trial, while the remainder were later pardoned.
Because of the intervention of the King, the story became well known and gained credibility. The contemporaneous chronicler Matthew Paris (d. 1259) mentions the story. The story also appears in Annals of Waverley. The Paris version of events was drawn on by Chaucer. Elements of the Paris and Chaucer versions of the story can be found in some versions of the ballad. It is likely that the earliest versions were composed close to the time of the events.
Textual variants and analysis
The song has been found in England, Scotland, Canada, the US and, to a lesser extent, Ireland. It was still popular in the early 19th century.
There is an Anglo-Norman ballad (medieval French), likely composed while Henry III was still alive and probably with knowledge of the city of Lincoln. This version may contain the main elements of the original English song, many of which were lost in the later versions, which were written down in the 18th century and later. It is possible to relate elements in the older versions to the medieval stories; attempts to reconstruct the probable content of the original have been made.
Paris has a Latin fragment of the ballad in his Chronicle. Thomas Percy's Reliques (1783) has a version from Scotland. David Herd (1776) had a version, and so did Robert Jameison (1806). McCabe says that the "earliest texts of Sir Hugh are Scottish … [and] preserve the medieval saint's legend in its most coherent form."
The song may also incorporate elements of other medieval anti-semitic texts, particularly a miracle story also drawn on by Chaucer in the Prioress' Tale that features Jews murdering a child, often a school child, that habitually sings an anthem near where they live, and throw the body into their privy. These elements occur in some of the early versions of Sir Hugh.