The worst ‘Egyptian day’ suffered by the Jews of twelfth-century England was undoubtedly the massacre at York in 1190 – an event that stunned contemporary onlookers, Jews and Christians alike. Of contemporary chroniclers who discuss the violence at York, William of Newburgh provides the most elaborated detail. He identifies the Egyptian day of Richard's coronation as something new for the Jews: events, he writes, were ‘suddenly changed against them’. Other chroniclers of the persecutions of the Jews that followed the coronation of Richard the Lionheart in 1189 likewise noted that they were novel: Ralph de Diceto, an eyewitness and participant in the coronation ceremony of Richard I, writes, ‘the peace of the Jews, which they had always maintained since antiquity, had been severed by foreigners’. And indeed, whereas Jews living on the continent had suffered at the hands of violent mobs particularly during the First Crusade, the Jews of England had survived safely through two crusades. Moreover, from the mid-twelfth century, the most troublesome discourse concerning the Jews of England did not involve violence against Jews, but rather against Christians.