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“The Purses and Leeches of Princes”

By the twelfth century, merchants and trade were viewed as potentially good for society and in the thirteenth century, trade was regularized with the aim of reducing risk and increasing exports for greater profit. The rise in tenants paying cash rents pushed them to produce surplus for markets, while increased commercialization prompted greater control over law and order by the authorities as well as significant capital. This was acceptable so long as merchants remained within the perimeters of moral integrity. Usury remained outside those borderlines but, nevertheless, the practice was expanding, not contracting. In England, at the end of the twelfth century, loan charters (Chartae or Chirographa), written in Hebrew, Latin, or French, were kept not in the Jews’ homes but in “a publick Chest provided for that purpose, called the Chest of the Chirographi, or of the Chirographers.” This step was taken in order to prevent mobs from destroying the debt records by burning down Jews’ houses. One part of the chirograph was kept by the Jewish moneylender, signed with the borrowers seal. There were three locks on the chest where the other part of the chirograph was put and keys were given to two Christians and two Jews, as well as clerks of the place in which the chest was housed. When it came time to open the chests, the chirographers, both Jews and Christians, along with the sheriff, cofferers, and, in London, the barons of the ←24 | 25→←25 | 26→Exchequer were all present. Copies of the receipts of any payments made to the Jews were likewise given to the Christians, the Jews, and the keeper of the rolls.¹

Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), head cantor at Notre Dame in Paris, protested that “the detestable usurers are now the bosom companions of princes and prelates, who surrender to the blandishments of the moneybags and promote their sons to the highest posts in Church and State.” Usurers were “the purses and leeches of princes” who by vomiting cash, sucked everyone dry and avarice was their daughter. Along with this charge, he added the rebuke that the creditor made a profit without physical exertion. This was an accusation that was to endure over the centuries; work meant physical labor and if financial gain by usury could happen even as the moneylender slept, then it was not honest work or any kind of work.²

Peter’s vicious attack on moneylenders was correct in one aspect. Money became more necessary in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in transactions between the king and his subjects, landlords and their tenants, and in fairs and markets. If between 1160s and 1170s, the currency in circulation in England was less than one million pennies, by the 1250s, it was fifteen million, due in large part to the wool trade and an increase in silver mining. The appearance of smaller denominations in the thirteenth century made it possible for many more people to use coins for everday purchases. As R.H. Britnell writes, the “commercial development of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries permitted a growth in population … and greatly enriched the resources of knowledge and experience which future generations had at their disposal.” In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, who was later became known as Fibonacci, wrote Liber Abaci (The Book of Calculation) in which he used the Hindu-Arabic numerical system to cover fractions and their application to commercial bookkeeping, currency conversion, and calculation of interest. It was the first time that mathematics was tied to profit making and moneylending and offered in terms that were comprehensible for the general public. According to some historians, this book signaled the beginning of modern finance.³

Ruling authorities may have accumulated a lot of money but they also spent vast amounts and found themselves almost constantly in need of funds. Wars were not only bloody affairs, they were costly and the price of waging a war often far exceeded the financial rewards gained by the victor. In addition to military endeavors, rulers had many other expenditures and were left with little option but to take out large loans to cover their expenses. Taxes may have been the obvious choice to increase revenue but it was an unpopular one that could lead to civil unrest and worse. The taxes demanded by the archbishop of Mainz were ←26 | 27→so exacting that he was murdered in 1160 in front of the monastery of St. Jakob. Rulers in need of funds were, therefore, forced to look for a variety of financial sources.⁴

Throughout Europe, Jews were, effectively, the “king’s Jews,” a status formally recognized in the thirteenth century. Everything they owned, effectively was the monarch’s property. For this reason, rulers had a vested interest in the Jews not only thriving but in their debtors paying their loans fully and in a timely manner. Jewish moneylenders, after all, could not pay their substantial tithes to the king if their loans went unpaid. But this relationship between moneylenders and monarchs—based on protection by the ruler and a thriving and steady banking business by the Jews—had the potential to breed serious resentment on the part of debtors and critics who were far removed from the seats of power. This was especially true if the king exacted heavy taxes or fines, impelling people to take out loans, and then forcing them to repay their loans under duress.

After nineteen winters of “chaos, anarchy, and suffering” under King Stephen, the reign of Henry II (1154–1189) was fortuitous for Jewish moneylenders in England. Henry had inherited a disatrous economy and, with war against France approaching, he needed to right the financial ship as quickly as possible. In 1177, at Henry’s request, the Bishop of London and the treasurer of the exchequer Richard FitzNeal wrote Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer. The purpose of his book was to explain the auditing and registration of the sheriff’s accounts. In the process, he tackled the subject of usury. Unlike the depiction of it as theft and injustice, usury was not an evil in Fitzneal’s estimation. Far from it. Capital was vital for a strong kingdom and those without it would always find themselves at the mercy of their enemies. Henry certainly knew this. When he amassed his tremendous army in the summer of 1159 for the invasion of France, he had to cover the cost of the mercenaries which amounted to nine thousand pounds. That sum exceeded the king’s revenue for the entire previous year. With war and daily expenses draining the treasury, Henry spent much of his time trying to find ways to fill the coffers, as well as asserting his control over wayward nobles. He grabbed what he could from his subjects in the way of taxes, including between a quarter and a third of the Jews’ property. As a number of England’s Jewry helped to supply the capital he needed, either by loans or taxes, he also protected them so that they could collect their debts without the overreaching arm of the Church interfering.⁵

Even with high taxation levied on them, by the mid-twelfth century certain Jews profited from moneylending, enabling them to purchase land, the main source of wealth in the medieval world. Men such as Isaac and Abraham of London, Jurnet and Benedict of Norwich, Brun and Josc Quatrebuch of London, ←27 | 28→and Aaron of York, and especially Aaron of Lincoln (c.1125–1186) amassed great fortunes. In fact, his wealth was so immense, Aaron of Lincoln warranted his own exchequer (Scaccarium Aaronis), which led to the recording of all debts owed to Jews in the Exchequer of the Jews (Scaccarium Judaeorum), a detailed account of all financial transactions concerning the Jews of England. During his lifetime, Aaron was said to have lived in great splendor in his father’s London house that he rebuilt, and he reportedly helped to fund multiple ecclesiastical buildings, including St. Albans Abbey, Lincoln Minster, and Peterborough Cathedral. Aaron’s income came from lending money at interest to the higher echelons of society, including the monarchy, leading to criticism of the Jews being the “king’s usurers.” It was commonly said that he was the richest man in England, with more money than even the king. After Aaron’s death, Henry confiscated his entire estate and his outstanding debts were collected in a more thorough and harsh manner.⁶

In 1187, after Jerusalem fell to Salah ad-Din, Henry imposed the largest tax ever experienced in England. Everyone, with the exception of crusaders, was responsible for a 10 percent tithe on his revenue and movable goods. This Saladin Tithe was to fund the third crusade and those who tried to avoid the payment risked imprisonment or excommunication. The chronicler Gervase of Canterbury assessed the amount given by the small minority of Jews to be £60,000, while the Christians gave £70,000. These numbers have since been revised downward with the amount for which the Jews were responsible being £10,000 initially, with a further £2,000 the following year, although the actual amount demanded and the amound paid are unknown.⁷

Two years after Jerusalem’s capture, the thirty-two-year-old son of Henry and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine was crowned King Richard I of England. According to Raphael Holinshed’s chronicle, Jews from London and other counties gathered at Westminster palace to present the new monarch with a gift to show their loyalty. They also wanted to assure themselves that Richard would retain the privileges and liberties that had been given to them by previous monarchs. Richard, however, was not inclined to give the Jews an audience. A rumor quickly spread that the king had ordered the destruction of the Jews. Crowds tried to force their way into the Jews’ homes, and when this proved unsuccessful, their houses were set on fire. The flames not only consumed Jewish buildings but those of their Christian neighbors “so hideous was the rage of the fire.”⁸

Informed about the riot, the king sent some of his councilors and officers to quell the violence. Not only did he want to maintain law and order, Richard wanted to make sure revenue from the Jews was not interrupted or damaged. The crowd, however, was in no mood to listen to Richard’s advisors. Intent on robbing ←28 | 29→the homes and shops of the Jews, the ransackers turned on the councilors who fled for their lives. As the fire blazed, lighting up the night, Jews inside the homes were either smothered to death with the smoke or burned. Those who tried to escape, were butchered by “the furious and disordered people” with spears, swords, and bills (a type of polearm with a hooked, chopping blade and protruding spikes). The massacre continued until the afternoon of the following day, when, exhausted, the crowd dispersed.⁹

Shortly after the riot, Richard departed English shores to join the third crusade leaving England without a monarch. His crusade was costly. The ships being readied for the campaign were stocked with silver, furs, food and spices, weapons, and much more. Funding came from taxes that were exacted from all quarters of society. Heretics’ property was confiscated, donations were expected from all towns, and tariffs were imposed on the Jews. Richard’s need for military campaign funds prompted him not only to tax Jews in England but also to levy a special tax on the Jews in Normandy, which was part of the Angevin empire under English rule during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. As usual, non-payment of government taxes meant fines, confiscation of property, and imprisonment.¹⁰

It was not only heavy taxation that was a problem. With the king absent and his troops assembled as they prepared to follow him, lawlessness increased. More attacks on Jews spread throughout England in spite of Richard’s command that the Jews should be left unmolested. The reason for the violence, in Holinshed’s opinion, was the “unmercifull usurie practised [by the Jews] to the undooing of manie an honest man.” In Lincoln and Norfolk, Jews were slaughtered while in other towns they were beaten and robbed. The worst attack occurred in York on the sabbath before Passover, March 16, 1190 which was also the eve of Palm Sunday. According to the chronicler Ephraim of Bonn, the houses of the richest Jews were looted and burned. As the Jewish community sought protection at the royal castle keep, a decision was apparently made to either die by their own hand or that of their family rather than by infidels. Those who ignored this command and fled from the fire were slaughtered by the mob storming the castle.

The exact details of the story are lost to us but it is clear that the issue of usury was a critical factor. Bonds owned by the Jews were often left in churches for safekeeping, and in York they were kept at the Minster. With the Jews massacred, people swarmed into the Minster, broke into the chests where the promissory notes were kept, and, in the middle of the church, the bonds were burned. With this action, all debt was erased. William of Newburgh one of the contemporary chroniclers of the disturbances, evaluated the source of the violent riot:

←29 | 30→

Of the Jews of York … the principal were Benedict and Joceus, men who were rich, and who lent on usury far and wide. Besides, with profuse expense they had built houses of the largest extent in the midst of the city, which might be compared to royal palaces; and there they lived in abundance and luxury almost regal, like two princes of their own people, and tyrants to the Christians, exercising cruel tyranny towards those whom they had oppressed by usury … when the king was afterwards resident in the parts beyond sea, many people in the county of York took an oath together against the Jews, being unable to endure their opulence while they themselves were in want; and, without any scruple of Christian conscientiousness, thirsted for their perfidious blood, through the desire of plunder. Those who urged them on to venture upon these measures were certain persons of higher rank, who owed large sums to those impious usurers. Some of these, who had pledged their own estates to them for money, which they had received, were oppressed with great poverty; and others who were under obligations, on account or their own bonds, were oppressed by the tax-gatherers to satisfy the usurers who had dealings with the king.

The killings, the theft, the destruction, were all justified by Newburgh as a legitimate response to the illegitimate and vile practice of moneylending on the part of the Jews. There was only one Christian account, by Ralph of Diss, that condemned the killings outright and without equivocation. In general, even those who despised the aims of the murderers understood the hatred of moneylenders. William of Newburgh did not condone the massacre, which he believed to be motivated by avarice and conducted with immense cruelty. The carnage, in his assessment, was less a spontaneous outburst of anti-Jewish hatred and more a well concerted and organized murder of men to whom some highly ranked Christians owed considerable sums of money. Nevertheless, he placed most of the blame not on the murderers but on the usurious and rich Jews.¹¹

Like all chronicles of the time, Ephraim’s account of the massacre needs to be handled with caution. He had no interest in history; he was, after all, writing a martyrology, the important message of which was the holiness of dying for God. Nevertheless, the end result was without doubt: York’s Jewish community was brutally butchered, their money and goods stolen, and the debts owed to the Jewish moneylenders in the city were wiped clean.

Noblemen such as Richard Malebisse owned large estates—in his case, in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire—and actively sought to harness royal power, which he believed was encroaching on the rights of the barons. He was also in debt to Aaron of Lincoln, whose estate had fallen into the hands of the king after the moneylender’s death in 1186. Malebisse’s aggrievement led him to join the ←30 | 31→conspiracy headed by the future King John against his absentee brother Richard. He was further accused of joining forces with members of the Percy family, to whom he was related, to plot the attack on the Jews of York. Other leaders accused of the riot were similarly indebted to Jews, including Robert of Ghent and Robert de Turnaham, who both owed money to Aaron of York. In addition, Robert of Ghent was in debt to another Jewish creditor, Brun of Stamford.¹²

When news of the assault on the Jews reached him in Normandy, Richard I took action against his rebellious lords and ordered his chancellor, the bishop of Ely William de Longchamp, to travel to York. Once there, he removed the sheriff and the constable of the castle. Most of those culpable for the riot had already escaped to Scotland or had joined the crusade. In their absence, the bishop confiscated a considerable amount of land. Fines were attributed to some of the richest subjects regardless of whether they were the most liable for the massacre or not. The estates of Malebisse were also taken and his esquires imprisoned.¹³

The attack in York was not only an assault against Jews as moneylenders. It was an attack on the king and his power. In the spring of 1199, on campaign at the Château of Châlus-Chabrol in the duchy of Aquitaine, forty-one-year-old Richard I succumbed to gangrene caused by a crossbow arrow wound. His rule had lasted ten-years, most of which time was spent outside of England on crusade, in captivity until ransomed, or, as at Châlus-Chabrol, devastating the lands of his rebellious vassals in France. His successor was his short, fat brother John and it was during his reign that the instigator of the riots against the Jews, Malebisse, had his estates restored to him. It was a case of one bad man being rewarded by another, for John was “a very bad man” who was “brim-ful of evil qualities,” in the words of a contemporary. He was treacherous, lecherous, and cruel. “Nature’s enemy” is how William of Newburgh described him. Starving his enemies to death was one of his favorite methods of execution and, fearful of his teenage nephew Arthur’s popularity, he had him imprisoned and then murdered.

With high taxes, bad harvests, unsuccessful business ventures, and any other of the multitude of reasons debt is accumulated, the nobles’ challenge to the monarch and talk of civil war led to the signing of Magna Carta by King John in 1215. An early form of political representation between the king and his barons, Magna Carta included, as one of its provisions, a proscription against the continuation of usury on Jewish debts after the death of the debtor if the heir was a minor. John’s signature on that celebrated treaty failed, however, to suppress the tyranny of kings and the demands of hostile barons.¹⁴

Within five years of the York massacre, Jews resumed their moneylending activities, providing financial services even more prominently than before. The ←31 | 32→Crown supplied closer supervision, as it was determined to prevent any repeat of 1190. These measures were taken not for the sake of the Jews but for the benefit of King John’s finances which were greatly diminished after the loss of Normandy to the French and his costly military campaign in Ireland. In late 1209 and early 1210, after plundering the Cistercians and provoking Pope Innocent III to excommunicate him, John turned his attention again to the small community of Jewish moneylenders. Holding them captive, he had their income assessed and then exacted a tax of sixty-six thousand marks. If not voluntarily paid, the money was forcibly taken by means of torture and imprisonment. According to one chronicler, John “pillaged them out of nearly everything they possessed and drove them out of their houses.” The chronicler wrote how the king had the eyes of some captives gouged out, or their teeth pulled, while others were starved, reduced to knocking on the doors of Christians to beg for food. Even if these accounts are exaggerations, when it came to filling his war chest and punishing his enemies, John was odious, craven, and remarkably cruel, even for such brutal times. No one can trust him, sang the troubadour Bertran de Born, for he was man with a “soft and cowardly” heart.¹⁵

When Henry III took the throne in 1216 as a boy of nine, the country was still riven with baronial discontent and rebellion. In royal tradition, he continued the demands for money and loans, burdening his population with heavy taxation and running roughshod over Magna Carta much to the barons’ alarm. Henry’s reign was initially a fruitful time for the Jewish communities, however, which numbered around two thousand living in around fifteen towns. By 1241, English Jews held around 200,000 marks in liquid assets, making it Europe’s most affluent Jewish community.¹⁶

Wealthy Jewish moneylenders enjoyed close commercial relations with similarly well-to-do Christians. One of most successful Jewish moneylending family in the thirteenth century was the le Blunds and when Aaron II le Blunds married, Christians attended the wedding, mingling with his relatives who were sumptuously “clothed in silk and gold.” Such was their wealth that in 1221 and 1223, Leo I and his son Aaron I together paid around 40 percent of the tallage—the tax levied in times of special needs—due to the king from London’s entire Jewish community. In 1220, Aaron I and his brother Elias I were granted a property in London stretching from Colechurch Lane to St. Thomas Hospital on the other side of the Thames to the Palace of Westminster. Their benefactor was Peter fitz Aluf, whose relative Constantine, a former sheriff of London, had attempted an insurrection against the king and was hanged without trial, his property confiscated. The land belonging to the le Blunds brothers was also ←32 | 33→appropriated by Henry III but returned to them on one condition: that no Jew should reside there due to its proximity to the hospital that commemorated the sainted Thomas Becket. Aaron duly sold the land to St. Thomas’s and purchased another property east of Colechurch Lane which was near to land owned by his brother Elias and his business colleague Aaron of York.¹⁷

The le Blunds’ clients included some of the most powerful merchants and families in England. In the close role of 1236 Aaron was given the nickname “the rich,” although the le Blunds’ wealth paled in comparison to other moneylenders such as Aaron of York, David of Oxford, and Leo of York. Leading members of the Jewish community tried to negotiate, sometimes successfully, the amount of tax they owed to the king. Aaron, son of Abraham of London, for example, came to an agreement with Henry III to reduce the tallage owed by the Jews. In general, though, taxes increased as the king’s financial needs grew. Those who did not pay their taxes had the misfortune to be imprisoned until payment was received, as in the case of Sampson Bunting, a Jew from Lincoln, who was locked up in the Tower of London for nonpayment of his part of the tallage. His release came only when Solomon, “the king’s Jew of London,” settled Bunting’s debt. It was not only Jews that the king targeted. Christians such as William Cade, a wealthy Flemish cloth trader and moneylender in London and fellow merchant Walter de Cheriton were financially ruined by the king’s demands and died penniless. Reginald de Conduit was imprisoned and William de la Pole, a wealthy wool merchant who lent huge sums of money to the Crown at the start of the Hundred Years’ War and organized further loans from merchants in London and York, was held at Devizes Castle on charges of wool smuggling. His lands were seized until the charges were eventually dropped.¹⁸

It was during Henry III’s reign that one of the wealthiest women in England, Licoricia of Winchester, lived and worked as a moneylender. From around 1230, she lent money in association with other Jews or alone, assisted by an attorney, becoming one of the most prominent moneylenders in Winchester. After the death of her first husband, Abraham, she married one of those richest Jewish moneylenders in England, David of Oxford. Their marriage was a complicated affair as David’s first wife refused to agree to a divorce until the intervention of Henry, the Archbishop of York, Walter de Grey, and the Jewish courts (bet din) in England and Paris. Upon David’s death in 1244, Licoricia was incarcerated in the Tower of London while the Jewish Exchequer scrutinized the official debts that were owed to her late husband. As the process dragged on, Licoricia languished in prison for months. Finally, the audit was completed and, as was usual with the ←33 | 34→king, there was a financial deal to be struck. In return for her freedom and the debts owed to her deceased husband, Licoricia was charged five thousand marks. A portion of that amount was earmarked for a project close to Henry’s heart. A fervent devotee of the cult of Edward the Confessor, the king intended to build a chapel to house a shrine dedicated to the former king.

Even after paying this large fine, Licoricia remained an extremely wealthy woman. She quickly returned to her life in Winchester and to the business of moneylending, providing loans to royalty, the nobility, and the clergy. Through her financial business, Licoricia developed a good relationship with Henry and members of his court and it was a friendship that proved beneficial. When the heir of Sir Thomas of Charlecote brought a court case against her over his estate, the king intervened on her behalf. In spite of her conviction by the court for unlawfully retaining Thomas’s late father’s estate, her penalty was a miniscule fine. Licoricia’s good fortune, however, was tragically cut short in 1277 when her daughter Belia found her lifeless body alongside that of her Christian maid, Alice of Bicton. Both women had been stabbed to death and an unknown sum of money was taken from her house. No one was apprehended or charged with either crime of robbery or murder, which was not an unusual occurrence. It was not until Henry’s son, Edward, became king that the justice system began to take shape.¹⁹

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In France, there were multiple efforts to curb usury. In 1182, King Philip II of France (r. 1180–1223) decided to help fill his treasure chests by expulsion and confiscation. This was a common practice for many reasons, used by authorities to rid themselves of a political foe or for religious reasons. In Philip’s case, it was for financial need and it was at the expense of the Jews, who were expelled from the French realm and their property and goods appropriated by the Crown. The king then restored to his knights lands and title deeds, without interest, which had been pledged to Jewish moneylenders. Philip’s son, Louis VIII, issued the Establissement sur les Juifs in 1223, which erased the interest off existing loans and stated that the principal sum had to be repaid to the Jews within three years. Nobles were given control over the loans with the power to collect the debt. But it was a change of policy that was not happily accepted by nobles who, like their English counterparts, were keen to challenge the king’s authority. They may have legally been the “king’s Jews,” but that did not stop powerful nobles from regarding Jews in their lands as “theirs.” Thibaut IV of Champagne baulked at ←34 | 35→these new regulations. He had a customary arrangement with the Jews of his region that in return for a high tax payment, they would be neither expelled nor have their property confiscated. Any property belonging to a Jew who died or left the region was to go to the Jewish community and not the count, who also agreed not to seize private goods, including horses, from the Jews. Thibaut’s reluctance to spoil this agreement to accommodate the king’s new laws led to conflict between the two men. Thibaut continued to vouch for Jewish moneylenders, including foreign merchants, such as Palmerius of Siena who lent money to Walter of Arzillières. The noble pledged his estate to the count if he failed to repay the loan. The property would be held by the count until Palmerius had his money returned by the deadline imposed by Thibaut. Another lord, Geoffroy of Deuilly transferred his fief to Thibaut, which again was held until he had repaid the debt he owned to “his [Thibaut’s] Jews.”²⁰

Louis’ brother, Alfonse, count of Poitiers and Toulouse, had his own deals with merchants and Jewish moneylenders. His property tax on the burghers of Poitou (the fouage) was accepted on one condition. In exchange for the tax, the count promised to expel the Jews, to whom many were in debt. Alfonse played both sides, benefiting from the tax while accepting money from the Jews for his promise not to expel them. As they were not expelled, the payment from the Jews seems to have outweighed the revenue from the fouage. Yet, this financial double-dealing was not sufficient and Alfonse still found himself asking his brother for loans.²¹

In 1234, Louis VIII’s heir, the gaunt-faced Louis IX (known as St. Louis for his piety), created a new constitution, which demanded that the Jews abandoned usury or leave France “completely in order that it shall be no longer polluted with their filth,” that is, usury. Following suit, the duke of Brittany, John I, gave way to popular resentment against Jewish moneylending, and exiled the Jews in 1239. Simon de Montfort and Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III of England, both expelled the Jews from their French estates, as did Louis IX’s nephew, Charles of Salerno, who expelled Jewish usurers from Maine and Anjou for their “devious deceits.” In most cases, the deficit that was incurred with the loss of capital was to be made up by a new set of taxes, readily agreed to by a populace thankful to be rid of Jewish moneylenders and the debts they owed. Moreover, the monarchs and nobles had the blessing of Pope Gregory IX, who, in 1234, urged rulers to expel usurers from their lands and never readmit them.²²

To help the crusade he launched in 1248, Louis IX freed Christian borrowers and potential crusaders from a third of the registered amount of money owed to Jews if and while they were imprisoned. The new decree also forbade bailiffs to ←35 | 36→incarcerate Christians for unpaid debts to Jewish moneylenders or to force them to sell property to pay these debts, although the king’s authorities continued to try and collect the debts owed to Jews. A court returned to Lady Catherine of Cadros property which her husband had given to a Jewish moneylender as collateral for a loan. It was ruled that her husband had no right to give away the property without his family’s consent. In 1239, debtors were informed that, with some exceptions, they did not have to respond to Jewish demands for repayments. That the issue was usury and not religious antipathy is suggested by Louis’ expulsion of the Lombards, Cahors, and other foreign moneylenders from his kingdom in 1268, although this was a short-lived departure. By the end of the thirteenth century, Lombards had become the most influential moneylenders in France, as well as England, with the Crown receiving twice as much in revenue from the Italians than from Jewish usurers.²³

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The southern port city of Marseille was a wealthy, free republic headed by merchants, and part of the independent county of Provence. It had the good fortune to be located on the crossroads of trade routes running from northern France to the Mediterranean and be in possession of a deep natural harbor. Merchants from many kingdoms, duchies, and republics traded and made contracts in this sun-drenched European center of commercial activity—traveling, in particular, from Tuscany, Toulouse, Lombardy, and the Rhone delta. Marseille was a place made wealthy during the crusades by profiting from the crusaders who boarded ships in its harbor and from the export of goods to the Levant. Cloths from Flanders arrived at the port ready to be shipped on to Sicily and Acre. Spices (such as cumin, ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon), herbs (such as myrrh and scammony), sugar, dyes, Brazil wood, medicinals, alum cordwain, and wax passed through Marseille before reaching their final destination. By the mid-thirteenth century, trade from Marseille stretched to Arras, Paris, Champagne, Ypres, Barcelona, Valencia, the Maghreb, Egypt, Pisa, Genoa, and Rome. The only routes from which the Marseille merchants were excluded were those under Venetian control in the Adriatic, Aegean, and Black Sea.²⁴

Jews had settled in Marseille since the Merovingian period. During the thirteenth century they obtained the status of citizen, with the same privileges as Christians, such as the right to worship freely, and owned property in the city and on the outskirts. They had quarters in both the upper and lower part of the city, two synagogues, a hospital, schools, and their own market. Contrary ←36 | 37→to some studies that portray Jews as perennial “outcasts,” the business activity of Jews in places such as Marseille suggests there was a great deal of interaction with Christians and that integration was not unusual. There were restrictions, as there were for all citizens. Jews could not give evidence in court against a Christian, openly working on Sunday or a religious feast day was not allowed, and some sort of insignia indicating that they were Jewish was to be worn, a regulation that was regularly exempted, avoided, or ignored.²⁵

Located on the north-east corner of the port was Carreria Portus, the hub of Marseille’s maritime and commercial business. Here, moneychangers sat at tables in front of the Isla dels Cambis building, rubbing shoulders with notaries, oar makers and caulkers. All merchants took an oath to trade honestly. They promised not to form monopolies, cheat, inflate the cost of goods, take bribes, steal, or contaminate produce. Some Jews participated in Mediterranean commerce, including Léon Passapayre, Abraham Bonehore, Abraham and Gardet de Bédarride, but, as most historians agree, the majority of these traders were of “middling status” and made up only a small percentage of Jews in the city. Unlike medieval England and France, the Jews of Marseille were not known for moneylending and chose instead the professions of physician, artisans, or worked in the coral, wool, almond, and tartar trades. What is difficult to know, however, is whether Jews and Christians offered loans to family, friends, neighbors, and others without formal contracts. To avoid the charge of usury or the grasping hands of government, it may be the case that some, maybe considerable, moneylending was on a more furtive level but, obviously, if this was the case we will never know.²⁶

In the spring of 1248, the same year Louis IX began his crusade, fifty-four ships set sail from Marseille loaded with goods for other markets. On board some of these ships were seven Jews who were agents for investors and who, in partnership, had entered into a contract called a commenda, which allowed merchants to share risks and rewards. The use of this kind of contract illustrated how much Jews were involved in commerce and interacted with Christians in business enterprises. The commenda was a medieval commercial loan that involved a sedentary partner (commendator) and a tractator, who was the active partner. The first supplied capital to the active partner who might add their own capital to the amount, which made the commenda a bilateral rather than a unilateral one. The Jewish commendators in Marseille were either merchants who were, at various times, either commendator or tractator, investors in many commendae in a condensed time period, or investors in only one commenda, and they were usually low-level investors. Once formulated, the commenda was notarized with witnesses to sign it, which gave the commercial enterprise a legal standing. The tractator then took ←37 | 38→the capital, usually overseas, and used it in whatever way was agreed. When the particular venture had been completed, the tractator returned to report on the proceedings. This could occur even without the physical presence of the tractator. After deducting expenses and investment capital, the profits were split in whatever way had been agreed.²⁷

The most important items traded in Jewish commenda contracts were saffron and cloves, followed by toile, silk, finished capes, and coins. After these came foods, dyes, and chemicals. These were items easily handled by low-level financiers, as they did not require extremely large sums of capital. Of 466 commenda contracts in the cartulary of Almaric, 11 percent had Jewish agents as either active partners or investors and out of the two contracts that had commendator partnerships, one of these was between a Jew and a Christian. The Jewish agent Bonanatus judeus filius Bonifilii and the Christian moneychanger Dulcianus de Sancto Victore gave a commenda contract for sulfur to three Jewish tractators in partnership. Bonanatus was also a tractator while Dulcianus was a witness to a contract, the commendator of which was a witness for Dulcianus and Bonanatus. Another Jewish merchant Mosse d’Accone entered into a contract with Petrus Cresteng, a Christian, in April 1248. From Mosse, Petrus took 40 capes from Metz worth £142.10d monete miscue, which were then transported to Sicily. Mosse then took 150 besants of millares from Petrus at a value of £45 monete miscue, which sailed to Bougie in the Maghreb. Mosse’s sons, Salomon and Joseph were also involved in commendae as both tractators and commendators.²⁸

These were clearly fluid professions and most of the partnerships were devised on an informal rather than a permanent basis, with partnerships formed and dispensed with as needed. It was also the case that tractators, once they had accumulated enough capital, became commendators for a more settled existence. The Jewish tractators were, as Julie Mell points out, professional commercial agents but the values of the contracts they executed were moderate, “ranging from £100 to 10 shillings.” In Amalric’s cartulary, the contracts associated only with Jews averaged £17.4s per commenda, which was far below the entire average of £62, when Christians are included. As Mell concludes, Jewish tractators were active professionals in this business but they were of “modest means.”²⁹

As shown, Jews and Christians interacted as partners and witnesses in commenda contracts. What is even more indicative of the business relationships between Jews and Christians is that Jewish commendators and tractators often chose Christian notaries and Latin contracts rather than a rabbinic contract (Heter Iska), which had stricter stipulations to avoid usury. The Jewish partners then had them drawn up in a municipal court instead of a rabbinic court (bet ←38 | 39→din). As a Christian court was used, Christians were witnesses and, in the case of a disagreement between the Jewish partners, they could be called on to give evidence. The experience of the Jews in Marseille is an important contrast to the experience of the Jews under Louis IX. If usury led to expulsion in the kingdom of France, there were other regions, such as Marseille, that were more amenable to anyone with capital to lend and invest.³⁰

Before he left to head another costly crusade in 1270, Louis IX ordered the property of Jews to be seized if it had been gained through usury. This had a two-fold purpose. It satisfied the resentment and anger that many people held against moneylenders, especially those who charged high rates of interest, and it added to the king’s treasure, helping to fund his crusade campaign. The crusade never made it to the Holy Land but was instead diverted to North Africa by Charles of Anjou, the king’s brother, for his own political purposes. It was in Tunis that Louis died from dysentery at the age of fifty-six. When Louis’ son, Philip III (the Bold) took the throne in 1270, there was an easing of these anti-usury ordinances, although they continued to exist on the books. Contrary to his father, Philip acknowledged pawnbroking as a valid profession for Jews, bestowing the pawnbroker with legal rights. He was also lax in applying Louis’ stringent laws. Therefore, despite the prohibitions, by 1273, Jews were engaged in regular moneylending in the Ile-de-France due to the non-enforcement of anti-usury laws. Philip, it seems, was more concerned with the economic health of France than with the moral rights and wrongs of usury.³¹

Philip was not the only French ruler keen to harness capital for their own purposes. In the 1270s, Marseille was forced to recognize the suzerainty of Charles of Anjou, along with Arles, and Avignon. Under Charles, the city was incorporated into Provence and usurious transactions were restricted to twice a month with a general interest rate of 12 percent. After a revolt, he enacted harsh penalties against moneylenders but, in general, Charles’ lands were hospitable to their profession. Intrigued by the idea of profit, he set about encouraging trade and commerce, creating a royal monopoly on salt, mining for precious metals, and collecting fees for exempting people from the onerous Sicilian subventio generalis tax. Those exemptions, however, meant that the tax pool was smaller and so those left paying tax paid a greater amount. To promote trade and commerce, he gave protection to merchants attending fairs in Anjou and encouraged Jews and Italian Christians to develop credit. He also stipulated that Jews did not have to wear the insignia that had been ordered by the French king. With such policies, Florentines settled in his dominions as moneylenders and merchants under his protection so ←39 | 40→that by 1274, Italians had a monopoly in the profession of moneylending in his realm, lending Charles large sums of money in exchange for privileges.

Jews under Charles’ control were particularly involved in the economy of the Regno, which was comprised of the Kingdom of Sicily and parts of southern Italy. Sicilian Jews had a near monopoly on the dyeing trade while others acted as moneylenders under his protection like the Italians. Between Charles’ large number of indirect taxes and the monopolization of industries, the economic benefits fell on the few rather than the many. Still, he brought his expanding state under one administration operating with one set of laws. With this more competent and consistent government, the presence of Lombards to provide credit, and new connections in the Mediterranean, profits were robust, even though Charles’ expenditure was steep. This acceptance of usury was halted during the reign of his grandson, Robert I, who, in 1322, issued an edict against usurers. But by the middle of the century, the economic needs for loans outweighed moral concerns. Robert’s successor was his granddaughter Jeanne (Joanna or Giovanna) of Naples, who permitted a maximum interest payment of 10 percent. It was not an overwhelming victory for moneylenders, who valued their risk at rather more than 10–12 percent, but it was an indication that the tide was turning in the attitude towards usury.

* * *

In England, the tallaging of Jews increased during the twelfth century but became a less profitable form of revenue for the Crown as the community’s wealth declined, either because of the heavy taxation or loans that went unpaid. It may also be the case that income was hidden from the financially voracious monarch. Repeatedly denied taxes from parliament, Henry had become reliant on his sheriffs, foresters, and justices to bring in the necessary revenue and fines which were collected with growing oppression. In 1241–42, a massive tallage of 20,000 marks was imposed on the Jewish community. About half of the paid amount was provided by Aaron of York, David of Oxford, and Leo of York. This was followed up by a 60,000 tallage in 1244–45. In an effort to comply with the king’s demands for taxes, moneylenders called in their debts, such as the one contracted between John de Carun of Sherington and Elias le Eveske. In the early 1240s, John de Carun was in need of money after joining Henry III’s military expedition to Gascony. With the expense of his knighthood, the cost of military equipment, and the upkeep of his estate while he was overseas, he sought a loan from Elias, one of the most influential Jewish moneylenders in the thirteenth century. When Henry imposed ←40 | 41→his enormous tallage on the Jews, Elias, like other moneylenders, was obliged to seek repayment. After a judicial inquiry, that assessed his lands, John of Carun was ordered to pay an annual instalment of six marks to his creditor in repayment, much to the dissatisfaction of Elias. The debt was paid after the sale of thirty acres of John de Carun’s land. Some Jews sold off their loans with deep discounts. These were eagerly bought by wealther courtiers such as William de Valence and Richard of Cornwall who had their eyes on the land on which the loan was pledged. In this way, the estates of vulnerable landowners fell into the hands of the wealthy elite, causing resentment and hostility on the part of the debtors towards the Jewish moneylenders and the courtiers who benefitted from their distress.³²

The discontent of the barons and knights of the shire over the transfer of land from debt-ridden nobility to their creditors, who were often Jews but sometimes the Cistercian monks of Meaux, and then into the hands of wealthy Christian courtiers, forced a solution to the issue of usury. Having already rebelled against King John at the beginning of the century, action that led to the signing of Magna Carta, kings were well aware that the barons and knights had the ability to rebel successfully.³³

A series of statutes in the 1250s promulgated that no Jew was permitted to reside in England unless he was in service to the king. These laws, combined with the tallages and the downturn in profits, convinced some Jews that there was no future for themselves as moneylenders in England. This included Aaron I le Blunds who, along with his son Samuel, his brother Elias, and their wives, attempted to leave England in 1252 with their realisable assets. They were apprehended before they departed, their houses and property held until they had paid their fine in full, and ordered to give a security bond to ensure that they would not attempt to flee again. These hefty communal taxes effectively destroyed the capital of these magnates. By 1255, Aaron of York was bankrupt.³⁴

Violence and revolt surfaced once more after disease and torrential storms moved through the kingdom, bringing famine and plague and leaving the dead in the streets, their stomachs swollen with hunger. In 1260, the Jewish Exchequer that kept a record of the debts owed to Jewish moneylenders was ransacked and the rolls were stolen. A number of attacks on Jews followed a revolt against King Henry by his brother-in-law and friend-turned-enemy, the French nobleman and crusader, Simon de Montfort, the earl of Leicester and one-time ally of the king’s son, Edward. Simon had expelled the Jews from Leicester, accusing them of causing Christians to suffer because of their usury. In leading the Second Baron’s War (1263–64), Montfort ousted the king, removed his authority, and included ordinary townsmen in the parliament. With the country in chaos, an incident in ←41 | 42→London in which a Jew supposedly wounded a Christian with a knife resulted in a mob-hunt for the Jewish culprit.³⁵

As night fell and the crowd turned to looting, the local mayor and sheriffs drove “away those offenders by force of arms.” A murderous riot by Londoners who welcomed Montfort’s anti-royalist troops broke out a week before Palm Sunday in 1263. The Annals of Thomas Wykes that describes the rampage gives a simple reason for the violence: greed. According to one chronicler, the rioters pillaged the property of Jews who were “stripped naked, despoiled and afterwards murdered by night in sections.” Authorities loyal to the king stepped in to stop the slaughter, although London’s Jewry was “destroyed.” They did, however, manage to save the chest of chirographs that held the debts to Jewish moneylenders, which had been put in the Tower of London for safekeeping.³⁶

A year later, Henry III had regained the throne and Simon de Montfort lay dead on the battlefield of Evesham, his body mutilated with his head cut off and his testicles hung either side of his nose, his hands and feet severed and sent to different parts of the country. Property in London was redistributed as a means of punishment for the city’s support of Montfort and a 20,000 mark fine was assessed in return for a pardon. All of Montfort’s lands and the title of Earl of Leicester were transferred to Henry’s son Edmund. The surviving rebels were able to regain their lands only by paying a hefty fine, which was in accordance with their culpability in the revolt.³⁷

In 1264, Henry appointed the “twenty-four,” a “self-perpetuating” group of “trustworthy and wise” men to act as guardians to the Jewish community of Winchester. Among the most prominent of the Jews of Winchester was Licoricia’s son, Benedict, who, by 1280, owned nine properties in Winchester, Southampton, Bristol, York, and London. Like Elias of London and Benedict of Lincoln, Benedict of Winchester must have felt sufficiently secure to choose to make his home outside of the Jewish quarter. This is also borne out by the close commercial relationship between the Jews and the wealthy Christians of the town. Tension arose between the twenty-four and the general population when the group’s members made Benedict a guild member. As the “twenty-four” were wool merchants, the credit that the Jews provided was vital to their business but to those outside the business Benedict’s admittance was “a manifest scandal to Christian men.” In an attempt to restore the economic wellbeing of the Jews, Henry took the Winchester Jews under his special protection and appointed a further twenty-five men as “guardians and protectors” of the Jews. These included Simon le Draper, a wool merchant and mayor, and a convert, Henry de Winchester, an exporter of wool. The twenty-five were to inform the public that ←42 | 43→no one “do the Jews harm, on pain of life and limbs, and protect them and their households, lands, rents and possessions, and if harm be done to them to have it amended at once.”³⁸

In order to rein in the abuses by courtiers who were buying up Jewish debt in the hope of grabbing the pledged land, legal restrictions were placed on Jewish moneylenders. Debts to Jews were no longer allowed to be sold without the king’s permission and, if he permitted the sale, there was to be no interest added. But there was little effort made to implement this restriction and so the practice and the resentment continued to fester as the power passed from Henry to his eldest son in 1272.³⁹

Henry’s son and successor was Edward I, a tall, broad chested, blonde, imposing figure who was the first king to be crowned in Westminster Abbey, the building of which had been overseen by his father. He had a reputation for courage, exceptional ferocity, and spending his subjects’ money. The biggest armies, the largest parliaments, and the greatest chain of castles were built during his reign in Britain. Military campaigns in France, Wales, and Scotland and crusades demanded vast sums of money. His palaces, such as Windsor, as well as his castles were sumptuously decorated with elegant floor tiles, sculpted marble pillars, wall paintings, tapestries, and courtyard gardens. To meet these expenditures, Edward pressed parliament to approve taxes, while shire knights insisted the king confirm the tenets of Magna Carta and enforce the restrictions on Jewish moneylending.

It was said that Edward’s kingdom was “awash” in moneylending. But it was the Christian Riccardi bankers of Lucca, not Jews, who monopolized international finance and upon whom the king had become reliant to keep him in credit in the form of short-term loans that supplemented the king’s existing funds. These Lombardi moneylenders had the benefit of a well-developed Italian economy behind them and in the first seven years of Edward’s reign, he had received over £200,000 from them. As Edward’s bankers, they financed his military campaigns and provided for the construction of castles, in return for control over the new custom system for the wool trade. To raise more reliable sources of income, as opposed to his father’s irregular tallages, Edward introduced custom duties on England’s most profitable export which he placed in the hands of the Italian bankers. The Riccardis thus handled thousands and tens of thousands of pounds, infinitely more than the amounts handled by the majority of Jewish moneylenders.⁴⁰

Edward’s deal with knights in 1270 for a crusader tax was in exchange for a renewal of Magna Carta. This bargain included a restriction on Jewish usury that allowed debtors more time to repay their loans. Curbing the ability of Jewish ←43 | 44→moneylenders to insist on prompt repayment was a popular demand by the barons, who were eager to delay settling their debts or willing to default on them. His debts from his crusade led him once again to ask parliament for another tax. In return, the knights of the shire demanded that he end the Jewish debt issue, which had led to smallholders losing their lands, once and for all. Resentment on the part of knights and the general population prompted Edward to take harsher action against Jewish moneylenders. As conflict continued in Winchester between the twenty-four and the community, Edward personally intervened, bringing the town under his control and destroying the power of the twenty-four. Benedict had already decamped to London, and by 1274, many other Jews left Winchester for other cities. In the fall of 1274, Edward ordered the mayor and sheriffs of London to issue a proclamation demanding that, “all merchant-usurers shall depart thence within twenty days from the date of these letters, and shall leave the kingdom, under pain of forfeiture of their bodies and goods, and if they be found in the city after that date, to cause them to be arrested and kept safely until otherwise ordered ….” This was not aimed specifically at Jews, but at all merchant usurers, including the Lombards who practiced the “vice” of usury over the “virtue” of charity. It is unclear whether the order was enforced or to what degree, but it did not eradicate moneylending as the Riccardi still contracted usurious loans after the proclamation.⁴¹

In the following year, legislation was written specifically against Jewish moneylenders, which was a concession to the knights in return for yet another tax. In October 1275, the Statute of the Jewry was sealed and sent to the Justices of the Jews before being widely circulated. It acknowledged that Edward and his ancestors had “received great benefit from the Jewish people in the past” and in return they had been “safely preserved and defended by his sheriffs and other bailiffs and faithful me” so that no harm should come to them “in their bodies or in their goods.” Nonetheless, the statute stated, Jewish usury pushed Christians into debt and destitution. The new legislation prohibited loans being secured on rents and limited the amount of money and goods that could be seized by a Jew from a Christian. The larger aim was to turn Jews away from moneylending and into other employment. The Statute ordered all Jews to “gain their living by lawful merchandise and their labour … by selling and buying.” This meant as “legal merchants” who traded cereal and wool. Lending money at interest was once more pitted against “honest” work that was physical in nature. Jews were only permitted to live in towns with an archa (chest), the repository where the contracts and deeds were kept recording loans, mortgages, vifgages, other pledges, lands, rents, houses, and chattels belonging to Jews. They were not to mingle with ←44 | 45→Christians and, just so there was no chance of mistaking a Jew for a Christian and vice versa, Jews were to wear a yellow felt badge so they were easily identified. Being separated from Christians it was thought unlikely that usury could continue. This was, as has been recently pointed out, a functional regulation, not akin to the Nazi yellow star of David. Jews did petition Edward to protest but their pleas fell on deaf ears, although it is not known whether Jews evaded wearing the badge or whether any effort went into enforcing the law.⁴²

While Edward was trying to stamp out Jewish moneylending, his wife, Eleanor of Castile, was eagerly acquiring land and estates with the help of Jewish moneylenders. Eleanor, therefore, was complicit in the issue that was paramount in the knight’s argument for restricting Jewish usury. In particular, Aaron, son of Vives, acted as an intermediary in her transactions under the authority of Eleanor’s brother-in-law, Edmund, the new Earl of Leicester who had been granted all of Simon de Montfort’s estate. In 1276, Licoricia’s son, Benedict (who had married into the le Blunds family) was nominated to be the new keeper of the queen’s gold at the Exchequer of the Jews. He was to “receive her gold at the exchequer and to act in all matters to her benefit.” Benedict had little choice in the matter. Like her husband, Eleanor had use of the Jews’ loan debt and also seized the property of condemned Jews. Agreements drawn up between debtors and creditors, such as the one between Stephen Cheindut and Manasser, son of Aaron, were often withdrawn from the chest of the chirographers and sent to Eleanor. With a debt owed to a Jewish creditor in her possession, she was able to appropriate Leeds castle, which had been used as security. Resentment towards Eleanor swelled, especially on the part of the knights and the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham, denounced her purchase of land which was possible only through usury by Jews “under the protection of the royal court.” Not only was she admonished for committing the sin of usury, Walter of Guisborough composed a poem that complained of her, and her husband’s, greed: “The king desires to get our gold/the queen, our manors fair to hold.”⁴³

It has been argued that the heavy taxation on the Jews by Henry III had depleted the wealth of the Jews to such an extent that Jewish moneylending had greatly diminished by Edward’s reign. Edward was therefore led by “a usury discourse disconnected with the historical reality of Jewish economic occupations.” It is certainly the case that Jewish moneylenders were poorer, but it is hard to know how many loans were made off the books between neighbors, friends, and business associates. What is recorded in ledgers does not necessarily give us the full picture. Certainly, the complaint over the loss of pledged land indicates usury was still being practiced by some Jews. Whatever the extent of usury, the ←45 | 46→Statute was either redundant and would have no real consequences for the Jewish community or Jews were still engaged primarily in moneylending and the new regulations were an attempt to eradicate that completely. Regardless, the upshot of Edward’s new law was a restriction on Jewish occupational freedom in return for new taxes and peace from potentially rebellious lords. In this increasingly hostile environment, Jewish moneylenders had roughly three options: move into a different occupation, leave the country to find a community that welcomed moneylenders and their services, or carry on lending money furtively. But it was not only the Jews that the Statute affected; it had unintended consequences for some of the Christian poor. Usurers may not have been loved, but they were necessary in the new economy. Fewer moneylenders meant less competition in the loan business and that enabled Italian moneylenders to increase their rates of interest, “causing great suffering to the people.”⁴⁴

* * *

After the military campaign against the Welsh, who were described as lazy, savage barbarians, Edward was once more in the red. The war had cost £23,000, which had been borrowed from the Riccardi bankers. In addition to the debt, money was needed for road clearance, canals, and castle building. Further loans from the Riccardi did not cover all the expenses, nor did the money he received by forcing all landowners with property worth £20 annually to become knights. As knighthood was an expensive affair, many opted to pay a fine for exemption, which went straight into Edward’s treasury. Eager not to go cap in hand to parliament again, he soon found another source of revenue. The coins in circulation were in a bad state, due to natural deterioration of everyday use of coinage. One escheator complained that the inferior coinage made it next to impossible to collect taxes. With the coins devalued, the price of livestock and grain rose, making everyday living more expensive and poor-quality coinage also discouraged foreign merchants. With reminting, the king profited from the fees charged to his subjects and from the small changes in weight and silver content.

One of the biggest problems with coinage was counterfeiting and coin clipping, which was the most widespread monetary crime and the one with which financiers were most often charged. Before mill marks were introduced during Edward’s reminting, it was relatively easy to clip slivers of silver from the metal’s edge without it being detected. The charge of coin clipping dovetailed with the ongoing debate over usury. A loan transacted with clipped coins and repaid in unclipped coin was a way to disguise usury and circumvent usury laws. Rabbi ←46 | 47→Meir, son of Baruch of Rothenburg, denounced coin clipping and “currency falsifiers who have led to the destruction of our brethren, the inhabitants of France and the island [England].” Matthew Paris wrote that English coinage was “so intolerably debased by money-clippers and forgers, that neither natives nor foreigners could look upon it with other than angry eyes and disturbed feelings.” The guilty, he continued, included “certain Jews and notorious Caursins [Cahors], and also some Flemish wool-merchants.” Yet, it was not only financiers and merchants who debased coins. Monarchs who controlled the mint intervened in the economy to bolster the amount of currency in circulation to meet their spending needs, thus debasing it and causing a cycle of inflation. Whoever had a monopoly over the money supply were the only ones to benefit from this greater increase in currency.⁴⁵

A sound currency was a key element in regulating the money economy and debasement the source of much misery, therefore convictions of coin clipping bore severe consequences. The law permitted the punishment of torture and death as well as confiscation of property, which went to the Crown, and the disinheritance of heirs for the offence of counterfeiting. Those accused were held in prison until a special dispensation was issued by the king. A 1232 edict in England prevented the exchange of old and new money, a restriction that was commonplace throughout Europe. All coins had to be bought and sold only in the king’s official exchanges to avoid the “false money” that was in circulation. Further changes were made in 1247 to the coins in an effort to make counterfeiting more difficult but these would turn out to be unsuccessful.⁴⁶

In October, 1278, a council meeting was held at Windsor to discuss the coin clipping problem. The decision was taken to arrest all of the Jews in England, along with all goldsmiths and officials at the mints and exchanges regardless of religion. Over a period of two days in November, those detained were dispersed to fortresses around the country. An estimated 600 Jewish males were taken from all parts of the realm and transported to the Tower of London and commissions were established to hear the charges against the accused. Officers of the king ransacked the homes of the accused looking for evidence of coin clipping and counterfeiting. The king let it be known that Jews might gain their release by paying a fine and some Jews bought their freedom. But the burden of heavy and increased taxation over the thirteenth century meant that the Jewish moneylenders no longer had the wealth or influence they possessed in the previous century.⁴⁷

An unknown number of those arrested were found guilty and executed, including Benedict of Winchester who, along with a fellow Jew from Winchester, Deudone, was imprisoned before he could take up the position of queen’s gold ←47 | 48→keeper. He was taken to the Tower of London on charges of “certain trespasses concerning the king’s money.” Four of his properties were seized and then forfeited before he was found guilty of the charges. On a cold day in January 1280, he and Deudone were “hanged for felony” and their chattels sold. Where large sums of money were at stake, there was always the risk that the eradication of debt and the appropriation of property were motivating factors in the imprisonment and punishment of moneylenders or that such concerns ran roughshod over judicial procedures. It may also have been the case that he was guilty of the common crime of coin clipping.⁴⁸

Around 200 Jews were executed and 29 Christians, including the king’s Master of the Exchange at the London mint, Philip de Cambio, and the assayer, William Harlewyn, who were hanged, drawn, and quartered for making and distributing inferior coinage. The prosecutions were an attempt to end a serious problem but in trying to stop coin clipping, money flowed into the king’s coffers. Primarily, Edward’s motivations, had more to do with solving the issue of debased coinage and filling his treasury, than it had to do with pursuing a policy based on prejudice toward Jews.⁴⁹

After the appropriations and fines resulting from the arrests and executions, the king began the process of recoinage which netted him around £36,000 in profit. An increase in the money supply does not necessarily enrich society but it does enrich the person or government that monopolizes it; in this case, the king. In May 1279, it was announced that,

all of the Jews lately “charged, indicted, and convicted of clipping the king’s money have now been punished with death, and certain of them have forfeited all their goods and chattels … and are imprisoned during the king’s pleasure … many Christians … by … divers grievances heretofore inflicted upon Christians by Jews endeavour from day to day to accuse and indict certain Jews not yet charged or indicted with trespasses of money by light and groundless … accusations, charging them to their terror with being guilty of such trespasses, in order that they may by threats of such accusations strike terror into the Jews and that they may extort money from them.”

After a lull, in 1283, however, there was an upswing once more in coin offences and other crimes concerning metals.⁵⁰

A costly expedition to Gascony and a large payment given to free Charles of Salerno, the son of Charles of Anjou, on top of the debt owed to the Riccardi (which was nearly £110,000), put Edward in the familiar situation of financial trouble. A clampdown on corruption by England’s justices—which brought in ←48 | 49→large fines and ended in the Chief Justice being exiled—brought in not nearly enough money. In addition, the problem over Jewish debt that grieved magnates and smallholders alike, had not vanished with the Statute. Instead, moneylending was now practiced covertly with false contracts. Deciding to rid himself of the issue once and for all, Edward decided on expulsion, a common punishment and one that Jews had experienced under rulers in France.⁵¹

In July 1290, Edward commanded that all Jews were to quit England before 1 November. His edict charged that in spite of a previous order that Jews should refrain from usury and earn a living from trade and labor instead, they had continued to lend at interest. The edict went on to scold the Jews for “maliciously deliberating amongst themselves,” and merely disguising their usury by calling it “courtesy” (curialitatum). Whatever they called it, the king stated, it was still a form of usury and one that he judged even more oppressive than before. He therefore concluded that edicts against usury were ineffective in restraining usurers. The only answer was to expel all Jews from England. In return, Edward was rewarded with the biggest tax of his reign. Even the Church agreed to a tax.⁵²

Banishment had been used as a form of punishment since ancient times and the subject of the first biblical story which told of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. It was regularly used in ancient empires and in medieval times for political transgressions, criminal behavior, vengeance, or to maintain social order. It is difficult to class the expulsions as antisemitic as we commonly understand that word. Brutal, certainly, callous, undoubtedly, but it has to be placed in the context of thirteenth-century England. England was densely occupied with a rising population and many lived on the edges of subsistence, barely scraping enough together to survive. A bad harvest could bring famine and plague in its wake, carrying off the young, old, and weak. It was a world where lives were short and often worth little, where people jostled to see rebels and others rightly or wrongly convicted of crimes against the Crown hanged alive, disemboweled, beheaded or their bodies quartered, where heads were displayed on spikes at city walls or castles and left to rot as a warning to others not to defy the monarch, and where war was an almost constant part of life. Exile and confiscation of property were familiar punishments for those who were condemned for some act against the Crown and was suffered by people of all standing, including clergymen, nobles, and even members of the royal family who had fallen out of favor.

By the time Edward ordered the expulsion in 1290, the Jewish moneylenders had declined financially. Four years after the Jews left England’s shores, Edward had the Riccardi arrested as “men who had deceived him.” The arrest and ←49 | 50→confiscation of assets, including the deprivation of the custom seals, came shortly after they were financially crippled by the war between England and France and after the company had refused to extend him further credit. Further arrests and confiscations of the Riccardi in France led to a run on their bank, their demise, and bankruptcy. The king, meanwhile, found new bankers in the form of the Frescobaldi of Florence. In the case of the Jews, debtors and especially those at risk of losing their lands, rejoiced at the expulsion order, but the celebration would not last long. Edward continued to press his people for money, by frequent and onerous taxation, threatening the clergy with outlaw status unless they paid up, and seizing food to feed his armies and goods (such as horses, carts, and boats) in return for future recompense. The battle between the earls, lesser knights, and the king continued but the issue of Jewish debt was no longer part of the discussion.⁵³

* * *

On Philip III’s death in 1285, his son with Isabella of Aragon was crowned king of France. Philip IV may have been handsome enough to deserve his nickname “the Fair,” but he was not universally admired. Bernard Saisset, the bishop of Pamiers, remarked that he was not a man, “but a statue,” or an owl because all he can do is stare, which may have been due to his extremely shy nature. He was, like Edward I, big on spending but permanently short of funds, obsessed with money and getting his hands on it however he could. If Edward was a petulant and difficult man for moneylenders, Philip was a creditor’s enemy, as the Riccardi found out to their ruin.⁵⁴

Because Philip had expensive wars to wage against England and Flanders, impressive buildings to erect, officials to pay, and, not least, a grand lifestyle to fund, he tolerated usury so long as it benefited him. At the same time, he passed measures that appeared to protect his subjects from its “excesses.” He allowed debtors to escape imprisonment if the loans they left unpaid were owed to Jews, while instructing his administrators to collect debts owed to Jews of the king (Juifs du Roi). If the goods involved in the transactions were “tainted by usury” then the money was forfeited to the royal treasury.

In need of more money for his war against Flanders, Philip IV debased the currency and then raised it to meet his monetary demands, prompting people to furtively describe him as a faux-monnayeur or counterfeiter. The practice of rulers manipulating currency would grow over the centuries and prompted the eminent medieval economist, Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320–1382) in the following century to protest. If usury was “bad, detestable, and unjust,” in his opinion, alteration of ←50 | 51→the coinage was far worse. Coinage belonged neither to kings nor princes but to the people, although the kings and princes would beg to differ as they brought the mints, and therefore the money supply, under their control. The rulers, Oresme wrote, had no right to alter or affect the value of that coinage as this was nothing more than a tyrannical act. By debasing the currency in order to lay their hands on more money they committed “robbery with violence or fraudulent extortion.” At least usury was a voluntary transaction between a willing usurer who lent money to a person who borrowed of his own free will. The borrower received some benefit from the loan and, generally, interest was not excessive or harmful to the public. This was especially true if there was competition in the moneylending profession. The alteration of coinage by royal authorities, by way of comparison, was “less voluntary and more against the will of [their] subjects, [who were] incapable of profiting” from such action at all, deeming them “utterly unnecessary.”⁵⁵

Philip had no ethical qualms about usury, but, as with most monarchs, he was willing to manipulate and exploit ill will towards moneylenders for his own financial gain. Like the Riccardi, Jewish moneylenders had their goods confiscated, including gold and silver accessories and household goods, sacred objects, clothing, linens, and anything else considered valuable. This action on the part of the king’s men indicated to others that Jewish moneylenders were fair game and so encouraged physical attacks. Jews’ homes were looted as riots broke out in Paris and other towns but there was little more to take as the Jews were no longer a profitable source of plunder. It was more to Philip’s advantage to denounce usury and take on the role of protector of the people against “usurious transactions.” Philip had already rid himself of the Riccardi but he was still deeply in debt to Jewish moneylenders and the Order of the Knights Templar. With advice from his councilors, such as Guillaume de Nogeret, an ambitious and unscrupulous former law professor from Languedoc, Philippe decided it was time to rid himself of all of them.⁵⁶

In 1306, Philip decreed the expulsion of the Jews, as had Edward I in England some sixteen years earlier. Over the summer and autumn, an unknown number of Jews left the kingdom of France for other, more welcoming, territories where usury was tolerated. Under Nogeret’s guidance, the king gladly took ownership of the exiled Jews’ property; as he had of the Riccardi’s. Not everyone greeted the exile of Jewish moneylenders with enthusiasm. The chronicler of Philippe’s reign, Geoffroi de Paris, wrote:

All the poor people complain

For the Jews were more generous

←51 | 52→

In the handling of their deals

Than the Christians do at present.

These ask for collaterals and deeds,

Pledges also, and grab everything

Until they have stripped them bare …

But if the Jews had remained

In the kingdom of France,

Christian souls would have had great relief

they have no longer.

A Norman chronicler of the fourteenth century was of like mind:

After the expulsion of the Jews [from France] they could not find any money except by borrowing it through agents from certain Christians, both clerics and laymen, who lent at such an enormous rate of interest that it was double what was charged by the Jews, and who did it in such a way that the debtors did not know the lenders who were in possession of their pledges. This was a dangerous situation, for if the agents died or gave up the business, they did not know where to recover them.

The Knights Templar fared the worst of all. One of the most powerful and wealthy military orders in Europe, the Templars, renounced personal wealth and pledged their permanent defence of Palestine and the holy places. In 1307, an order secretly prepared a month prior, directed the arrest of every French member of the Templars without warning and their property seized. Philippe’s attack on the Templars was helped by a schism in the Church. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Philip’s showdown with the papacy resulted in the abduction of Pope Boniface VIII. In 1304, the archbishop of Bordeaux was selected by the conclave as the new pope, Clement V. His decision to remain in France rather than Rome—settling in Avignon in 1309—resulted in a move away from Italian dominance of the papacy, especially as the next six popes were also French.

Beholden to the French king, Clement V called for a council to discuss the Knights Templar arrest and usury in general. In 1311, the Council of Vienne dissolved the Templars. With the Pope’s approval, fifty-four Templars accused of apostasy, sodomy, idolatry, and obscenity were burned to death at the Saint-Antoine gate outside of Paris. In 1314, the master of the order, Jacques de Molay, along with Geoffrey de Charnay faced the same fate on a scaffold erected opposite the cathedral of Notre Dame.⁵⁷

←52 | 53→

The Council also instructed the Inquisition to investigate monarchs who allowed usury. Because so many moneylenders hid interest payments, the Church decreed that lenders be forced to produce their record-keeping books for inspection. The Council further ruled that clergy be allowed to take their anti-usury preaching out onto the streets. This was a step too far for some rulers determined to exert their authority over an overweening pope. When the Inquisition attempted to go into various French towns to combat usury (including the southern towns of Carcassone, Limoux, and Pamiers), it was denied entrance. Philip made it clear that usury and its profits on French soil were solely the king’s affair, not the Church’s.⁵⁸

In the same year that the Jews were exiled, Philip returned to currency manipulation to fill his coffers. He devalued the currency around 39 percent which led to a dramatic rise in prices. Creditors called in their debts at the higher rate, which had tripled as had rents. One satirist scorned the king as turning “twenty into sixty, then twenty into four; and ten into thirty … Gold and silver, all is lost/And none will be restored.” A riot ensued that was put down by force, with a number of craftsmen hanged as an example to other would-be rioters. Taxation and fluctuation of the currency continued with Philip’s reign and it was not long after their expulsion that Lombards and Jews began filtering back to France. They resettled in various towns between 1307 and 1311, even though the expulsion had not been formerly lifted. In November 1314, at the age of forty-six, Philip IV suffered a stroke while out on a hunt and died just over three weeks later at Fontainebleu. It was the new king, Louis X, who officially allowed Jews to return to France.⁵⁹

* * *

The expulsion of Jews in England and France has long been a prime example of medieval antisemitism. Yet it is difficult to assess the actions of kings like Edward I and Philip IV as antisemitic. Their prime motivation did not stem from a personal animus towards Jews or their religion but from the demands for finance brought about by decades of costly wars, the expenditure for crusades, the building of defensive castles, upkeep of the royal household, maintenance of the kingdom, ransoms, bribes, and hospitality. No source of funding was sacred, as was clear from Edward’s raid on the clergy’s money and both kings attack on the Templars. Punishments for transgressions were harsh, and in some cases, obscenely brutal, with exile a convenient way to rid a monarch of a problem. Regardless of whether a few Jews were moneylenders, whether most had taken up other jobs, whether ←53 | 54→they were impoverished from years of taxation, or whether they were still active usurers, the perception and understanding in both England and France was that they were only settled in those countries for their capital. When usury became a political problem, and other sources of credit were found, it was expedient to expel them from their lands. Usury was an issue that had stoked violence and civil unrest in the past and would be a source of rebellion in the fourteenth century.

Notes

←54 | 55→←56 |←55 | 56→ 57→←57 | 58→←58 | 59→←59 | 60→←60 | 61→

1.Paul Rapin de Thoyras, An Abridgement of the History of England (London 1747), 217; Davis, “The Ethics of Arbitrage,” chap. 1; Vincent J. Cornell, “In the Shadow of Deuteronomy: Approaches to Interest in Judaism and Christianity,” in Interest in Islamic Economics: Understanding Riba, ed. Abdulkader Thomas (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

2.John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle (Princeton 1970); O’Carroll, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, 5.

3.Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 126; Ferguson, Ascent of Money, introduction.

4.Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 102, 103, 121; Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, 231.

5.Cave and Coulson, A Source Book for Medieval Economic History, 73; Jones, The Plantagenets, “L’Espace Plantagenet.”

6.David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 222–23; Robert Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000–1500 (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 159; Mundill, “Christian and Jewish Lending Patterns,” 45; Theodore Evergates, ed., Feudal Society in Medieval France: Documents from the County of Champagne (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 28–30; Mollat and Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, 26; Borer, The City of London, 55, 84; Robert C. Stacey, “Jewish Lending,” 89, 93–95 and “The English Jews under Henry III,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), 41; Materials for the History of Thomas Becket (Rolls Series, 67, 1875–85), vol. III, 19, quoted in Dobson, The Jewish Communities, 4. Following J. Jacobs in The Jews of Angevin England, Dobson believes the word creditores is an error and that debitores was intended. Graeme Donald Snooks, “The Dynamic Role of the Market in the Anglo-Norman Economy and Beyond 1086–1300,” in Commercialising Economy, 27; Kocka, Capitalism; C. Hollister, Robert Stacey, and Robin Chapman Stacey, The Making of England to 1399 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2001), 225–26.

7.John D. Hosler, “Henry II, William of Newburgh, and the Development of English Anti-Judaism” in Christian Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Middle Ages: A Casebook, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 170; Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 79.

8.Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577) quoted in Bernard Grébanier, The Truth About Shylock (New York: Random House, 1962), 21–22.

9.Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, vol. 2 (London: J. Johnson, 1807), 204–06.

10.William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 98.

11.William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Book 4, chapters 9 and 10 in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett (London: Longman, 1885); Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 2, 210–11; Dobson, The Jewish Communities, 12; Shatzmiller, Cultural Exchange, 41; Robert R. Mundill, The King’s Jews: Money, Massacre, and Exodus in Medieval England (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 80; William of Newburgh, History, chap. 9.

12.Mundill, The King’s Jews, 81; Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 222–23; Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 159; Borer, The City of London, 84; Mundill, “Christian and Jewish Lending Patterns,” 45.

13.Mundill, The King’s Jews, 80–81.

14.The quote is by The Anonymous of Béthune; Robert C. Stacey, “Jews and Christians in 12th Century England: Some Dynamics of a Changing Relationship,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, eds. Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); Mundill, The King’s Jews, 81; Jones, The Plantagenets, “Hunt for an Heir”; Seabourne, Royal Regulation of Loans and Sales, 31.

15.Jones, The Plantagenets, “Salvaging the wreck” and “A Cruel Master”; R.B. Dobson, “The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York,” Transactions and Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England) 26 (1974–78): 25, 35, and The Jewish Communities of Medieval England, 24; Robin R. Mundill, “Lumbard and Son: The Businesses and Debtors of Two Jewish Moneylenders in Late Thirteenth-Century England,” Jewish Quarterly Review 82.1/2 (July-Oct. 1991): 141; The Chronicles of Melrose.

16.Jones, The Plantagenets, “Kingship At Last.”

17.Joe and Caroline Hillaby, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 239–40, 408; John Paul Davis, The Gothic King: A Biography of Henry III (London and Chicago: Peter Owen, 2013), Kindle ed.; John Stow, A Survey of London, Written in the Year 1598, Project Gutenberg Ebook (2013), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42959/42959-h/42959-h.htm; Postan, Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 552.

18.Hillaby, The Palgrave Dictionary, 240; Calendar of Close Roles: Edward I, April 25, 1275, 162; R.H. Britnell, “England and Northern Italy in the Early Fourteenth Century: The Economic Contrasts,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 39 (1989):169; Emilie Amt, The Succession of Henry II in England: Royal Government Restored 1149–1159 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1993), 92; Borer, The City of London, 84, 97–98; Jones, The Plantagenets, “Edward At Sea.”

19.For the life of Licoricia, see, Suzanne Bartlet, Licoricia of Winchester: Marriage, Motherhood, and Murder in the Medieval Anglo-Jewish Community (Portland, OR and Edgware, UK: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009).

20.Evergates, Feudal Society in Medieval France, 26, 84–85.

21.Jordan, Louis IX, 101

22.Shatzmiller, Cultural Exchange, 80–81, 91; Gilbert S. Rosenthal introduction to Yehiel Nissam da Pisa, Banking and Finance Among Jews in Renaissance Italy: A Critical Edition of The Eternal Life (Haye Olam) (New York: Bloch Pub., 1962), 13; Robert Chazan, ed., Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (West Orange NJ: Behrman House, 1980); John H. Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the ‘Financial Revolution’: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability,” The International History Review 3.25 (2003): 507, 518, 521; Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades: Vol. 1: The First Crusade and the Foundations of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: CUP, 1951), 134–35; Geisst, Beggar Thy Neighbor, chap. 1; Matthew Paris, English History from the Year 1235 to 1273, v.1, 2; Sibon, “Peut-on croire en la parole du juif?,” 242; Weiner J. Cahnman, “Socio-Economic Causes of Antisemitism,” Social Problems 5.1 (1957): 24; Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Canon 67, http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/344latj.html; Hunt and Murray, A History of Business in Medieval Europe, 72; Hawkes, The Culture of Usury, 65.

23.Golb, The Jews of Medieval Normandy, 421, 422–23, 426, 429; Layettes du Trésor des Chartes v. III, 3782 and 3783, Archives Nationales (Paris: Henri Plon, 1902); Thomas N. Bisson, Medieval France and Her Pyrenean Neighbours: Studies in Early Institutional History (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 51; Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 113; John H. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150–1300 (New York: Longman, 2000), 100; L. Auvray, Les registres de Grégoire XI, v.1 (Paris: E. De Boccard, 1955), col. 691.

24.Reinert and Fredona, “Merchants,” 5; John H. Pryor, Business Contracts of Medieval Provence: Selected Notulae from the Cartulary of Giraud Amalric of Marseilles, 1248 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), 60, 63, 75, 77; Roover, Money, Banking, and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges, 12.

25.Pryor, Business Contracts of Medieval Provence, 83, 86, 89; Julie L. Mell, “Religion and Economy in Pre-Modern Europe: The Medieval Commercial Revolution and the Jews” (PhD diss., University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill, 2007), 191–92.

26.Mell, “Religion and Economy,” 228–29; Pryor, Business Contracts of Medieval Provence, 83, 86, 89.

27.Ibid, 115–16; Mell, “Religion and Economy,” 192, 212.

28.Mell, “Religion and Economy,” 220.

29.Ibid., 200, 206–08 and Mell, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, vol. 2, 230–32; Reinert and Fredona, “Merchants,” 11–13.

30.Mell, “Religion and Economy,” 225–26.

31.Golb, The Jews of Medieval Normandy, 423, 429.

32.Jones, The Plantagenets, preface, “Kingship At Last”; Dobson, “The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York,” 36; Hillaby, The Palgrave Dictionary, 240; Zefira Entin Rokéaḥ, “An Anglo-Jewish Assembly, or ‘Mini-Parliament’ in 1287,” in Thirteenth-Century England VIII: Proceedings of the Durham Conference 1999, eds. Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell, and Robin Frame, (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2001), 71, 73; A.C. Chibnall, Sherington: Fiefs and Fields of a Buckinghamshire Village (Cambridge: CUP, 1965), 51–52; Britnall, The Commercialisation of English Society, 128.

33.Dobson, “The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York,” 36, 39–40.