The York Massacre, 16 March 1190: On this Day in History

A depiction of the antisemitic mob and the tower at York Castle, where the local Jews had taken refuge in 1190, burning

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, antisemitic riots broke out in London, leading to violence, robbery and murders, 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.

The Norwich medieval well where dead Jewish men, women, and children were thrown head first

In 2013, the remains were reburied in the Jewish section of Earlham Road Cemetery in Norwich, in a multi-faith ceremony. A commemorative plaque now marks the site near where they were found—underneath what is now a shopping centre.

The massacred Jews were finally reburied 800 years later

The Norwich discovery gives the events of that spring a visceral reality that no chronicle can match. The dead were families—sisters, a small boy, mothers and fathers—killed because of who they were, and then hidden away as if they’d never existed.

Natural History Museum reconstruction of the faces of two of the victims - a young child and an adult

And Norwich has another reason to be ashamed—it was in ta medieval monk, Thomas of Monmouth, invented the original medieval blood libel, blaming Jews for the 1144 murder of a boy decades after it happened, when he hadn’t even been there and had no actual witnesses.

I’ll be writing about that at another time.

York: The Night the Tower Burned

York had one of the wealthiest and most established Jewish communities in England. When violence erupted in the city in March 1190, the community's leader, Josce of York, led his people to seek refuge in the keep of York Castle—the motte where Clifford's Tower stands today.

A recent reconstruction of the medieval York Coney Street, where many Jews lived before the massacre

The warden admitted them, but then the situation began to unravel.

Among those encouraging the mob were local nobles who owed large sums to Jewish lenders. With the community destroyed, the debts could disappear with them. The castle constable left to negotiate and was refused re-entry by the terrified refugees, who feared betrayal. The sheriff sided with the mob, led by a crazed hermit-monk, and laid siege to the tower.

There was no way out.

According to the chronicler William of Newburgh, the community's religious leader, Rabbi Yomtov of Joigny, made a terrible proposal: that (like in Masada) the community should choose death by their own hands rather than submit to murder or forced conversion. That night, many families killed one another (but not all), and the tower was set alight.

Those who didn’t choose to commit suicide and survived the flames came out in the morning to submit to baptism, but they were murdered anyway by the waiting crowd.

Those Jews who emerged from the tower, pleading to be baptised rather than die, were murdered

By the end of 16–17 March 1190, the entire Jewish community of York had been destroyed.

Lincoln: An Antisemitic Mob, but No Massacre

In some places, the violence was stopped.

In Lincoln, everyone in the Jewish community survived. Historical records indicate that Lincoln's Jews took refuge in the castle, where royal authority and the influence of three remarkable individuals prevented a massacre: Gerard de Camville, the castle's lord, his wife Nicola de la Haye, and Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln—later canonised as Saint Hugh.

Hugh was an extraordinary figure: a Carthusian monk from Burgundy who’d risen to become one of the most powerful churchmen in England, renowned for his personal courage and his willingness to defy even the King when he believed justice demanded it. He had, on more than one occasion, stood between a Jewish community and a hostile crowd, facing them down with nothing but his moral authority.

Saint Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln

Gerard de Camville’s motivation was less clear. Historians will say he was a pragmatic lord who understood that the Jews were under royal protection, that they were economically vital to the city, and that the castle represented the King's authority. His reasons for protecting Lincoln's Jews may have been partly self-interested.

But he acted, and my take on Nicola de la Haye suggests it may have been more than pragmatism that led to her, her husband, and the bishop saving every Jewish soul.

Together, these two men—and the woman who held Lincoln Castle as its constable in all but name, Nicola de la Haye—ensured that what happened in York did not happen in Lincoln.

How This Comes Alive in Lady of the Castle

This contrast—York destroyed, Lincoln saved—is at the heart of one of the most emotionally charged subplots in Lady of the Castle.

In the novel, Lincoln's Jewish community is brought to life through a group of characters: Bella, a scholar's wife; her son Leon; her friend Licoricia; and the physician Jacob and his terrified wife Chera. They are fictional, but rooted in the kinds of lives that Jewish families actually led in Angevin England—economically intertwined with their Christian neighbours, intellectually vibrant, and perpetually vulnerable.

When the mob gathers on Steep Hill and Aaron of Lincoln's old house is set ablaze, it is Gerard who rides down with his soldiers—not easily, not without fear—and places himself between the crowd and the Jews. It is Bishop Hugh who appears through the smoke like a figure from scripture, holding the processional cross above his head and invoking Moses and the promise of God, commanding the crowd to stand aside. And it is Turstin—Nicola's adopted son, a Premonstratensian canon who speaks Hebrew—who acts as the bridge between the two communities, alert to the danger before anyone else is.

"Put down your weapons and let these Children of Israel go." Hugh's calm gaze fixed on Godwin.

Nobody moved. A few of the townsfolk crossed themselves.

But the novel doesn’t let Lincoln's survival stand as a clean triumph. Because the York massacre happens anyway—and Leon's mother Bella is inside that tower.

In the novel's York scenes, Turstin rides through the night to York Castle with Leon, armed only with letters bearing Bishop Hugh's seal. He cannot stop what is coming. He can only try to get Bella out.

Read the novel and find out if he succeeds.

Remembering

Daffodils, which come out at this time of year, were planted to remember the 150 Jewish souls who died in the massacre

Clifford's Tower still stands above York, a squat stone keep on its grassy motte. Every year at this time, the mound fills with daffodils. To remember.

The medieval well in Norwich has been carefully excavated and its contents treated with the dignity denied to those people in life.

History is not only made by kings and battles. Sometimes it is made by mobs—and by the individuals who choose, in the moment, whether to risk their own lives and resist them.

That choice is what the subplot in Lady of the Castle is about.