Then there is war. An essential historical context of Thomas's Life of William and anti-Jewish feeling in England was the crusades. The same passions that inflamed Thomas and led him to express such unbridled hatred of Jews were also inflaming the population at large. If you look at the dates you can see that the time during which Jews were resident in England (1066-1290) corresponds very closely to the dates of the crusades (1096-1291). As Joseph Jacobs puts it, Thomas's Life was published "just ... when men's religious passions were aroused to fanatical fury ... Jews fell all along the track of the crusaders" (Jacobs 1897, 197; see also Roth 1964, 18). To modern minds it is not apparent why crusades against Muslims should have led to hatred of Jews, but the connection was there for the crusaders: alongside Muslims, Jews were part of the medieval "axis of evil" (see Jacobs 1893, xi). In England, particularly during the reign of the popular crusader-king, Richard 1 (Richard the Lion-Heart, r. 1189-99), the mustering of crusaders in English towns and ports was the occasion for the expression of a great deal of anti-Jewish feeling. There was, for example, an anti-Jewish riot at present-day King's Lynn in which many Jews were killed and that, in turn, led to violence in nearby Norwich (see Lipman 1967, 57-8). Chroniclers report that: "Many of those who were hastening to go to Jerusalem determined first to rise against the Jews before invading the Saracens. Accordingly on the sixth of February [1190], all the Jews who were found in their own houses at Norwich were butchered" (Lipman 1967, 58; quoting Ralph de Dicetos's Imagines Historiarum 1652). Richard's coronation (from which, incidentally, Jews had been excluded) led directly to an attack on the London Jewry (see Jacobs [1893, 99-105] for an extract from the chronicle of William of Newburgh). Houses were burnt and thirty people lost their lives. Between 1189 and 1216 there were attacks on Jews throughout the eastern counties of England--at Stamford, Lincoln, Colchester, Thetford, Ospringe, Dunstable, and Bury St Edmunds. At Stamford all the Jews who did not get to the castle in time were killed and Jewish houses were pillaged. At Dunstable the small Jewish community only saved themselves by submitting to Christian baptism. At Bury St Edmunds fifty-seven Jews were murdered and the rest were expelled from the town by the Abbot. The worst outbreak of anti-Jewish hostility came at York, where one hundred and fifty Jews lost their lives (see Roth 1964, 19-25). These attacks were not the result of accusations of Jewish ritual murder. They were symptoms of a growing hostility brought to boiling point by crusader enthusiasm--and increasingly allowed to happen as Jews lost royal support.
Source:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_3_116/ai_n15954445/pg_2
