His father Richard was a royal judge and married Mathilda de Cauz (or Calz), a widow with holdings that included Sherwood Forest.
[2] Given Lexington's personal relationship with the Bishop and other clerics in Lincoln, there is considerable suspicion that he pushed King Henry towards dealing with the Jews severely, and with the knowledge that the accusations had no basis in fact.
He incited the weakly credulous Henry III to give the ritual murder fantasy the blessing of royal authority, and he inspired Matthew Paris to write a vivid garbled yarn that would ring in men's minds for centuries and blind modern historians.
A century and a half later, Geoffrey Chaucer, after letting the legend of the singing boy slip from the prioress' lips, would inevitably be reminded of England's most famous proof of Jewish evil and conclude with an invocation to young Hugh — whose alleged fate neither he nor his audience were likely to question.
John de Lexington died in January, 1257, and his elegant learning will not be described in any history of mediaeval thought, yet his tale of young Hugh of Lincoln became a strand in English literature and a support for irrational beliefs about Jews from 1255 to Auschwitz.