O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln
Updated: Aug 26
684 O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also Oh young Hugh of Lincoln, slain also 685 With cursed Jewes, as it is notable, By cursed Jews, as it is well known, 686 For it is but a litel while ago, For it is but a little while ago, 687 Preye eek for us, we synful folk unstable, Pray also for us, we sinful folk unstable, 688 That of his mercy God so merciable That of his mercy God so merciful 689 On us his grete mercy multiplie, Multiply his great mercy on us, 690 For reverence of his mooder Marie. Amen For reverence of his mother Mary. Amen —Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Prioress’s Tale”
One of the quick foetuses spoke in a small but clear voice from the blasting-hot furnace, and said that he was Little Hugh of Lincoln. And everybody laughed. And hot-rock harpers were playing their traditional music there around the portals of Conclave Hall.
A quick follow-up to the last post on “How Many Miles to Babylon?”
A year or so ago, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen made a point about Lafferty and antisemitism that bears on “How Many Miles to Babylon?” The immediate context was Petersen’s comparison of Lafferty and Lovecraft. He recommended the comparison, then argued that Lafferty’s antisemitism is subtler than Lovecraft’s and therefore harder to discuss. If I remember correctly, he went on to suggest that this subtlety makes it, in some ways, more insidious than overt antisemitism.
I prefer to approach this interpretive problem through the category of virtuous antisemitism, but I am open to being better educated about it. Perhaps it is not the best framework. When one digs hard enough, the spade eventually turns. Virtuous antisemitism is the current turning point of my spadework. The term denotes a variety of European and American antisemitism that belongs to a long cultural tradition of assessing relations between Jews and Christians without openly casting Jews as vermin or parasites. It has a Christian inflection and usually combines some form of theological supersessionism with suspicions of Jewish infiltration into the economic, political, and religious life of the nation-state. The category is controversial but useful because it distinguishes an ostensibly moral and “respectable” prejudice from more openly virulent forms of antisemitism. Its figure is the sneaky Jew, not the evil Jew.
The category appears here because of a profoundly curious moment in “How Many Miles to Babylon?” The story contains other elements of Jewish coding, but the moment I have in mind concerns Little St. Hugh of Lincoln. The passage to which I draw your attention will challenge any serious reader of Lafferty who wants to understand his thoughts about Jews, history, and the Church.
Who was Little St. Hugh of Lincoln? He stands at the center of one of the best-known blood libels in English history. His dead body was found in a well at Lincoln in 1255, when he was eight or nine years old. His death became, almost immediately, the basis for a world-historical accusation that local Jews had kidnapped, tortured, and crucified him in mockery of Christ. The murder-sacrifice charge produced panic throughout England, along with arrests, executions, and a wider wave of anti-Jewish sentiment. King Henry III took control of the case. One Jew, named Copin or Jopin, was executed; others were arrested; and eighteen more Jews were eventually hanged in London. This was the first English blood-libel case to receive direct support from the Crown.
A local cult then formed around Hugh as a child martyr, though the Church never formally canonized him. People called him Little St. Hugh to distinguish him from St. Hugh of Lincoln. The legend entered medieval literature, most famously through Chaucer’s reference to “yonge Hugh of Lyncoln” in “The Prioress’s Tale.” Modern historians regard the story not as an account of martyrdom but as one of the most damaging English examples of medieval blood libel. The facts of Hugh’s death are lost to history. The case nevertheless became a landmark in the growth of English antisemitism before the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.
Lafferty mentions Little Hugh in the Moloch Furnace scene in “How Many Miles to Babylon?” This is the moment when children, infants, and unborn children are thrown into the furnace during the public festival surrounding the false Conclave. One of the unborn children speaks from the furnace. He identifies himself as Little Hugh of Lincoln. The crowd laughs.
I read the scene principally as an attack on abortion, an issue that could set Lafferty’s hair on fire. In 1987, for instance, he wrote a letter titled “Missing the Point” in rebuttal to a local priest, Father Bill Skeehan. There he set out his understanding of rights: “The ills of the world have various causes, and nobody (not even Father Skeehan) has a monopoly concern for them. My own observation is that those most greatly concerned (and quite active) in protecting the rights of the unborn are also most concerned (and quite active) in protecting all other rights.” That letter informs my reading of the Moloch Furnace. The reading is complicated, however, by Lafferty’s description elsewhere in “How Many Miles to Babylon?” of the debased cardinalate: “There were Gates of the various rites of Freemasonry and Jewry.”
This returns us to Petersen’s point about the difficulty of assessing Lafferty’s representations of Jews. In this case, Lafferty’s use of Little Hugh forms a contaminated mixture. I believe he wrote the story before he encountered the arguments for Holocaust denial that later convinced him. The Little St. Hugh scene is a parodic attack on modern child sacrifice: abortion, euthanasia, bureaucratic killing, public spectacle, and the crowd’s laughter at innocent death. Virtuous antisemitism is nevertheless in play. Why else would Hugh speak from the Moloch Furnace as a “quick foetus”? The killers are not Jews. They are “secular humanist” Catholics, the inhabitants of modern Babylon and the celebrants of its anti-sacrificial parody of religion. Why, then, does Lafferty make the leap from Jews to abortion?
Lafferty did not choose a neutral child-martyr figure. He chose Little Hugh, whose cult arose from the medieval accusation that Jews had murdered a Christian child. The choice gives “How Many Miles to Babylon?” the phantom shape of an old antisemitic charge: the Jewish corruption of popular Catholicism. That shape parallels the Jewish conspiracy to corrupt Duffey’s Catholic publication through blackmail. The reference is complicated. The Moloch Furnace episode is not itself a Jewish-conspiracy scene, but neither can Little Hugh be treated as a simple symbol of opposition to abortion. Lafferty attacks modern Moloch through a figure that is meant to be coded, displaced, and complicated as part of the novella’s antisecret.
I cannot say what Lafferty believed about the Little St. Hugh legend, which remained current well into the twentieth century. I asked a ninety-year-old Catholic friend with a PhD in the Middle Ages about Little Hugh, and she said, “Oh, bless him. I love Little Hugh.” It would not surprise me if Lafferty believed that the legend contained some truth. Most Catholics of his generation who knew the story did. Publicly, however, I suspect that he would have adopted the cautious position of The Catholic Encyclopedia: “Whether there was any basis of truth in the accusation against the Jews there is now no means of ascertaining. There seems to be little doubt that such accusations were sometimes made for the purpose of extorting money.”
Lafferty is subtle here. If Petersen is right that Lafferty’s prejudices are insidious because they are subtle, the Moloch Furnace scene bears him out. Lafferty’s visionary imagination sometimes works through historically contaminated ghosts. Little Hugh is one of them. As “How Many Miles to Babylon?” puts it, “Certainly dead men cast shadows. That’s what history is about.”
