Edward I’s Destruction of England’s Jews

On 2 August 1274 Edward, the eldest son of Henry III, returned to England from the Crusades. He had been gone for four long years and much had happened in his absence. Most obviously, his father had died on 16 November 1272, having reigned for 56 years. Despite Edward’s absence from the country he had been the heir apparent since at least 1254 and there was no question that he would be accepted as England’s next king. Just weeks after his return, on 19 August Edward was crowned king of England at Westminster. Among his new subjects was a community of Jews, numbering perhaps 3,000. Established by William the Conqueror in the wake of the Norman Conquest, the Jewish community originated in northern France and Germany. Until 1135 they were based in London but thereafter began to settle in the south and east of the country. Throughout their time in England, the Jewish population was reliant on the Crown for protection. During the 12th century this was generally a beneficial relationship and the Jews prospered. Things began to change in the 13th century: John’s reign was not a good time for the Jews, but then it was not a particularly good time for anybody. Although the initial years of his son’s (Henry III) reign witnessed a politically and economically successful Jewish community, they were subject to increasing royal exploitation from the 1240s onwards. Increasing restrictions were placed upon the Jews, as the Crown worked to systematically drain the community of its wealth. The Jewish community that Edward inherited, therefore, was a shadow of the bold and prosperous one that his father had inherited.

In the year or so after Edward’s coronation several acts targeted the Jews. These cannot be ascribed to the intemperate actions of a novice king, new to government, who wanted to demonstrate his Christian credentials. As the work of historians such as Rodolphe Billaud has shown, since at least 1254 Edward had undergone a long political apprenticeship during one of the most turbulent periods of the English Middle Ages. He had taken an increasingly active role in Jewish affairs throughout the 1260s, by which point the community had been subject to harsh financial exploitation by the Crown for more than 20 years. Most obviously, in 1269, the Provisions of Jewry were issued by Henry III ‘with the advice of Lord Edward, our eldest son’. Designed to protect Christian debtors, this legislation targeted a particularly unpopular type of moneylending transaction, as well as prohibiting the sale of debts more generally. Edward was, therefore, beginning to think about (and have a role in) Jewish policy well before he ascended to the throne.

‘The destruction of the Jews’

Traditionally, historians date Edward’s first formal contact with the Jews to 4 June 1262, when the revenues of the Jewish community were granted to him for a period of three years. When thinking about Edward’s relationship with the Jews, however, it is useful to start with his birth on the evening of 17-18 June 1239. Just one week later, what the chronicler Matthew Paris would later describe as ‘the destruction of the Jews’ began, which would see the Jews stripped of their money and privileges, and ultimately banished from the kingdom. The first step in this process came when Henry III required that the Jews make payments, valued at one third the value of their estate, as a tax. This was followed, over the next 15 years, by a series of regular, high level, tallages (a form of tax which required the payment of a specific sum) which served to decimate the wealth of the Anglo-Jewish community. From almost the day of Edward’s birth, therefore, the Jews were regarded as a source for the Crown’s increasingly harsh financial demands, shaped by hardening religious attitudes as well as the fact that Jews (unlike the Crown’s other subjects) could be taxed without consent. The abuse of Anglo-Jewry during these years surely shaped his later actions.

Tallages on the Jewish community were administered via an important process. Although the Crown generally specified how much was to be paid, usually a set number of marks (a mark being worth 13s 4d or two-thirds of a pound), it was down to the Jews themselves to determine how much would be paid and by whom. This was conventionally done by a group of the leading Jews, supported by those of a middling rank, and sometimes even the poor. In this way, it was ensured that those who could most afford it bore the heaviest burden. Aaron of York, for example, was the richest Jew in England in 1241, with an estate worth somewhere in the region of £20,000. Even Aaron’s fortune could not satisfy the Crown’s incessant demands for money in the following years indefinitely. So in 1255 Richard of Cornwall (Henry III’s brother) had to excuse Aaron from his tallage obligations on account of his ‘great poverty’. In all, the Jews paid more than 100,000 marks to the Crown between 1241 and 1255, equating to around one third of all the coins circulating in England at this point. Matthew Paris’ ‘destruction of the Jews’ was well underway by the time that Edward came to the throne, with the wealth of the Jewish community having been vastly depleted and their rights restricted.

Within weeks of his return to England in 1274, Edward, in need of cash to replenish his coffers following his crusade, imposed a fresh tallage which, as in 1239, was set at one third the value of each Jew’s goods and debts. When this was ordered is unclear, but given that the first payments were made on 1 October it must surely have been commanded within weeks of his return. Remarkably a set of four manuscript rolls has survived, detailing each payment to the so-called ‘Great Tallage’. As a result, we can access nearly 450 individual payments, totalling approximately £1,600. On Monday 1 October 1274, for example, the Prior of St Katherine’s outside Lincoln paid 10s 1d on behalf of the Lincoln Jewry. The tallage realised only a fraction of the sums which had been received by the Crown in 1239, which was assessed at the same rate, reflecting the perilous financial state of the Anglo-Jewish community that Edward inherited.

To make matters worse, when in many cases they could ill afford one set of tallage payments, Edward also set about collecting the arrears from his father’s last tallage. Imposed in January 1272, just months before Henry III’s death, this had commanded that the Jews pay 5,000 marks into the royal coffers. Well under half of that sum had actually been paid, presumably because of difficulties finding the cash after three decades of heavy taxation. Edward issued orders to collect the outstanding balance. On 1 November he appointed officers who had the power to seize the goods of individual Jews, as well as debts owed to them. Any Jew who was unable to pay was commanded to leave the country, with their wife and children, via Dover within three days of the date when their obligations became due.

Expulsion

Nor was talk of expulsion an idle threat. On 2 October, a month earlier, Edward had issued an order expelling the Jews from Bridgnorth (Shropshire). Soon thereafter, in January 1275, Eleanor of Provence, Edward’s famously formidable mother, requested that her son expel the Jews from those towns which she had been assigned to sustain her during widowhood. Her reasons for requesting this are unclear. Possibly, it was done in consideration of how her relationship with the Jews would impact her immortal soul. Equally, it might have been prompted by personal antisemitism. It could also have been an attempt to secure her authority within her dower towns. Having waited since 1236 to claim them, it is possible that she wanted to remove any excuse the Crown might have to meddle in her affairs. Whatever the reason, Edward agreed to her request. On 12 January he provided a ‘grant to Eleanor, the king’s mother, that no Jew shall dwell or stay in any towns which she holds in dower’. This was followed four days later by a much fuller writ, which specified precisely which Jewish communities were to be expelled and where they should go. The Jews of Cambridge were to go to Norwich, Gloucester to Bristol, Marlborough to Devizes, and Worcester to Hereford. To this list, we can also add Andover, where there was a small number of Jews, who presumably went to Devizes or Winchester. Although the expelled Jews were given safe conducts, which covered both their persons and goods, they were nonetheless being forced from their homes to relocate to another part of the country.

It has always been assumed that the expulsion orders were enforced in their entirety. This is not entirely accurate. It is true that the Jews left with their movable goods, but they were also commanded to take with them the archae, or chests, which held records of Jewish business activities. A list of chests from across the country, produced in November 1290, shows this provision was only partially complied with because there were still chests at Cambridge and Worcester. What is more, an inventory of the Cambridge chest was produced in 1292-93, which includes five transactions registered after January 1275. One of these is dated to 8 May 1275, and details that Henry son of Richard of Abbotsley (Huntingdonshire) had borrowed £10 from Aaron, son of Vives. This is clear evidence of just how quickly Jews returned to Cambridge to conduct business. That the remaining four debts came from the 1280s shows that they maintained relationships in the town well after they had been expelled.

The mechanisms by which the chests were administered adds an additional element to this narrative. Although they were established by the Crown in 1194 the archae were actually managed by the towns in which they were held. Each chest had three locks and was administered by three pairs of officers: two Jews, two Christians, and two scribes who were responsible for recording transactions. In this sense, a Jew could not lend money to a Christian, nor a Christian borrow money from a Jew, without the acquiescence of the whole community (Jews and Christians) through their representatives. The post-expulsion transactions, therefore, cannot have been cases in which an individual Jewish moneylender returned to Cambridge. Instead, the officers appointed to administer the chest would also have needed to come together. In their presence, one of the clerks would have written the transaction out; it would then have been read aloud by one of the Christians, and only if no objection was raised would it be entered into the chest and thereby made enforceable.

The Statute of the Jewry

At the same time that Aaron, son of Vives was in Cambridge to lend money, Parliament was in session at Westminster. Although no business relating to the Jews was passed, this was probably by accident rather than design. Parliament sat throughout May and would surely have continued into June had the king not fallen ill. When it reconvened, in mid-October, one of the flagship pieces of legislation passed was the Statute of the Jewry (1275). This included a wide-ranging set of regulations which impacted upon Jewish businesses, where Jews could live, and sought to distinguish them from the broader (Christian) community.

Most obviously, the Statute prohibited Jewish moneylenders from lending money at usury. In essence, this was the act of making money from money, which had long been a target of the Church. Previously, there had been work arounds, allowing Jewish moneylending transactions to carry interest without being overtly usurious. The debtor was provided with a grace period, from a few weeks to more than a year. Only then, if the money was not paid, would the debt begin to accrue interest as a form of compensation to the creditor. That even this form of credit was discontinued after 1275 shows just how severe the new restrictions were. Those Jews who had previously operated as moneylenders (and they would only have been a small minority of the Anglo-Jewish population) would have to make their living in other ways.

The only (slight) silver lining for Jewish creditors was that the Statute did not cancel existing debts. Instead, any debts which had been entered into before 13 October (the feast of St Edward the Confessor and the day that Parliament had been meant to convene) were valid, and any interest which had accrued up to that point would be honoured. Even so, Jews who had previously made even a portion of their income via moneylending could no longer do so, and they were forced to find other ways to make, or supplement, their incomes. This has prompted some historians to speculate that the Jews continued to lend money in the coming years but simply concealed the interest. Although understandable, it is difficult to see how this could have worked in practice. Had transactions merely concealed interest, it would have been easy for Christian debtors to dispute the debt in court; it is likely, therefore, that Jews were not generally flouting the prohibition against usury.

Many former Jewish moneylenders appear to have shifted towards commodity dealing. That is, they would extend credit by speculating that the yields of specific commodities would be more than the value of their investment. The nature of such deals means that they varied from place to place depending on the nature of the local market. In Lincolnshire, for example, there was extensive sheep farming, so it was only natural that speculation would focus on the wool market. Although an obvious shift in terms of credit activities, this did serve to place Jews in a grey area. If they paid £10 at the start of the year and the clip or crop actually netted them £15, did the act of receiving more than they had invested constitute usury? The answer to that question was probably ‘no’, but it did, at the very least, create the possibility, or illusion, that this might have been the case. In this sense, Jewish creditors were in a more precarious position now than they had been for the previous century in dealing with money.

Much of what else was specified in the Statute reiterated older requirements, although if the provisions relating to usury are anything to go by, they were likely enforced with a new vigour. One such requirement of the Statute was that Jews wear the Jewish badge or tabula, so called because it took the form of the two tablets of Mosaic Law. Such a measure was not new. Indeed, distinguishing badges had been imposed by Muslim rulers in Spain upon Christians and Jews in those lands for centuries, while the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) had stipulated that Jews across Christendom were to wear it. England was the first region to adopt this requirement. In 1218 Henry III’s minority government specified that the badge, to be made of white cloth or parchment, should be affixed to the outside of each Jew’s clothes. In reality most Jews and Jewish communities purchased exemptions to wearing the badge during the 1220s, making it unlikely that the badge was actually worn. It was only in 1253 that the Crown specified once more that it was to be worn, and this may have had more effect.

The Statute of 1275 went further, requiring that all Jews over the age of seven should henceforth wear the badge. This was to be made of yellow cloth, measuring six inches by three inches, and cut in the form of the tablets, so that it was clearly visible. Moreover, restrictions were placed upon where the Jews could live. Specifically, they were to reside in towns with an archa whereas previously it had been possible, with a royal licence, to live in settlements beyond the main urban centres.

This point might explain why such emphasis was placed on the removal of the archae from Eleanor of Provence’s dower towns earlier in the year. If so, it would provide evidence that the Statute had been planned since at least the beginning of the year, and also that it had been intended to be enacted at the Easter Parliament had Edward’s ill health not intervened.

The end of the beginning

The Jews were also singled out from their Christian neighbours in another way in the Statute. From 1275 each Jew over the age of 12 would be required to pay an annual poll tax of 3d each Easter. In the 13th century, as in the 1980s, the concept of a poll tax was deeply unpopular and difficult to enforce. Yet Edward was taking every opportunity to squeeze every last penny out of the Jewish community. This might go some way towards explaining why, in early 1290, a tax collector at Oxford (who was also a Jewish convert to Christianity) was chased out of the town, beaten with his own scales. Records of payments towards the poll tax survive from the early 1280s and show that around 1,000 individuals made contributions. Accounting for those who might be absent from the returns (on account of age or lack of wealth) this would suggest a Jewish population by the end of the 13th century of somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 Jews. This compares to a Christian population of somewhere in the region of 2.5 million, highlighting just how small a percentage of the English population Jews constituted.

At the same time, the Statute attempted to make provision for what Jews could do instead of moneylending. First, they would be encouraged to engage in trade (including in commodities) with Christian merchants. Although some Jewish creditors undoubtedly attempted this they were, to a large extent, hamstrung by the requirement that they live in towns with an archa. Unless one was present they could not easily move to a town where business opportunities presented themselves, nor move on once they had dried up. This placed Jewish merchants at a severe disadvantage compared with their Christian competitors, who could move freely in the pursuit of their business ventures.

The final, and most convoluted, element of the Statute provided the possibility that Jews might purchase farms, if they were unable to make a living from trade or labouring. Leaving aside the practicalities of such an order, this presumably followed Augustinian teaching that Jews ought to be below Christians, stripping them of the power that moneylending gave them over Christians. They would only be permitted to hold those farms for a period of ten years or fewer, however, and the licence to do so would expire after 15 years. It is difficult to see how this can ever have worked in reality. Even if a Jew did avail themselves of this provision, within a decade they would be back to the same position, struggling to make a living in an increasingly hostile environment.

The Statute of the Jewry (1275) brought to an end a hard year for the Jews. This had seen them subjected to heavy tallages, banished from their homes in Bridgnorth and Eleanor of Provence’s dower towns, their livelihoods restricted, increasing measures to limit where they could live and to drain them of the last of their wealth, and measures to keep them separate from the broader Christian population were imposed. In the Churchillian sense, however, the Statute of the Jewry was only the end of the beginning.

The model which had been set in 1274-75 would be repeated over the next 15 years. The Jews continued to be subject to regular tallages which, in conjunction with the poll tax and other payments, placed a financial burden upon the community which it could ill afford to bear. After half a century of heavy taxation, first by Henry III and then by Edward I, many Jewish coffers had been stripped bare. Equally, the Jews were subject to state trials in 1278-79 in which they were accused of coin-clipping. An act of petty treason, this saw hundreds of Jews imprisoned on (largely spurious) charges, with 269 Jews being executed at the Tower of London alone. This perhaps represented around ten per cent of the Jewish population in England.

Finally, in 1290, Edward issued orders of expulsion. Unlike those of 1274-75, this covered all the Jews in England. Promulgated on 18 July, they commanded that the Jews leave the country by All Saints Day, 1 November. They would not be permitted to return until the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.

Dean A. Irwin is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Lincoln and is writing a book on Jews and Christians in Medieval England.