The Demon’s Parchment

Afterword

It is a wild notion indeed to write about a medieval serial killer, and especially one who murders and defiles children, using their blood and entrails for summoning demons. This surely is the stuff of gothic horror fiction of the most melodramatic kind.

Unfortunately, it might have inspired gothic horror fiction, but this was definitely not fiction. This is the retelling of the very real and very strange tale of the fifteenth-century serial killer, Gilles de Rais, in all its horrific detail.

De Rais lived in France about one hundred years after the action of this novel. He was a contemporary of Joan of Arc. In fact, he served with her in her army. Too bad he wasn’t influenced enough by her life to follow in her saintly footsteps. He and his cronies indulged in their perversions by using the excuse that they were summoning demons to do their bidding, mostly for riches. De Rais sought his wealth and status through his own special grimoire, written in the blood of the hundreds of boys and girls he slaughtered. If he had not run afoul of the Church he might never have met his justice.

Eventually, he did meet a grim and well-deserved end.

A medieval serial killer is one thing, but to include a medieval cross-dressing male prostitute? John Rykener did, indeed, exist in Crispin’s London. We know little about him except what is found in one court document when he was arrested in 1395. What he explained in the story is strictly from those documents: He used the name “Eleanor” when he dressed as a woman and was arrested for his attire as well as soliciting sex. He confessed that his clients were made up of priests, scholars, monks, women, and nuns, but he preferred priests because they paid him more!

Homosexuality was certainly little understood in the Middle Ages, though Rykener appears to have been more vilified for his gender-bending attire than for his interest in men. According to historian John Boswell in his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, the penalties for homosexual behavior were erratic. More often than not, punishments came in the form of ecclesiastical penance rather than civil penalties, but these actions by the authorities were by no means universal or unduly obsessive. The idea that the Church or civil authorities were “getting medieval” on homosexuals in the Middle Ages might have come to us from criminal records in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when harsher punishments and prison time was meted out for acts of sodomy. “Homosexuality,” says Boswell, “is given no greater attention than other sins and, viewed comparatively, appears to have been thought less grave than such common activities as hunting.” Still, between the law courts and the Church, it was best to keep a low profile.

As for the tale of the Jews in England, Edward I exiled them in 1290, but those that remained—the converted—were scarcely received with open arms. Many were ghettoed in the Domus Conversorum for their entire lives. Others did strike out on their own and eventually blended into the society at large, marrying Gentiles and disappearing from sight. Did many convert in name only, remaining secret Jews? In the 319 years that Jews were officially barred from England, the documents of the Domus record a regular succession of Jews arriving on English shores. According to those documents, there were still thirty-eight men and ten women admitted into the Domus even after expulsion, but more, surely, had entered England than had converted and lived in the Domus. There are no exact records to document it, but there had to be many Jews who remained, even forsaking their dietary restrictions in order to blend in. Some continued to live as secret Jews and some even lived openly as in the case of Nathanael Menda of London and Johanna and Alice of Dartmouth, though they eventually ended up in London’s Domus.

Records of the Domus inhabitants end in 1609. The Master of the Rolls actually continued to receive his stipend for being Keeper of the Domus well into the nineteenth century. In 1891 the post of preacher of the Rolls Chapel was finally abolished by Act of Parliament and the buildings in Camden were used as a storehouse for the rolls of Chancery.

Jews were not officially allowed back into England until 1655 under Oliver Cromwell (even though they were residing in England openly as Jews at this point, and performed bravely in the Jacobean conflict), but it wasn’t made law until the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753. That act was repealed the next year, but it didn’t stop Jews from immigrating back to England.

The bishop in this piece is modeled on the later Spanish Inquisition of 1478 (and, of course, according to Monty Python, no one expects that!) that made its mark by rousting out the converted Jews still secretly practicing their faith, leading up to the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The northern countries of Europe seemed mostly spared from Inquisitions, including England, which only had a Templar trial (perhaps because they had already ousted their Jews). But anti-Semitic sentiment was certainly fired up in the medieval world, especially the blood libels that seemed to easily stir the rabbles. Yet there were still staunch men who protected Jews from the mobs, including the sheriff of Norwich in the days of Saint William of Norwich. The sheriff gathered the Jews in Norwich castle and refused to allow any trial that he well knew would end in Jewish bloodshed. Despite Thomas of Monmouth’s writings, there were many such men who did not believe that Jews were responsible for the deaths of children. Blood libels reached such a peak—insisting that Jews ritually crucified a Christian child and drank their blood and ate their flesh during the Passover—that in seventeenth-century Poland, only white wine was served at Passover so there could be no suspicion that the wine was instead blood!

Anti-Semitism had its proponents in the Middle Ages, even from the highest of authorities. Quotations from such worthies as Pope Innocent III (“The Jews, like the fratricide Cain, are doomed to wander about the earth as fugitives and vagabonds, and their faces must be covered in shame. They are under no circumstances to be protected by Christian princes, but, on the contrary, to be condemned to serfdom. . . .”) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (“Since the Jews are the slaves of the Church, she can dispose of their possessions. . . .”) fueled expulsions until Jews either remained in the Muslim world, or fled to the farthest reaches of eastern Europe.

However, Avignon was a place that allowed Jews to flourish, many becoming physicians and enjoying any number of trades in crafts and the arts, some even welcoming the patronage of the popes who had moved their residence to Avignon during the fourteenth century. This was not to last, and though they became wealthy in their many vocations, they could not buy chateaus outside the Jewish streets called the carriers that soon became their ghettoes.

Crispin’s early attitude about Jews reflects medieval sensibilities from outright hatred and mistrust, to the more thinking-man’s approach, much as Saint Bernard and many other contemporaries expressed. Exploring this aspect of his personality as well as the Jewish influence on the Middle Ages was interesting and refreshing.

Crispin and Jack have more murder and some new surprises to contend with when they leave London for a trip to Canterbury in the next medieval noir installment, Troubled Bones. In the meantime, I invite readers to keep abreast of Crispin’s doings on his very own blog at www.CrispinGuest.com.

Glossary

AIGLET the metal point of a lace to make it easier to thread through the lace hole.

ARRAS a tapestry.

CANONICAL HOURS also called the Divine Office. Specific hours for certain prayers by monastics, though the church bells to call to each canonical hour helped divide the day for the laity as well.

CHAPERON HOOD a shoulder cape with a hood attached.

CHEMISE shirt for both men and women, usually white. All-purpose.

COMPLINE last canonical hour of the day.

COTEHARDIE (COAT) any variety of upper-body outerwear popular from the early Middle Ages to the