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The York Massacre, 16 March 1190: On this Day in History
When England turned on its Jewish communities, and what happened when a few brave souls refused to look away
On the night of 16 March 1190, around 150 Jewish men, women, and children huddled inside a wooden tower in York Castle. Outside, a mob—some of them the city's most respectable merchants and noblemen—bayed for their blood.
By morning, almost all of them were dead.
They hadn’t committed any kind of crime, but they’d been trapped, besieged, and given a choice: forced baptism or death.
Most chose death on their own terms.
It remains one of the darkest episodes in medieval English history, and one that haunted me throughout the writing of Lady of the Castle, my upcoming historical fiction novel, the second in the Nicola de la Haye series.
The Wave of Violence
The York massacre didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the bloodiest peak of a wave of anti-Jewish violence that had been building since the accession of King Richard I in 1189. When Richard was crowned, riots broke out in London and quickly spread north—to Norwich, Stamford, King's Lynn, Lincoln, Bury St Edmunds, and York.
The causes were tangled together: religious prejudice inflamed by crusading fervour, resentment of Jewish moneylenders by nobles drowning in debt, and the age-old power of conspiracy and rumour to transform neighbours into enemies.
In some places, royal authority held. In others, it collapsed entirely.
The Dead Beneath Norwich
A medieval depiction of the persecution of Jews
We don't only know about this violence from chronicles and court records.
In 2004, construction workers digging the foundations for a shopping centre in central Norwich broke through into a medieval well. At the bottom, they found seventeen people. Six adults. Eleven children, aged roughly two to fifteen.
The bodies had been thrown in head-first. The adults had landed first, cushioning the children’s fall. Because the skeletons showed no signs of trying to break a fall, researchers concluded the victims were already dead when dropped in. All seventeen appeared to have been deposited in a single event, their bodies still complete and intact, placed in the well shortly after death.
The well lay just south of what had been Norwich’s medieval Jewish quarter. Radiocarbon dating placed the deaths between 1161 and 1216—a range that includes the recorded massacre of Norwich’s Jewish community on 6 February 1190, when, according to the chronicler Ralph de Diceto, men heading for the Crusade attacked Jewish homes before leaving the city.
DNA analysis of six of the individuals, published in 2022, confirmed what the location and circumstances had long suggested: they were almost certainly Ashkenazi Jews. Four of the six were related to each other. Three of them were sisters—the youngest between five and ten years old. A toddler boy, probably between infancy and three years of age, likely had blue eyes and red hair.
Three sisters. A red-haired toddler. Thrown into a well in the dark, and forgotten for eight hundred years.
A Rat, a Skull, and a Murder That History Never Solved
On This Day: The Death of William Longespée, Third Earl of Salisbury. 7th March 1226
William Longespée’s Tomb at Salisbury Cathedral
When they opened the tomb, they found a rat. And not just any rat, but a dead one, curled inside a man's skull, centuries after both had gone into the dark. And when investigators ran the chemical analysis, the results sent a chill down historians’ spines.
Arsenic.
This is the story of William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury: soldier, crusader, half-brother to a king, and the death that eight hundred years of history has never been able to explain.
The King's Bastard Who Rose to Power
Born around 1176 as the illegitimate son of King Henry II, Longespée had no business becoming one of the most powerful men in England. But he did.
Through marriage to Ela of Salisbury, he became Earl and acquired one of the great titles of the realm. But he didn't coast on it; he fought, he commanded, and he mostly won.
His military career contained at least two moments that changed the course of history.
The Destruction of the French Fleet
In May 1213, King Philip II of France was massing an invasion fleet near the port of Damme, in what is now Belgium. The ships stretched across the harbour; hundreds of vessels, loaded with supplies, troops, and the ambition to bring England to its knees.
Longespée led the English fleet across the Channel to meet them.
What followed was less a battle than a systematic destruction. The English found the French fleet largely undefended as many of the ships sat at anchor with skeleton crews while the main force was raiding inland. Longespée's men fell upon them, seized what they could carry, and burned much of the rest.
It was one of the most decisive naval actions of the entire medieval period, and Philip's planned invasion collapsed. England, which had looked dangerously exposed, was suddenly safe.
Longespée had just saved the kingdom, and was hailed a hero.
He did it again four years later.
In 1217, with the young Henry III barely clinging to his throne, a French prince was being supplied and reinforced by sea. Longespée commanded the English fleet at the Battle of Sandwich, intercepting the French supply convoy in the Channel and destroying it with ruthless efficiency.
The strategy was brutally effective. Without reinforcement, the French campaign collapsed, and Henry III kept his throne.
His success (and probably his arrogance) meant he made enemies; powerful ones, in high places.
The Enemy You Already Know
One of those enemies was Nicola de la Haye; the indomitable castellan of Lincoln Castle, the woman who held the city against all odds and shaped the fate of England. But Nicola and Longespée were not allies. They were rivals, moving through the same treacherous political landscape from opposite sides.
It went further than politics. Longespée held the wardship of Nicola's granddaughter, Idonea. He’d essentially bought her wardship and betrothal to his son from John when she was captured during the Baron’s Revolt.
In the medieval world, controlling a child's wardship meant controlling their future, their inheritance, their marriage prospects. It was power over everything that mattered.
Nicola was not happy. What happens between them next is covered in the third novel in my Nicola de la Haye series, Lady of England.
A Storm at Sea. Then Something Worse.
In early 1226, Longespée's ship was wrecked.
He survived, battered, exhausted, exposed to the sea, and made his way to Salisbury. It was the obvious explanation when he fell ill shortly afterwards and died: a man weakened by shipwreck, a body pushed past its limits; the kind of death that happened all the time in the thirteenth century.
On 7 March 1226, he died.
His body was carried into the new cathedral at Salisbury, which was still rising from the water-meadows, still smelling of fresh stone and lime, and buried with the honours due an earl.
A model of Salisbury Cathedral still under construction, as it was when Longespée was buried there
But the rumours started almost immediately.
The Poison Rumours
William Longespée may well have been murdered by Hubert de Burgh with arsenic
The official verdict was illness, but the unofficial verdict was murder.
Suspicion gathered around Hubert de Burgh, the formidable royal justiciar who had long tangled with Longespée in the brutal politics of Henry III's court. In a world where power changed hands fast and rivals had everything to gain, poisoning wasn't paranoia. It was a reasonable fear.
But there was no proof. The rumours circulated, faded, and were eventually filed away under unsolved.
Then, in 1791, during a major reordering of Salisbury Cathedral, the tomb was opened.
The Rat and the Skull
When Longespée’s tomb was opened, an eerie detail emerged: a rat skeleton trapped inside the earl’s skull. Later testing revealed arsenic in the rat’s bones, giving chilling new life to the medieval whispers that the great earl had been poisoned.
How a Birthday Party at Chinon Kickstarted a Civil War (5 March 1173)
Today is my birthday 😁. And as birthdays go, I could have shared mine with worse people, because 5 March 1133 was also the birthday of Henry II of England, born at Le Mans, one of the most formidable rulers medieval Europe ever produced.
Henry II’s Birthday was 5th March
Soldier, lawgiver, empire-builder, father of eight legitimate children (and countless illegitimate ones), and a man whose family would become both his greatest weapon, his biggest headache, and eventually most spectacular downfall.
Which makes today a good day to talk about what happened on his fortieth birthday, in 1173. Because that evening a feast was held at Château de Chinon. The great hall would have been ablaze with candlelight and Henry, thinking he’d managed to control his spoiled, entitled (but courteous and generous) namesake son, allowed the goblets to be repeatedly refilled by his son’s own hand.
The drunkenness that followed led to everything that followed: the Great Rebellion, where Henry’s family were torn apart, and his throne would never feel secure again.
This event, and the Great Rebellion itself, runs through the heart of my novel Lady of Lincoln.
Eleanor of Vermandois
In the shadowed corridors of twelfth-century French history stands a woman whose story has been largely forgotten—Eleanor of Vermandois (c. 1148–1213). Born into one of medieval Europe's most controversial families, Eleanor's life was marked by political intrigue, personal tragedy, and remarkable resilience as she navigated a world where powerful men controlled women's destinies.
If you're planning to read my popular, and currently free, historical novella Eleanor's Revenge, the first section of this post is spoiler-free, introducing Eleanor and her family background. Further down, after a clear spoiler warning, I delve into the full dramatic arc of her life.
A Scandalous Beginning
Eleanor's very existence was rooted in scandal. Her parents' marriage in 1142 triggered one of the most notorious affairs of the medieval period. Her father, Raoul I, Count of Vermandois, was the powerful seneschal of France and cousin to King Louis VII. Her mother, Petronilla of Aquitaine, was the younger sister of the legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine, who would become Queen of both France and England.
Their love story began at the French court around 1141, when Petronilla met the much older, married Raoul. With her sister's encouragement and the king's approval, Raoul secured an annulment from his first wife, Eleanor of Blois, on dubious grounds of consanguinity. Three compliant bishops—one of whom was Raoul's own brother—officiated at Raoul and Petronilla's wedding in early 1142.
Feasts, Folklore & Boar: A Medieval Christmas with a Dash of Wild Hunt Magic
Christmas is coming; and if you think today’s festive spread is decadent, just imagine what a medieval English banquet looked like! Long before turkeys were discovered in America, people from monks to monarchs gathered round a banquet table groaning with pies, ale, spiced wine, and one very impressive centrepiece: the boar’s head.