Lionheart A Novel - By Sharon Kay Penman Page 0,48

shuddered, instinctively bringing her hands up as if to shelter her unborn baby from such a world. “Even the children, Uncle Richard?”

“Yes, lass, even the children.” To Richard, this was the cruelest twist of all, that the mob had treacherously slain people seeking God’s Grace. He’d been taught that the Almighty held His Breath over every Jew, waiting to see if he would choose Christ as his Saviour. He understood that the surviving Jews most likely sought baptism out of fear, but what if their ordeal had awakened them to the Divine Truth? Not only had they been shamefully betrayed, they’d been denied salvation.

“What happened next revealed the real reason for the rioting,” he said. And now his anger was that of a king, not a man of faith. “The leaders of the mob forced their way into York Minster, where the Jews had kept their debt bonds. They terrified the monks into giving up the bonds, and then burned them right there in the nave of the church.”

Richard had begun to pace again. In destroying the bonds, the rioters had struck a blow at the Crown itself, for the debts of Jews were also the debts of the king. The Jews were an important source of royal revenue and they were under royal protection. So this had been an act of political defiance as well as an outrage against the Church and the laws of the realm. And justice would not be done. The citizens of York had sworn that they’d played no part in the assault on the castle, blaming strangers and soldiers who’d taken the cross, and the few men identified—those who’d burned the bonds—had long since fled the city by the time Longchamp arrived. His action in punishing the sheriff and castellan would strike fear into others of rank, men unaccustomed to being held to account for their sins or their blunders. Their fall from favor ought to be enough to prevent another York. But Richard could take little satisfaction from that. When men defied the Crown, they deserved to hang.

“The stupidity of men never fails to amaze me,” he said. “How does killing defenseless Jews aid in the rescue of the Holy City? Only in Winchester did reason prevail. Some fools accused the local Jews of ritual murder when a Christian child died, a charge dismissed by the royal justices as being without merit. A pity they could not have shown such sense in the other towns.”

“The poor and the uneducated are most likely to believe such tales,” Eleanor observed, reaching out to squeeze her granddaughter’s hand. “They think the Jews practice the Black Arts, fear what they do not understand. Fortunately, men of rank are not as susceptible to such superstitions, nor are the princes of the Church. You all know I was no friend to the sainted Bernard of Clairvaux,” she said with a thin smile, remembering the abbot’s oft-quoted declaration that the Angevins came from the Devil and to the Devil they would go. “But when a Cistercian monk began preaching that German Jews must be slain ere war could be made upon the Saracens, Bernard hastened to Germany and single-handedly kept violence from breaking out.”

Richard demurred at that, saying, “Not all men of rank are so rational, though. The French king once told me about a Christian child supposedly killed by the Jews in Pontoise. Even though this took place ere Philippe was born, he harbored no doubts whatsoever that the boy had been sacrificed in some vile Jewish ritual. When I reminded Philippe that his lord father had never believed such tales, he bristled like a hedgehog, claiming that Louis had been easily led astray, and then babbled some nonsense about the Jews meeting secretly in caves beneath Paris to sacrifice Christian children. Philippe Capet,” he said, in a voice dripping with scorn, “may be the greatest fool ever to sit on the French throne, and considering that they once had a king known as Charles the Simple, that is saying quite a lot.”

Jaufre now found himself in an extremely awkward position, not wanting to offend his wife’s uncle, but feeling obligated to defend his liege lord. “King Philippe is not the only one to give credence to those accusations against the Jews. I was just a lad when it happened, but I remember my father telling me that the Count of Blois once executed a number of Jews for killing a Christian child.”

“When was this?” Richard demanded, and when