“Community, Self, and Anti-Semitism:  William of Norwich and Sir James Hobart”

       A small church, about ten miles south of the city of Norwich, lies in the picturesque and quintessentially English town of Loddon.  The loveliness of Holy Trinity Church fades away as one enters the building to examine the partially dismantled 16th century rood screen.  In the midst of a traditional sequence of painted panels showing the Infancy of Christ is a unique image of the death of William of Norwich, a young Christian boy who was allegedly tortured and killed by Jews in Norwich in 1144.

       In order to understand why this image appears in Loddon one needs to reconstruct what the patron knew about his local community of Norfolk.  Holy Trinity Church was rebuilt and decorated under the patronage of Sir James Hobart, Attorney General to King Henry VII.    The presence of the boy saint in Loddon depends on Sir James Hobart and his network of relationships with the upper echelons of Norwich Cathedral.  Ultimately, this rood screen, with the inclusion of William of Norwich, makes specifically manifest the personal, yet socially elevating, devotional interests of a man from Suffolk whose goal was to redefine himself as a “Norfolk man.”

       Though Hobart realized his goal, in so doing he linked himself, and his church, with the painful legacy of medieval English anti-Semitism.  In a sense, he knew a rather dark side of his community a little too well.