Hugh of Lincoln, a boy supposed to have been murdered by the Jews of Lincoln, as told both in English traditional ballads and early chronicles. Professor Child (No. 155) gives no fewer than eighteen versions of ballads on this theme, which agree marvellously even in detail. A group of boys playing at foot or at hand ball are joined by the young Hugh or Sir Hugh, who drives the ball through a Jew's window, is enticed into the house by the Jew's daughter, cruelly murdered and flung into a well, from which he speaks miraculously, whereby the murder is discovered. The story of Hugh of Lincoln is told in the Annals of Waverley, under the year 1255, by a contemporary writer. Here the boy is tortured by the Jews, and finally crucified in contempt of Christ. His body is discovered by miraculous means, and eighteen Jews are hanged for their share in the crime. Additional circumstances are found in Matthew Paris. The story occurs simultaneously in several Anglo-French ballads; and Chaucer's Prioresses Tale is an artistic elaboration of the theme.
We find more or less circumstantial versions of the same story not only at Lincoln, but at Norwich, Gloucester, London, and Northampton; at Blois, at Saragossa, and Valladolid; at Frisingen and Zurich; at Prague and Cracow, Pavia and Venice, and very frequently among the German peoples, as at Vienna, Erfurt, Magdeburg, Mainz, Munich, Breslau, and Ratisbon. Besides the desire to deride the Passion, an additional motive was invented, that the Jews sought to obtain blood for use in the Paschal rites—a charge ridiculously at variance both with Jewish precept and practice. This singular notion has survived persistently for over 600 years, and has formed a pretext for cruel and shameful wrong down to our own day. It is still a firmly-held popular notion in Russia, Hungary, at Smyrna and Alexandria; indeed it was only so late as August 1883 that fifteen Jews were acquitted after over a year's imprisonment for the alleged kidnapping of a young girl at Tisza-Eszlár, and that the good Christians of Budapest plundered the Jewish shops in their disappointment.
See the Chaucer Society's Originals and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for 1875-76; Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1888); and The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, edited by Jessopp and James (1897).