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Title: The expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290
Author: B. L. Abrahams
Release date: May 4, 2026 [eBook #78599]
Language: English
Original publication: Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1895
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78599
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM ENGLAND IN 1290 ***
Arnold Prize Essay, 1894.
THE EXPULSION OF THE
JEWS FROM ENGLAND IN 1290
BY
B. L. ABRAHAMS
_Formerly Scholar of Balliol College._
Oxford
B. H. BLACKWELL 50 AND 51, BROAD STREET
London
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO.
M DCCC XCV
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WERTHEIMER, LEA & CO.
CIRCUS PLACE, LONDON WALL.
This Essay, to which the Arnold Prize in the University of Oxford
was awarded in 1894, has appeared in the _Jewish Quarterly Review_
for October, 1894, and January and April, 1895. I am indebted to the
Editors of the _Review_ for permission to republish it.
I wish to express my obligations to _Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica: a
Bibliographical Guide to Anglo-Jewish History_, compiled by Messrs.
JOSEPH JACOBS and LUCIEN WOLF, and to _The Jews of Angevin England_,
by Mr. JOSEPH JACOBS. Nearly all the passages bearing on Anglo-Jewish
history, down to 1206, are contained in the latter book, and many of
the references in the earlier part of my essay might have been made
to its pages. I thought it better, however, to refer direct to the
original authorities, and have, as a rule, mentioned Mr. Jacobs’ book
only when using passages in it which have been nowhere else printed.
Some articles which I have contributed to Mr. R. H. I. PALGRAVE’S
_Dictionary of Political Economy_, to the First Volume of the
_Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England_, and to the
_Jewish Chronicle_ for April 26th, 1895, contain information bearing on
the subject of this Essay.
THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM ENGLAND IN 1290.
The expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward I. is a measure
concerning the causes of which no contemporary historian gives, or
pretends to give, any but the most meagre information. It was passed
by the King in his “secret council,” of the proceedings of which
we naturally know nothing. Of the occasion that suggested it, each
separate writer has his own account, and none has a claim to higher
authority than the rest; and yet there is much in the circumstances
connected with it that calls for explanation. How was it that, at a
time when trade and the need for capital were growing, the Jews, who
were reputed to be among the great capitalists of Europe, were expelled
from England? How did Edward, a king who was in debt from the moment
he began his reign till the end, bring himself to give up the revenue
that his father and grandfather had derived from the Jews? How could
he, as an honourable king, drive out subjects who were protected by
a Charter that one of his predecessors had granted, and another had
solemnly confirmed? To answer these questions we must consider what
was the position that the Jews occupied in England, how it was forced
on them, and how it brought them into antagonism at various times with
the interests of the several orders of the English people, and with
the teachings of the Catholic Church. We shall thus find the origin
of forces strong enough when they converged to bring about the result
which is to be accounted for.
I.--THE JEWS FROM THEIR ARRIVAL TO 1190.
Among the foreigners who flocked to England at, or soon after, the
Conquest were many families of French Jews. They brought with them
money, but no skill in any occupation except that of lending it out
at interest. They lent to the King, when the ferm of his counties, or
his feudal dues were late in coming in;[1] to the barons, who, though
lands and estates had been showered on them, nevertheless often found
it hard, without doubt, to procure ready money wherewith to pay for
luxuries, or to meet the expense of military service; and to suitors
who had to follow the King’s Court from one great town to another, or
to plead before the Papal Curia at Rome.[2]
But though they thus came into contact with many classes, and had
kindly relations with some, they remained far more alien to the masses
of the people around them than even the Normans, in whose train they
had come to England. Even the Norman baron must, a hundred years after
the Conquest, have become something of an Englishman. He held an
estate, of which the tenants were English; he presided over a court
attended by English suitors. In battle he led his English retainers. He
and the Englishman worshipped in the same church, and in it the sons
of the two might serve as priests side by side. But the Jews remained,
during the whole time of their sojourn in England, sharply separated
from, at any rate, the common people around them by peculiarities of
speech, habits and daily life, such as must have aroused dread and
hatred in an ignorant and superstitious age. Their foreign faces alone
would have been enough to mark them out. Moreover, they generally
occupied, not under compulsion, but of their own choice, a separate
quarter of each town in which they dwelt.[3] And in their isolation
they lived a life unlike that of any other class. None of them were
feudal landowners, none farmers, none villeins, none members of the
guilds. They did not join in the national Watch and Ward. They alone
were forbidden to keep the mail and hauberk which the rest of the
nation was bound to have at hand to help in preserving the peace.[4]
They were not enrolled in the Frank-pledge, that society that brought
neighbours together and taught them to be interested in the doings
of one another by making them responsible for one another’s honesty.
They did not appear at the Court Leet or the Court Baron, at the
Town-moot or the Shire-moot. They went to no church on Sundays, they
took no sacrament; they showed no signs of reverence to the crucifix;
but, instead, they went on Friday evening and Saturday morning to a
synagogue of their own, where they read a service in a foreign tongue,
or sang it to strange Oriental melodies. When they died they were
buried in special cemeteries, where Jews alone were laid.[5] At home
their very food was different from that of Christians. They would not
eat of a meal prepared by a Christian cook in a Christian house. They
would not use the same milk, the same wine, the same meat as their
neighbours. For them cattle had to be killed with special rites; and,
what was worse, it sometimes happened that, some minute detail having
been imperfectly performed, they rejected meat as unfit for themselves,
but considered it good enough to be offered for sale to their Christian
neighbours.[6] The presence of Christian servants and nurses in their
households made it impossible that any of their peculiarities should
remain unobserved or generally unknown.[7]
Thus, living as semi-aliens, growing rich as usurers, and observing
strange customs, they occupied in the twelfth century a position that
was fraught with danger. But, almost from their first arrival in the
country, they had enjoyed a kind of informal Royal protection,[8]
though, as to the nature of their relations with the King during the
first hundred and thirty years of their residence, very little is
known. It was probably less close than it afterwards became, for the
liability to attack and the need for protection had not yet manifested
themselves.
But, at the end of the eleventh century, there began to spread
throughout Europe a movement which, when it reached England, converted
the vague popular dislike of the Jews into an active and violent
hostility. While the Norman conquerors were still occupied in settling
down in England, the King organising his realm, and the barons
enjoying, dissipating, or forfeiting their newly-won estates, popes and
priests and monks had been preaching the Crusade to the other nations
of civilised Europe. At one of the greatest and most imposing of all
the Church Councils that were ever held, where were present lay nobles
and clerics of all nations, attending each as his own master, and able
to act on the impulse of the moment, Urban II., in 1095, told the
tale of the wrong that Christians had to suffer at the hands of the
enemies of Christ. He told his hearers how the Eastern people, a people
estranged from God, had laid waste the land of the Christians with fire
and sword; had destroyed churches, or misused them for their own rites;
had circumcised Christians, poured their blood on altars and fonts,
scourged and impaled men, and dishonoured women.[9] Such denunciations,
followed by the appeal to all present to help Jerusalem, which was
“ruled by enemies, enslaved by the godless, and calling aloud to be
freed,” excited, for the first time in Europe, a furious and fanatical
hatred of Eastern and non-Christian races. The Jews were such a race,
as well as the Saracens, and between the two the Crusaders scarcely
distinguished. Before they left home and fortune to fight God’s enemies
abroad, it was natural that they should kill or convert those whom they
met nearer home. Through all central Europe, from France to Hungary,
the bands that gathered together to make their way to the Holy Land
fell on the Jews and offered them the choice between the sword and the
font.[10]
The disasters that followed the first Crusade brought with them
an increase in the ferocity of the attacks to which the Jews of
Continental Europe were subjected, and S. Bernard, when he preached
the second Crusade, found that he had revived a spirit of fanaticism
that he was powerless to quell. He had wished for the reconquest of
the Holy Land as a result that would bring honour to the Christian
religion; but his followers and imitators thought less of the end than
of the bloodshed that was to be the means. A monk, “who skilfully
imitated the austerity of religion, but had no immoderate amount of
learning,”[11] went through the Rhineland preaching that all Jews
who were found by the Crusaders should be killed as enemies of the
Christian faith. It was in vain that Bernard appealed to the Christian
nations whom his eloquence had aroused, in the hope that “the zeal of
God which burnt in them would not fail altogether to be tempered with
knowledge.” He himself narrowly escaped attack: and the Jews suffered
from the second Crusade as they had suffered from the first.[12]
England was so closely related to the Churches of the Continent that
it could not fail to be affected by the great movement. But the first
Crusade was preached when the Conquest was still recent, and the
Normans had no leisure to leave their new country; the second, during
the last period of anarchy in the reign of Stephen.
Thus there were, during the first hundred years after the Council of
Clermont, few English Crusaders. Yet the Crusading spirit, working
in a superstitious mediæval population, called forth a danger that
was destined to be as fatal to the English Jews as were the massacres
to their brethren on the Continent. The Pope who preached the first
Crusade had told his hearers that Eastern nations were in the habit of
circumcising Christians and using their blood in such a way as to show
their contempt for the Christian religion. This charge was naturally
extended to the Jews as well. What alterations it underwent in its
circulation it is hard to say; but in 1146, a tale was spread among
the populace of Norwich, and encouraged by the bishop, that the Jews
had killed a boy named William, to use his blood for the ritual of
that most suspicious feast, their Passover. The story was supported by
no evidence more trustworthy than that of an apostate Jew, which was
so worthless that the Sheriff refused to allow the Jews to appear in
the Bishop’s Court to answer the charge brought against them, and took
them under his protection. But the popular suspicion of the Jews lent
credibility to the story, and so terrible a feeling was aroused that
many of the Jews of Norwich dispersed into other lands, and of those
who remained many were killed by the people in spite of the protection
of the Sheriff.[13] The accusation once made naturally recurred, first
at Gloucester, in 1168, and then at Bury St. Edmund’s, in 1181. “The
Martyrs” were regularly buried in the nearest church or religious
house, and the miracles that they all worked would alone have been
enough to continually renew the belief in the terrible story.[14]
Under the firm reign of Henry II., anti-Jewish feeling found no further
expression in act. The King, like his predecessors, gave and secured
to the Jews special privileges so great as to arouse the envy of their
neighbours. They were allowed to settle their own disputes in their own
_Beth Din_, or Ecclesiastical Court, and in so far to enjoy a privilege
that was granted only under strict limitations to the Christian
Church.[15] They were placed, apparently, under the special protection
of the royal officers of each district.[16] They lived in safety, and
they made considerable contributions to the Royal Exchequer.
The death of Henry II. and the accession of Richard I., the first
English Crusading King, brought trouble, as was but natural, to the
rich and royally favoured infidels of the land where the blood
accusation had its birth. The interregnum between the death of one
King and the proclamation of the “peace” of his successor was always
a time of danger and lawlessness during the first two centuries after
the Conquest, and the growth of the crusading spirit, and of the
popular belief in the truth of the blood accusation, caused all the
forces of disorder to work in one direction, viz., against the Jews.
The day of Richard’s coronation was the first opportunity for a great
exhibition of the anti-Jewish fanaticism of the populace. The nobles
from all parts of the country brought with them to London large trains
of servants and attendants, who were left to occupy themselves as
best they might in the streets, while their lords were present at the
ceremony. The Jews, who had been refused permission to enter the Abbey,
took up a prominent position outside. Their appearance exasperated the
crowd, and in the mediæval world a crowd was irresistible. While the
service was proceeding, the Jews were fiercely attacked by the “wild
serving men” of the nobles and the lower orders of citizens. One at
least was compelled to accept baptism to save himself from death. Later
in the same day, when the King and magnates were banqueting in the
palace, the attack on the Jews was renewed. The strong houses of the
Jewry were besieged and fired, and the inhabitants were massacred. But
soon “avarice got the better of cruelty,” and in spite of the efforts
of the King’s officers the city was given up to plunder and rapine.[17]
Though the King was bitterly angry at what had happened, the first
attempt at punishment showed him how powerless he was against the
forces hostile to the Jews. Had the offenders been nobles or prominent
citizens, he could, when the first irresistible disorder had subsided,
have taken vengeance at his leisure. But what could he do against a
collection of serving-men and poor citizens, whom no one knew, who had
come together and had separated in one day? When he departed for the
Crusades, he left behind him all the materials for more outbreaks of
the same kind. In the more populous towns Crusaders were continually
gathering together in order to set out for the Holy Land in company:
and they, aided by the lower citizens, clerics, and poor countrymen,
and in some cases by ruined landholders, fell on and killed the Jews
wherever they had settlements in England, at Norwich, York, Bury St.
Edmunds, Lynn, Lincoln, Colchester, and Stamford.[18] Again the Royal
officers were unable to touch the offenders. When the Chancellor
arrived with an army at York, the scene of the most horrible of all
the massacres, he found that the murderers were Crusaders, who had
long embarked for the Holy Land, peasants and poor townsmen who had
retired from the neighbourhood, and some bankrupt nobles, who had
fled to Scotland. The citizens humbly represented that they were
not responsible for the outrage and were too weak to prevent it. No
punishment was possible except the infliction of a few fines, and the
Chancellor marched back with his army to London.[19]
It was clear that the King must strengthen his connection with the
Jews. He could not afford to lose them or to leave them continually
liable to plunder. They were too rich. In 1187, when Henry II. had
wanted to raise a great sum from all his people he had got nearly as
much from the Jews as from his Christian subjects. From the former he
got a fourth of their property, £60,000, from the latter a tenth, or
£70,000.[20] It is of course improbable that, as these figures would
at first seem to show, the Jews held a quarter of the wealth of the
kingdom, but they were as useful to the King as if they had. He had
a far greater power over their resources than over those of his other
subjects; their wealth was in moveable property, and what was still
more important, it was concentrated in few hands. It was easily found
and easily taken away.[21]
II.--THE CONSTITUTION OF THE JEWRY.
Richard’s policy, or his councillors’, was simple. On the one hand, in
order to encourage rich Jews to continue to make England their home,
he issued a charter of protection, in which he guaranteed to certain
Jews,[22] and perhaps to all who were wealthy, the privileges that
they had enjoyed under his father and great-grandfather. They were to
hold land as they had hitherto done; their heirs were to succeed to
their money debts; they were to be allowed to go wherever they pleased
throughout the country, and to be free of all tolls and dues. On the
other hand he asserted and enforced his rights over them and their
property by organising a complete supervision of all their business
transactions. In 1194 he issued a code of regulations, in which he
ordered that a register of all that belonged to them should be kept for
the information of the treasury. All their deeds were to be executed
in one of the six or seven places where there were establishments of
Jewish and Christian clerks especially appointed to witness them; they
were to be entered on an official list, and a half of each was to be
deposited in a public chest under the control of royal officers.[23]
No Jew was to plead before any court but that of the King’s officers,
and special Justices were appointed to hear cases in which Jews were
concerned, and to exercise a general control over their business.[24]
These arrangements underwent various modifications under Richard’s
successors. The privileges which had at first been granted to certain
Jews by name were extended by John to the whole community[25]; and the
royal hold over them was tightened by an edict, issued in 1219, which
ordered the Wardens of the Cinque Ports to prevent any Jews who lived
in England from leaving the country.[26]
This elaborate constitution did not indeed afford complete security
against a repetition of the massacres of 1189 and 1190, but its
existence was a more solemn and official recognition than had been
given before of the fact that the King was the sole lord and protector
of the Jews, and that he would regard an injury done to them as an
injury to himself. And thus it went far to secure to him his revenue
and to them their safety. From this time forward, the Jews yielded to
the king, not simply irregular contributions, such as the £60,000 they
had paid to Henry II., and the sums they had paid to Longchamp towards
the expenses of Richard’s Crusade,[27] but a steady and regular income.
They paid tallages, heavy reliefs on succeeding to property, and a
besant in the pound, or ten per cent., on their loan transactions; they
were liable to escheats, confiscation of land and debts, and fines and
amercements of all kinds.[28] Their average annual contribution to the
Treasury, during the latter part of the twelfth century, was probably
about a twelfth of the whole Royal revenue,[29] and of the greater part
of what they owed the realisation was nearly certain. Other debtors
might find in delay, or resistance, or legal formalities, a way of
avoiding payment. But the King had the Jews in his own hands. He could
order the sheriffs of the county to distrain on defaulters, and there
was no one between the sheriffs and the Jews.[30] He could despoil
them of lands and debts. He could imprison them in the royal castles.
In the reign of John, all the Jews and Jewesses of England were thrown
into prison by his command, and are said to have been reduced to such
poverty that they begged from door to door, and prowled about the city
like dogs.[31] The only way they had of removing any of their property
from his reach was by burying it. Whereupon the King, if he suspected
that a Jew had more treasure than was apparent, might order him to have
a tooth drawn every day until he paid enough to purchase pardon.[32]
Powerless as the Jews were against royal oppression in England, the
position that was offered to them by Richard and John was no worse
than that of their co-religionists in other countries of Europe. Those
of Germany were the Emperor’s _Kammerknechte_;[33] those of France
had been expelled in 1182, and though they were soon recalled, might
at any time be expelled again.[34] A Jew in a feudalised country was
liable to be the subject of quarrel between the lord on whose estate
he dwelt and the king of the country, and he could be handed about,
now to the one and now to the other.[35] The right to live and to be
under jurisdiction, was everywhere still a local privilege that had to
be enjoyed by the permission of a lord, lay or clerical, and had to
be paid for. In England, the Jews, so long as they were protected by
the King, were at any rate under the greatest lord in the land. The
towns where especially they wished to settle for the purposes of their
business, were, thanks to the policy of William the Conqueror, mostly
on the royal domain. And the royal power acting through its local
officers was used to the full to protect the Jews. The sheriffs of the
counties were especially charged to secure to them personal safety and
the enjoyment of the immunities that had been granted to them.[36]
The arrangement by which Jewish money-lenders received on English
soil the protection of the King against his own subjects was not very
honourable to either of the parties. But the King had no compunction,
and the Jews had no choice. It could endure so long as the royal power
was strong enough to override the objections of barons and abbots to a
measure in favour of their creditors, of the towns to an encroachment
on their privileges, and of the Church to the royal support of a body
of infidel usurers.
At the end of the twelfth century neither towns nor landholders nor
Church were in a position to offer any effectual protest. In the
thirteenth century the strength of the opposition of each of these
three orders grew steadily. But in each it pursued a separate course,
though to the same end, and each order struck its decisive blow at
a different moment. Hence the various forms of opposition must be
separately considered.
III.--THE CONFLICT WITH THE TOWNS.
The towns were the first to carry out a practical and effective
anti-Jewish policy. It was they that suffered most keenly and
constantly from the presence of the Jews. They had bought, at great
expense, from King or noble or abbot, the right to be independent,
self-governing communities, living under the jurisdiction of their own
officers, free from the visits of the royal sheriffs, and paying a
fixed sum in commutation of all dues to the King or the local lord;
and yet many of them saw the King protecting in their midst a band
of foreigners, who had the royal permission to go whithersoever they
pleased, who could dwell among the burgesses, and were yet free not
only from all customs and dues and contribution to the ferm,[37] but
even from the jurisdiction of those authorities which were responsible
for peace and good government.[38] This was exasperating enough; but
there was more and worse. The exclusion of the sheriff and the King’s
constables was one of the most cherished privileges of towns, but,
wherever the Jews had once taken up their residence, it was in danger
of being a mere pretence. At Colchester, if a Jew was unable to recover
his debts, he could call in the King’s sheriffs to help him. In London,
Jews were “warrantised” from the exchequer, and the constable of the
Tower had a special jurisdiction by which he kept the pleas between
Jews and Christians. At Nottingham, complaints against Jews, even in
cases of petty assaults, were heard before the keeper of the Castle.
At Oxford the constable called in question the Chancellor’s authority
over the Jews; contending that they did not form part of the ordinary
town-community.[39] Moreover, the debts of the Jews were continually
falling into the King’s hands, and whenever this happened, his officers
would no doubt penetrate into the town to make on behalf of the royal
treasury a collection such as had never been contemplated when the
burgesses made their agreement, which was to settle once and for all
their payment to the King.[40]
In some of the towns the feeling against the Jews was expressed in
riots as early as the reign of John, and the beginning of that of Henry
III. But the King in each case took stern measures of repression. John
told the mayor and barons of London that he should require the blood
of the Jews at their hands if any ill befell them.[41] In Gloucester
and in Hereford, the burgesses of the town were made responsible for
the safety of the Jews dwelling amongst them. In Worcester, York,
Lincoln, Stamford, Bristol, Northampton, and Winchester, the sheriffs
were charged with the duty of protecting them against injury.[42] Such
measures only increased the ill-feeling of the burgesses. At Norwich in
1234 the Jewry was fired and looted.[43] The Jews were maltreated and
beaten, and were only saved from further harm by the timely help of the
garrison of the neighbouring castle. At Oxford the scholars attacked
the Jewry and carried off “innumerable goods.”[44]
But the towns soon began to use a far more effective method than
rioting in order to rid themselves of the Jews. Just as they had found
it worth while to pay heavily for their municipal charters, so now
they were willing to pay more for a measure which would secure them
in the future against a drain on their revenues and a violation of
their privileges. Whether a town held its charter from the King, or
was still dependent on an intermediate lord, the motive was equally
strong. An abbot or a baron would be glad to second the efforts made by
the inhabitants of one of his vills to expel a portion of the populace
which took much from the resources whence his revenue came and added
nothing to them.[45] The abbot of Bury St. Edmund’s induced the King to
expel the Jews from the town in 1190.[46] The burgesses of Leicester
obtained a similar grant from Simon de Montfort in 1231, those of
Newcastle in 1234, of Wycombe in 1235, of Southampton in 1236, of
Berkhampsted in 1242, of Newbury in 1244, of Derby in 1263; at Norwich
the citizens complained to the King, but without any result, of the
harm that they suffered through the growth of the Jewish community
settled in the city.[47] In 1245 a decree in general terms was issued
by Henry III., prohibiting all Jews, except those to whom the King had
granted a special personal license, from remaining in any town other
than those in which their co-religionists had hitherto been accustomed
to live.[48] This series of measures did not simply deprive the Jews in
England of a right which had been solemnly granted them and which they
had long enjoyed. It went much further. For, by circumscribing the
area in which they could carry on their business, and so diminishing
their opportunities of acquiring wealth, it threatened their very
existence in a land where their wealth alone secured them protection.
IV.--THE CONFLICT WITH THE BARONS.
At the same time that the towns were making their attack on the Jews
in their own way, there was growing up within the baronial order a
new party, stronger than the towns in the elements of which it was
composed and in its capacity for joint action, and filled, on account
of the private circumstances of its members, with a deeper hatred of
the Jews than the greater barons, who had hitherto represented the
order, had ever known. For the old Baronial party which had forced
Magna Carta on John was too rich to be seriously indebted to the Jews,
and the anti-Jewish feeling of its members must have been blunted by
the fact that, when they had to pay their debts, they could raise the
money by benevolences levied on their tenants.[49] Moreover some of
them imitated on their own estates the King’s policy of sharing in the
profits of usury.[50] Hence they were little influenced by personal
grievances, and it was no doubt partly from political considerations,
and partly as a concession to the lesser and poorer members of their
order, that they had introduced into Magna Carta certain limitations
of the power of the Jews, or of their legatee, the King, over the
estates of debtors, a measure which, small as it was, was repealed
on the re-issues of the charters, when, during the minority of Henry
III., the great Barons had to undertake the duty of Government. And yet
even the great Barons must have felt, after twenty years’ experience
of the personal Government of Henry III., that an alteration in the
Royal system of managing the Jewry was necessary if their order was
ever to succeed in the constitutional struggle in which it was engaged.
They knew that many of those among the King’s acts which they hated
worst would have been impossible but for the Jews. It was by money
extorted from them that he had been enabled to prolong his expeditions
in Brittany and Gascony, to support and enrich his foreign favourites,
and to baffle the attempts of the Council to secure, by the refusal of
supplies, the restoration of Government through the customary officers.
In 1230, and again in 1239, he took from them a third of their
property; in 1244, he levied a tallage of 60,000 marks; in 1250, 1252,
1254, and 1255 he ordered the royal officers to take from them all that
they could exact, after thorough inquisition and the employment of
measures of compulsion so cruel as to make the whole body of Jews in
England ask twice, though each time in vain, for permission to leave
the country. Thus the whole Baronial order was for a time united, on
the ground of constitutional grievances, in a policy which found its
expression in the successful attempt of the National Council in 1244
to exact from the King the right of appointing one of the two justices
of the Jews, so as to gain a knowledge of the amount of the Jewish
revenue, and a power of controlling its expenditure.[51]
But such a measure did nothing to relieve the personal grievances
of the lower baronage, and it was naturally from this class that
further complaints proceeded. Its members, unlike the greater barons,
made no profit from the encouragement of usury. On the other hand,
they were among the greatest sufferers from the practice. Many a one
among them must, when summoned to take part in the King’s foreign
expeditions, have been compelled to pledge some land to the Jews in
order to be able to meet the expenses of service; and no doubt the
Jews derived from such transactions a large share of the profits that
enabled them to make their enormous contributions to the exchequer.
A landholder’s debt to a Jew would, when once contracted, have been,
under any circumstances, difficult to pay off. But the lower baronage,
or knight’s bachelors, were threatened, when they had fallen into debt,
with new dangers, the knowledge of which intensified their hatred of
the whole system of money-lending. “We ask,” they said in the petition
of 1259, “a remedy for this evil, to wit, that the Jews sometimes give
their bonds, and the land pledged to them, to the magnates and the
more powerful men of the realm, who thereupon enter on the land of the
lesser men, and although those who owe the debt be willing to pay it
with usury, yet the said magnates put off the business, so that the
land and tenements may in some way remain their property, ... and on
the occasion of death, or any other chance, there is a manifest danger
that those to whom the said tenements belonged may lose all right in
them.”[52]
The special wrongs of the lower baronage were, in the course of the
Civil War, temporarily lost sight of. Nevertheless, the action of the
whole baronial party throughout the war contributed greatly, though
indirectly, to the ultimate banishment of the Jews from England.
Just as the towns had, by their measures of exclusion, weakened
the mercenary bond that united the Jews to the King, so now the
barons, by their wholesale destruction of Jewish property, worked, as
unconsciously as the towns had done, to the same end. They attacked
and plundered the Jewry of London twice in the course of the war, and
destroyed those of Canterbury, Northampton, Winchester, Cambridge,
Worcester, and Lincoln. Everywhere they carried off or destroyed the
property of their victims. In London they killed every Jew that they
met, except those who accepted baptism, or paid large sums of money.
They took from Cambridge all the Jewish bonds that were kept there, and
deposited them at their head-quarters in Ely. At Lincoln they broke
open the official chests, and “trod underfoot in the lanes, charters
and deeds, and whatever else was injurious to the Christians.”[53] “It
is impossible,” says a chronicler, in describing one of these attacks,
“to estimate the loss it caused to the King’s exchequer.”
V.--THE BEGINNING OF EDWARD’S POLICY OF RESTRICTION.
When the Civil War was over, the position of the King’s son Edward
as, on the one hand, the sworn friend of the lower baronage, and, on
the other hand, the leader of the Council and the most powerful man
in England,[54] made it impossible that the Jews should continue to
carry on their business under the royal protection as they had hitherto
done. And Edward’s personal character and political ideals were such
as to make him execute with vigour the policy towards the Jews that
was forced on him by his relations with the lower baronage. He was a
religious prince, one who could not but feel qualms of conscience at
seeing the “enemies of Christ” carrying on the most unchristian trade
of usury in the chief towns of England. He was a statesman, the future
author of the Statutes of Mortmain and _Quia Emptores_, and he wished
to see the work of the nation performed by the united action of the
nation, and its expenses met by due contributions from all the National
resources. But in so far as the Jews had any hold on English land they
prevented the realisation of this ideal. Sometimes they took possession
of land that was pledged to them, and then the amount of the feudal
revenue and the symmetry of the feudal organisation suffered, though
the King might gain a great deal in other ways;[55] very often they
secured payment in money of their debts by bringing about an agreement
for the transfer to a monastery of the estates that had been pledged
to them as security,[56] and then the land came under the “dead hand”;
sometimes they contented themselves with a perpetual rent-charge,[57]
and then it would be hard, if not impossible, for the struggling debtor
to discharge his feudal obligations.[58]
The indebtedness of the Church must have shocked Edward’s sympathies
as a Christian, just as much as the indebtedness of the lay
landholders thwarted his schemes as a statesman. For the condition
of ecclesiastical estates was indeed deplorable. They had begun to
fall into debt in the twelfth century, no doubt in consequence of
the expense that was necessary for the erection of great buildings,
and their debts had gone on growing, partly in consequence of bad
management, partly through the necessity of fulfilling the duties of
hospitality by keeping open house continually, partly through the
exactions of the Pope and the King. The Bishop of Lincoln pledged the
plate of his cathedral, the Abbot of Peterborough the bones of the
patron-saint of his Abbey; at Bury St. Edmunds each obedientiary had
his own seal, which he could apply to bonds which involved the whole
house; and loans were freely contracted which accumulated at 50 per
cent.[59] Hence in the thirteenth century Matthew Paris wrote that
“there was scarcely anyone in England, especially a bishop, who was
not caught in the meshes of the usurers.”[60] “Wise men knew that
the land was corrupted by them.”[61] The literary documents of the
latter half of the century fully confirm these accounts. The See of
Canterbury was weighed down with an ever-growing load of debt when
John of Peckham first went to it.[62] The buildings of the cathedral
were becoming dilapidated for want of money to repair them.[63]
Those of the neighbouring Priory of Christ Church were in an equally
bad state, and its revenue was equally encumbered.[64] The bishop
of Norwich was so poor that in spite of the extortions regularly
practised by his officials, he had to borrow six hundred marks from
the Archbishop of Canterbury.[65] The Bishop of Hereford had been
compelled to seek the intervention of Henry III., in order to obtain
respite of his debts to the Jews.[66] The Abbey of Glastonbury was
weighed down by “immeasurable debts,” and, in order to save it from
further calamities, the Archbishop had to order a reorganisation of
expenditure so thorough as to include regulations concerning the number
of dishes with which the abbot might be served in his private room.[67]
The Prior of Lewes asked permission to turn one of his churches from
its right use, and to let it for five years to any one who would hire
it, in order that he might thus get together some money to help to pay
off what the priory owed.[68] The Church of Newnton could not afford
clergymen.[69] Even the great Monastery of St. Swithin’s, Winchester,
in spite of the revenue that its monks drew from the sale of wine and
fur and spiceries, and from the tolls paid by the traders who attended
its great annual fair, was always in debt, sometimes to the amount of
several thousand pounds.[70] Except in the cutting down of timber and
the granting of life annuities in return for the payment of a lump sum,
the religious houses had no resources except the money-lenders.[71]
They borrowed from English usurers, from Italians, from Jews, and from
one another.[72]
If the lay and ecclesiastical estates of England were to be freed from
their burdens, heroic measures were necessary. The barons had done
their part in the work by carrying off or destroying such bonds as they
could find. But the financial revolution, to be effective, must be
carried out by due process of law.
When, on the restoration of tranquillity, the Council under Edward’s
influence began its attempt to redress the grievances against which the
barons had been fighting, the first measure in the programme of reform
was one for the relief of the debtors of the Jews. Any interference
with Jewish business would, of course, entail a loss to the Royal
Exchequer, and, honest and patriotic as Edward was, his poverty was so
great that he could not afford to sacrifice any of his resources. But
the exhausting demands that the King had made on the Jews in the time
of his difficulties, and the terrible destruction of their property
that had taken place during the war, must have so far diminished the
revenue to be derived from the Jews as to make the possible loss of it
a far less serious consideration than it would have been twenty years
earlier. Accordingly, at the feast of St. Hilary in 1269, a measure,
drawn up by Walter of Merton, was passed, forbidding for the future the
alienation of land to Jews in consequence of loan transactions. All
existing bonds by which land might pass into the hands of Jews were
declared cancelled; the attempt to evade the law by selling them to
Christians was made punishable with death and forfeiture; and none to
such effect was to be executed in future.[73]
But this was only a slight measure compared with what was to follow.
The Jews might still acquire land by purchase, and needy lords and
churches, when forbidden to pledge their lands, were very likely,
under the pressure of necessity, to sell them outright. Already the
Jews were “seised” of many estates,[74] and, according to the story of
an ancient historian,[75] they chose this moment to ask the King to
grant them the enjoyment of the privileges that regularly accompanied
the possession of land, viz., the guardianship of minors on their
estates, the right to give wards in marriage, and the presentation
to livings. Feudal law recognised the two former privileges, and the
Church recognised the latter,[76] as incidental to the possession of
real property. It was strange, however, that the Jews should present
a demand for new social privileges of this kind to a council that had
already shown its determination to deprive them of their old legal
rights; and it was only natural that the churchmen should take the
opportunity of denouncing their “impious insolence.” Certain of the
councillors were at first in favour of granting the Jews’ request; but
a Franciscan friar, who obtained admittance to the Council, pleaded
that it would be a disgrace to Christianity, and a dishonour to God.
The Archbishop of York, and the Bishops of Lichfield, Coventry, and
Worcester were present, and argued that the “perfidious Jews” ought to
be made to recognise that it was as an act of the King’s grace that
they were allowed to remain in England, and that it was outrageous
that they should make a demand, the granting of which would allow
them to nominate the ministers of Christian churches, to receive the
homage of Christians, to sit side by side with them on juries, assizes
and recognitions, and perhaps ultimately to come into possession of
English baronies. Edward and his equally religious cousin, the son of
Richard, King of the Romans, were present at the council to support the
argument of the Bishops,[77] and not only were the original requests
refused, but the Jews were now forbidden by the act of the King and his
Council to enjoy a freehold in “manors, lands, tenements, fiefs, rents,
or tenures of any kind,” whether held by bond, gift, enfeoffment,
confirmation, or any other grant, or by any other means whatever. They
were forbidden to receive any longer the rent-charges which had been
a common form of security for their loans. Lands of which they were
already possessed were to be redeemed by the Christian owners, or in
default of them, by other Christians, on repayment without interest of
the principal of the loan in consequence of which they had come into
the hands of the Jews. In the interest of parochial revenues, Jews were
forbidden to acquire houses in London in addition to those which they
already possessed.[78]
VI.--THE PROHIBITION OF USURY.
Very soon after the passing of the Statute of 1270, Edward left England
to join the second Crusade of St. Louis, and did not return till
1274, two years after he had been proclaimed king. At once he took up
with characteristic vigour, and with the help and advice of a band of
statesmen and lawyers, the work of administrative reform that he had
already begun as heir-apparent. He recognised that the state of affairs
established in 1270 could not endure, since, under it, the Jews, while
practically prevented from lending money at interest, now that the
law forbade them to take in pledge real property, the only possible
security for large loans, were nevertheless still nothing but usurers,
allowed by ancient custom and royal recognition to carry on that one
pursuit as best they could, and prevented by the same forces from
carrying on any other. Edward, with his usual love for “the definition
of duties and the spheres of duty,”[79] felt that it was necessary to
define for the Jews a new position, which should not, as did their
present position, condemn them to hopeless struggles, nor demand from
him acquiescence in what he believed to be a sin.
For the Church had never ceased to maintain the doctrine of the
sinfulness of usury which Ambrose and Clement, Jerome and Tertullian,
had taught in strict conformity with the communistic ideas of primitive
Christianity. It is true that till the eleventh century usury and
speculative trading generally had not been active enough to call for
repression, nor would the Church have been strong enough to enforce on
the Christian world the observance of its doctrine. It could not follow
up the attempt made by the Capitularies of Charles the Great to prevent
laymen from practising usury, and it had to rest content with enforcing
the prohibition on clerics.[80] But the growth under Hildebrand of
the power of the Church over every-day life, and the elevation of the
moral tone of its teaching that resulted from its struggles with the
temporal power, enabled it to adopt with increasing effect measures
of greater severity. Hildebrand, in 1083, decreed that usurers
should, like perjurers, thieves, and wife-deserters, be punished with
excommunication;[81] and the Lateran General Council of 1139, when
exhorted by Innocent II. to shrink from no legislation as demanding
too high and rigorous a morality, decreed that usurers were to be
excluded from the consolations of the Church, to be infamous all their
lives long, and to be deprived of Christian burial.[82] The religious
feeling aroused by the Crusades still further strengthened the hold on
the Christian world of characteristically Christian theory, while the
prospect of the economic results that they threatened to bring about in
Europe, awoke the Church to the advisability of putting forth all its
power to protect the estates of Crusaders against the money-lenders.
Many Popes of the twelfth century ordained, and St. Bernard approved
of the ordinance[83] that those who took up the Cross should be freed
from all engagements to pay usury into which they might have entered.
Innocent III. absolved Crusaders even from obligations of the kind that
they had incurred under oath, and subsequently ordered that Jews should
be forced, under penalty of exclusion from the society of Christians,
to return to their crusading debtors any interest that they had already
received from them.[84]
Stronger even than the influence of the Crusades was that of the
Mendicant Orders. The Dominicans, who preached, and the Franciscans,
who “taught and wrought” among all classes of people throughout
Europe, carried with them, as their most cherished lesson, the
doctrine of poverty. It was by the teaching of this doctrine, and
by the practice of the simple unworldly life of the primitive
Church, that the founders of the two orders had been able to give
new strength to the ecclesiastical institutions of the thirteenth
century. And their teaching, if not their practice, made its way from
the Casiuncula to the Vatican. Cardinal Ugolino, the dear friend of
S. Francis, became Gregory IX.; Petrus de Tarentagio, of the order
of the Dominicans, became Innocent IV.; and Girolamo di Ascoli, the
“sun” of the Franciscans, was soon to become Nicholas IV. Moreover,
the work of formulating and publishing to the world the official
doctrines of the Church was in the hands of the Mendicants. A
Dominican, Raymundus de Peñaforte, was entrusted by Gregory IX. with
the preparation of the Decretals, which formed the chief part of the
canon law of the Church.[85] And friars of both orders codified with
indefatigable labour the moral law of Christianity, and set it forth
in hand-books, or _Summæ_, which were universally accepted as guides
for the confessional, and which all agreed in condemning usury.[86]
Hence, the doctrine of its sinfulness was taught throughout Christian
Europe, by priests and monks, by Dominican preachers and Franciscan
confessors, who could enforce their lesson by the use of their power
of granting or refusing absolution. How strong and violent a public
opinion was thus created is best shown in the lines in which Dante, the
contemporary of Edward I., tells with what companions he thought it fit
that the Caursine usurers should dwell in hell.[87]
There was every reason why the hatred of usury should be as strong in
England as anywhere. The Franciscan movement had spread throughout the
country, and had found among Englishmen many of its chief literary
champions.[88] And the Englishman’s pious dislike of usury had been
strengthened by many years of bitter experience. Italian usurers
had in the previous reign gone up and down the country collecting
money on behalf of the Pope, and lending money on their own account
at exorbitant rates of interest.[89] From some of the magnates they
obtained protection (for which they are said to have paid with a share
of their profits),[90] but to the great body of the Baronage, to the
Church, and to the trading classes their very name had become hateful.
One of them, the brother of the Pope’s Legate, had been killed at
Oxford.[91] In London Bishop Roger had solemnly excommunicated them
all, and excluded them from his diocese.[92]
No English king who wished to follow the teachings of Christianity
could willingly countenance any of his subjects in carrying on a
traffic which was thus hated by the people and condemned by all the
doctors of Christendom. Even Henry III. was once so far moved by
indignation and religious feeling as to expel the Caursines from his
kingdom,[93] and had religious scruples about the retention of the
Jews.[94] But, as has been shown, he could not do without the Jewish
revenue. Edward was not only free from dependence on that source of
income, but he was also a far more religious king than his father. He
was a man to obey the behests of the Church, instead of setting them at
naught with an easy conscience, as his father had done. In the second
year of his reign the Church, by a decree passed at the Council of
Lyons, demanded from the Christian world far greater efforts against
usury than ever before.[95] Till this time, though Popes and Councils
had declared the practice accursed, churches and monasteries had had
usurers as tenants on their estates, or had even possessed whole
ghettos as their property.[96] Now this was to be ended, and it was
ordained by Gregory X. that no community, corporation, or individual
should permit foreign usurers to hire their houses, or indeed to dwell
at all upon their lands, but should expel them within three months.
Edward, in obedience to this decree, ordered an inquisition to be made
into the usury of the Florentine bankers in his kingdom with a view
to its suppression, and allowed proceedings to be taken at the same
time and with the same object against a citizen of London.[97] And the
events of the last reign enabled him to proceed to what at first seems
the far more serious task of bringing to an end the trade that the Jews
had carried on under the patronage, and for the benefit, of the Royal
Exchequer.
For the Jews could no longer support the Crown in times of financial
difficulty as they had been able to do in previous reigns. The
contraction of their business that was the result of their exclusion
from many towns, and the losses that they had suffered through the
extortions of Henry III. and the plundering attacks of the barons,
had very greatly diminished their revenue-paying capacities, and the
legislation of 1270 must have affected them still more deeply. At the
end of the twelfth century they had probably paid to the Treasury about
£3,000 a year, or one-twelfth of the whole royal income,[98] and for
some parts of the thirteenth century the average collection of tallage
has been estimated at £5,000;[99] but in 1271--by which time the royal
income had probably grown to something like the £65,000 a year which
the Edwards are said to have enjoyed in time of peace[100]--Henry
III., when pledging to Richard of Cornwall the revenue from the
Jewry, estimated its annual value, apart from what was yielded by
escheats and other special claims, at no more than 2,000 marks.[101]
And while the resources of the Jews had fallen off, the needs of the
Crown had increased. Not only must Edward have conducted his foreign
enterprises at a much greater cost than did his predecessors, under
whom the English knighthood had been accustomed to serve without
serious opposition, but, in addition, he had to make the best of a vast
heritage of debt that his father had left him.[102] He had to seek
richer supporters than the Jews, and such were not wanting.
The Italian banking companies were the only organisations in Europe
that could supply him with such sums of money as he needed. From all
the greatest cities of Italy--from Florence, Rome, Milan, Pisa, Lucca,
Siena, and Asti--they had spread to many of the chief countries of
Europe, to France, England, Brabant, Switzerland, and Ireland.[103]
They were merchants, money-lenders, money-changers, and international
bankers, and in this last occupation their supremacy over all rivals
was secured by the great advantage which the wide extent of their
dealings enabled them to enjoy, of being able to save, by the use
of letters of credit on their colleagues and countrymen, the cost
of the transport of money from country to country.[104] They were
thus the greatest financial agents of the time. They transacted the
business of the Pope. At the Court of Rome ambassadors had to borrow
from them.[105] In France their position was established by a regular
diplomatic agreement between the head of their corporation and Philip
III.[106] In England they had in their hands the greater part of the
trade in corn and wool;[107] and the protection and favour of English
kings was often besought by the Popes on their behalf in special
bulls.[108]
Edward began his reign in financial dependence on the Italians. His
father had in the earliest period of his personal government incurred
obligations to them which he himself, as heir apparent, had to increase
considerably at the time of his Crusade.[109] When in later years
he needed money to pay his army, he borrowed it from them; when he
diverted to his own use the tenth that was voted for his intended
second Crusade, they gave security for repayment.[110] So great were
the amounts that they advanced to him, that between 1298 and 1308 the
Friscobaldi Bianchi alone, one of the thirty-four companies that he
employed,[111] received in repayment nearly £100,000.[112] He was
compelled to favour them, although he attempted to stop their usury. He
gave them a charter of privileges.[113] He presented them with large
sums of money. He bestowed on the head of one of their firms high
office in Gascony. At various times he placed under their charge the
collection of the Customs in many of the chief ports in England.[114]
Edward’s close connection with a body of financiers so rich and
powerful made the Jews unnecessary to him. If he was not to disobey the
decree of the Council of Lyons he must either withdraw his protection
from them or else forbid them any longer to be usurers. To withdraw his
protection from them would be to expose them to the popular hatred,
the danger from which had been the justification of the relations that
had been established between Crown and Jewry after 1190, and still
existed. He chose the second alternative. In 1275 he issued a statute,
in which he absolutely forbade the Jews, as he had just forbidden
Christians,[115] to practise usury in the future. He gave warning
that usurious contracts would no longer be enforced by the king’s
officers, and he declared the making of them to be an offence for which
henceforth both parties were liable to punishment. To ensure that all
those contracts already existing should come to an end as quickly as
possible, he ordered that all movables that were in pledge on account
of loans were to be redeemed before the coming Easter.[116]
VII.--EDWARD’S POLICY: THE JEWS AND TRADE.
Thus the Jews, already shut out from the feudal and municipal
organisation of the country, were forbidden by one act of legislation
to follow the pursuit in which the kings of England had encouraged them
for two hundred years.
However, for the hardships imposed by the Christian Church there was
an approved Christian remedy. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest authority
on morals in Europe in the thirteenth century, had written: “If rulers
think they harm their souls by taking money from usurers, let them
remember that they are themselves to blame. They ought to see that the
Jews are compelled to labour as they do in some parts of Italy.”[117]
A Christian king, and one whom Edward revered as his old leader in
arms and as a model of piety, had already acted in accordance with
the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. In 1253 St. Louis sent from the Holy
Land an order that all Jews should leave France for ever, except
those who should become traders and workers with their hands.[118]
And now, when Edward was forbidding the Jews of England to practise
usury, he naturally dealt with them in the fashion recommended by the
great teacher of his time and adopted by the saintly king. “The King
also grants,” said the Statute of 1275, “that the Jews may practise
merchandise, or live by their labour, and for those purposes freely
converse with Christians. Excepting that, upon any pretence whatever,
they shall not be levant or couchant amongst them; nor on account
of their merchandise be in scots, lots, or talliage with the other
inhabitants of those cities or boroughs where they remain; seeing they
are talliable to the King as his own serfs, and not otherwise.... And
further the King grants, that such as are unskilful in merchandise,
and cannot labour, may take lands to farm, for any term not exceeding
ten years, provided no homage, fealty, or any such kind of service, or
advowson to Holy Church, be belonging to them. Provided also that this
power to farm lands, shall continue in force for ten years from the
making of this Act, and no longer.”[119]
The 16,000[120] Jews of England were thus called upon to change at
once their old occupation for a new one, and the task was imposed upon
them under conditions which made it all but impossible of fulfilment.
They were forbidden to become burgesses of towns; and the effect of
the prohibition was to make it impossible for them, in most parts of
England, to become traders, for it practically excluded them from the
Gild Merchant. It is true that some towns professed that their Gild
was open to all the inhabitants, whether burgesses or not, so long
as they took the oath to preserve the liberties of the town and the
king’s peace.[121] But most of the Gilds were exclusive bodies, to
which all non-burgesses would find it hard to gain admission,[122] and
Jewish non-burgesses, though not as a rule kept out by a disqualifying
religious formula,[123] would on account of the unpopularity of their
race and religion, find it trebly hard.[124] As non-Gildsmen, they
would be at a disadvantage both in buying goods and in selling them.
They would find it hard to buy, because, in some towns at any rate, the
Gildsmen were accustomed to “oppress the people coming to the town with
vendible wares, so that no man could sell his wares to anyone except to
a member of the society.”[125] They would find it in all towns hard to
sell, in some impossible. In some towns non-Gildsmen were forbidden to
deal in certain articles of common use, such as wool, hides, grain,
untanned leather, and unfulled cloth; in others, as in Southampton,
they might not buy anything in the town to sell again there, or keep a
wine tavern, or sell cloth by retail except on market day and fair day,
or keep more than five quarters of corn in a granary to sell by retail.
There were even towns where the municipal statutes altogether forbade
non-Gildsmen to keep shops or to sell by retail.[126]
It was almost as difficult for Jews to become agriculturists or
artisans, as to become traders. They were allowed by the statute to
farm land, but for ten years only, and they were far too ignorant
of agriculture to be able to take advantage of the permission. They
could not work on the land of others as villeins, because, even if a
Christian lord had been willing to receive them, they would have been
prevented by their religion from taking the oath of fealty.[127]
Only under exceptional conditions could they work at handicrafts. A
Jew who possessed manual dexterity might, as was sometimes done in the
thirteenth century, have worked for himself at a cottage industry,
and might, though the task would have been a hard one, have gained
a connection among Christians, and induced them to trust him with
materials.[128] But many crafts were at the time coming under the
regulations of craft-gilds. Certainly as early as the beginning of
the fourteenth century, there were in London fully-organised gilds of
Lorimers, Weavers, Tapicers, Cap-makers, Saddlers, Joiners, Girdlers,
and Cutlers.[129] In Hereford there were Gilds for nearly thirty
trades.[130] It was probably very often the case, as it was with the
Weavers’ Gild in London, that a craft-gild existing in any town could
forbid the practice of the craft in the town to all who had not been
elected to membership, or earned it by serving the apprenticeship that
the Gild’s statute required.[131] The period required by the Lorimers’
statute was ten years, by the Weavers’, seven, and in some cases
certainly, and probably in all, the apprenticeship had to be served
under a freeman of the city.[132] The apprentice who had served his
time, was still, in some towns and industries, unable to practise his
craft, unless he became a citizen and entered the frank pledge.[133]
It was difficult for a Jewish boy to become an apprentice, since the
Church threatened to excommunicate any Christian who received into
his house, as an apprentice would naturally be received, a Jew or
Jewess; it was impossible for a Jewish man to become a citizen, for the
king forbade his Jewish “serfs” to be in scot and lot with the other
inhabitants of the cities in which they lived.
Excluded from the trades and handicrafts of the towns, the Jew might
try other means of earning a livelihood. He might attempt to travel
with wares or with produce, from one part of England to another, or
he might be an importer or an exporter. But wholesale trade of this
kind would be open to those alone who had command of a large capital.
And this was not the only difficulty in the way. If the Jew went
about the country with his goods from fair to fair, or from city to
city, he would do so at very great risk. He would have to travel over
the high roads, the perils of which made necessary the Statute of
Winchester, and are recounted in the words of its preamble, _de jour
en jour roberies, homicides, arsons, plus sovenerement sont fetes que
avaunt ne soleyent_.[134] If he survived the dangers of the road and
reached a fair, he would find there an assemblage made up in part of
“daring persons,” such as those, who, in spite of the orderly traders
and citizens, had caused the massacre at Lynn in 1190,[135] or those
who at Boston killed the merchants and plundered their goods, until
“the streets ran with silver and gold,”[136] or those citizens of
Winchester who, in the reign of Henry III., carried on for a time a
successful conspiracy to rob all itinerant merchants who passed through
the country.[137] With his foreign face and striking badge, he would be
the first mark for the hatred of the riotous crowd. And if he escaped
violence and robbery, he had still to fear the officials of the lord of
the fair, who exercised for the time unlimited and irresponsible power,
and who, according to the regulations of some fairs, could destroy the
goods of any trader if their quality did not please them.[138] When he
had managed to escape from the mob and the officials, his difficulties
were not over. He might make his bargains, but there was no court of
justice to which he could appeal to enforce the completion of any
transaction that required a longer time than that of the duration of
the fair. Redress for any injustice committed at a fair, or for the
failure to carry out an agreement made there, could be obtained only
through application made by the municipality of the complainant to that
of the wrong-doer.[139] The Jew had no municipality to present his
claims. If those with whom he had transactions deceived him, or refused
to pay him, he was helpless. There was no power to which he could
appeal.
If instead of going to a fair he tried to sell, in a town, produce
from another country or from a different part of England, he was in
a position of even greater difficulty. In a strange town he was as
much an alien as in a strange country, and there was scarcely any
limit to the vexations and sufferings that on that account he would
have to endure. In London, for example, alien merchants were forbidden
to remain in the city for more than forty consecutive days. While
they were there they might not sell anything by retail, nor have any
business dealings at all with any but citizens. There was a long list
of articles that they were altogether forbidden to buy. They might not
stow their goods in houses or cellars; they had to sell within forty
days all that they had brought with them; they were allowed neither to
sell anything after that time, nor to take anything back with them.
They were continually annoyed by the officers of the city.[140] All
these disadvantages the Jew would have to endure to the full while
competing with many powerful organisations which were engaged in
foreign trade, and had, after long struggles, secured from the king
special charters of privilege. Such were the companies of the merchants
of Germany, who had their steelyard in London and their settlements
at Boston and Lynn; the Flemings, who had their Hanse in London; the
Gascons who enjoyed a charter; the Spaniards and Portuguese; the
Florentines, most powerful of all, and the Venetians, whose enterprise
was, at the beginning of the fourteenth century at any rate, carried on
under the auspices of the Republic.[141]
The last opportunity for the Jews was to take part in the export
of English produce. English wool was the most important article of
international trade in Western Europe. It was brought from monasteries
and landholders chiefly by the rich and powerful companies of Flemish
and Italian merchants, and sent to Flanders and Italy to be woven and
dyed.[142] The Jews had, apparently, long taken some slight part in
wholesale trade,[143] but the amount of capital that it required, and
the power of the rivals who held the field, made it impossible for many
of them to take to it immediately as a substitute for money-lending.
Still it was the only form of enterprise in which they would not be at
a hopeless disadvantage; and some Jews, those probably who had a large
capital and were able to recall it from the borrowers, followed the
example of the Italians, and made to landholders advances of money to
be repaid in corn and wool.[144]
VIII.--THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE JEWS.
But even for those Jews who were rich enough to take part in wholesale
trade, there was still a great temptation to transgress the prohibition
against usury. All the legal machinery that was necessary for the due
execution and validity of agreements between Jews and Christians--the
chest in which the deeds were deposited, and the staffs of officers
by whom they were registered and supervised--were still maintained in
some towns, since they were necessary alike for the recovery, by the
ordinary process, of the old debts (many of which, in spite of the
order for summary repayment in the Statute of 1275, still remained
outstanding)[145] and for the registration of any new agreements that
might be made for the delivery of corn and wool, or for the repayment
of money lent ostensibly without interest. There was no lack of
would-be borrowers to co-operate with the Jews in using this machinery
in order to make agreements on which, in spite of the prohibition of
usury, money might profitably be lent. The demand for loans was great,
far too great to be satisfied, as the Church thought it reasonable
to expect,[146] by money advanced without interest; and owing to the
progress of the change from payment of rents in kind or service to
payment in cash,[147] it was steadily growing. It had been met by the
money of the Italian bankers, of the Jews, of English citizens, and,
as is freely hinted by writers of the time, of great English barons,
who secretly shared in the transactions and the profits of the Jewish
and foreign usurers.[148] The supply had suddenly been checked by the
simultaneous prohibition of all usury whether of Jews or of Christians.
Now a Jew who wished, by collusion with a borrower, to evade the law
against usury, had only to study the methods that had been followed
by the Caursines, and those that were still followed by the Italians
and acquiesced in by the heads of the religious houses with whom
they had dealings. The Caursines, for example, sometimes avoided the
appearance of usury by lending 100 marks and receiving in return a
bond, acknowledging a loan of £100.[149] Sometimes they lent money for
a definite period, on an agreement that they were to get a “gift,”
in return for their kindness in making the loan, and “compensation”
in case it were not repaid in time.[150] Sometimes by a still more
elaborate device, the Italians combined their two professions of
money-lenders and merchants, by inducing a monastery which had borrowed
money, to acknowledge the receipt, not only of the sum actually
received, but also of the price of certain sacks of wool which it bound
itself in due time to supply.[151] The Jews, no doubt, followed the
example of the Caursines and of the Italians. In official registers,
which are still extant, there are mentioned bonds which secured to
Jewish creditors a large payment in money together with a small payment
in kind, and which doubtless represent collusive transactions, in
which the offence of usury was to be avoided by the substitution of a
recompense in kind for interest in money. Other bonds for repayment of
money alone are mentioned in the same registers as having been executed
after 1275, and every one of the kind that was executed between that
date and the date of the amendment of the Statute against usury may
be safely considered to represent a transaction which was an offence,
either veiled or open, against the prohibition.[152]
The temptation to transgress the Statute of 1275 could appeal only to
Jews with capital, but on the poorer Jews other temptations acted with
even more strength and even worse results.
The only reputable careers known to have been open to the
poorer Jews were to become servants in the houses of their rich
co-religionists,[153] or else to imitate in a humble way their
financial transactions, either by keeping pawnshops,[154] or by
carrying on, in towns where there was no recognised Jewry, business
of the same kind as that of the rich money-lenders in the larger
Jewish settlements. To follow these pursuits was now impossible, in
consequence, not only of the prohibition of usury, but also of the
strictness with which Edward enforced the old legislation against the
residence of Jews in towns where there did not exist a chest for the
deposit of Jewish debts, and a staff of clerks to witness and register
them.[155] There was thus nothing to which the poorer Jews could turn.
Crowded as unwelcome intruders into a small and decreasing number of
towns,[156] without legal standing or industrial skill, hated by the
people and declared accursed by the Church, they were bidden to support
themselves under conditions which made the task impossible unless they
could take by storm the citadel of municipal privilege which bade
defiance to the “greatest of the Plantagenets” throughout his reign.
Under such conditions degeneration was inevitable. Some of the Jews are
said to have taken to highway robbery and burglary;[157] some went into
the House of Converts, where they got 1½d. a day and free lodging.[158]
But to the dishonest there was open a far more profitable form of
dishonesty than either of those already mentioned, viz., clipping the
coin.
The offence had long been prevalent. In 1248 such mischief had been
done that, according to Matthew Paris “no foreigner, let alone an
Englishman, could look on an English coin with dry eyes and unbroken
heart.”[159] It was in vain that Henry III. issued a new coinage, so
stamped that the device and the lettering extended to the edge of the
piece,[160] and caused it to be proclaimed in every town, village,
market-place, and fair that none but the new pieces with their shapes
unaltered should be given or taken in exchange.[161] The opportunity
for dishonesty was too tempting. The coins that actually circulated in
the country were of many different issues,[162] they were not milled
at the edges,[163] they were so liable to damage and mutilation of
all kinds that their deficiency of weight had to be recognised and
allowed for.[164] Hence anyone who had many coins passing through
his hands could secure an easy profit by clipping off a piece from
each one before he passed it again into circulation. In the early
part of the reign of Edward I., such was the deficiency in the weight
of genuine coins (an annalist of the period estimates it at 50 per
cent.),[165] and such the amount of false coin in circulation, that
the price of commodities rose to an alarming height, foreign merchants
were driven away, trade became completely disorganised, shopkeepers
refused the money tendered to them, and the necessities of life were
withdrawn from the markets.[166] The King had to promise to issue a
new coinage, but the announcement of his intention only increased the
general disturbance. The Archbishop of Canterbury complained that
in consequence of the disturbance of circulation, he could not find
anyone, except the professional usurers, from whom he could borrow
money on which to live during the interval before the revenues of his
see began to come in.[167] When the King at this period of his reign
went to a priory to ask for money, the first and most cogent of the
excuses that he heard was that “the House was impoverished by the
change in the coinage of the realm.”[168] Public opinion ascribed to
the Jews the greatest share in the injuries to the coinage. “They are
notoriously forgers and clippers of the coin,” says Matthew Paris.[169]
And that the suspicion was not absolutely without justification is
shown by the fact, that early in Henry III.’s reign, the community
made a payment to the King in order to secure as a concession the
expulsion from England of such of its members as might be convicted
of the crime.[170] When inquiries were ordered into the causes of
the debasement, in 1248, it was generally considered that the guilt
would be found to rest with the Jews.[171] The official verdict
included them with the Caursines and the Flemish wool-merchants in its
condemnation.[172]
It was not unnatural that Edward, when the evil reappeared in his
reign, should share the general suspicion against the Jews, seeing
that they had only recently begun to give up dealing in money, while
many of the poorer among them must have become, since 1275, desperate
enough to be ready to take to any tempting form of dishonesty. The
King’s indignation at the suffering that had been caused by the injury
done to the old coinage, and at the expense that was involved in the
preparation of the new issue which had become necessary, prompted him
to act on his suspicions, and to take a measure of terrible severity in
order to make sure of the apprehension of the most probable culprits.
When, in 1278, he was making preparations for an inquiry into the
whole subject of the coinage, he caused all the Jews of England to
be imprisoned in one night, their property to be seized, and their
houses to be searched. At the same time the goldsmiths, and many others
against whom information was given by the Jews, were treated in the
same way.[173]
The prisoners were tried before a bench of judges and royal officers.
There can be no doubt that many innocent men were accused, even if
they were not condemned. At a time when all the Jews in England were
imprisoned, there was a great temptation for Christians to bring
false accusations against those among them whom they disliked on
personal or religious grounds, especially as there was a good chance
of extorting hush-money from the accused, or, in case of condemnation,
of concealing from the escheators some of their property.[174] The
Jews and the King recognised the danger. One Manser of London, for
example, was wise enough to sue that an investigation might be held
into the ownership of tools for clipping that were found on the roof
of his house.[175] The King, anxious that punishment should fall only
on the guilty, issued a general writ, in which the various motives for
false accusation were recited, and it was ordered that any Jew against
whom no charge had been brought by a certain date might secure himself
altogether by paying a fine.[176] Nevertheless, a large number both of
Jews and Christians were found guilty. Of the Christians only three
were condemned to death, though many others were heavily fined. For
the Jews, however, there was no mercy. Two hundred and ninety-three of
them were hanged and drawn in London, and all their property escheated
to the King. A few more had been condemned, but saved their lives by
conversion to Christianity.[177]
The activity with which Jews took part, or were supposed to take part,
in the debasement of the coinage, and in the prohibited practice of
usury,[178] must have aroused in the mind of the King some misgivings
on the subject of his new policy. Nevertheless, he did not as yet
despair of its ultimate success. The crimes of the Jews were no
greater than those of the Christians around them, though they called
forth heavier punishment. Christians clipped and coined; Christians
still lent money on usury.[179] And a certain amount of crime among
Jews could not but be looked for as a natural result of the terrible
difficulties in the way of the social revolution that had been demanded
of them. Edward saw that he had been trying to do too much at once. The
Jews could not change their occupation as suddenly as he had wished.
The country could not do without money-lenders. By making the lending
of money at interest a penal offence, and thus encouraging debtors and
creditors to keep their transactions secret, Edward had weakened the
supervision that had been exercised by the Treasury, since 1194, over
the business and property of the Jews, and thus he had increased the
chance of fraud in the collection of tallages, and in the apportionment
of the share of each estate that had long been claimed by the Crown
as the succession due on Jewish property.[180] But he had not stamped
out usury, though the Statute of 1275 had forbidden it. He had not even
secured the redemption of all pledges of Christians from the hands of
the Jews, though the Statute of 1275 had demanded it. And, therefore,
in order that he might not keep on the Statute Book a law of which the
effective administration was impossible, he mitigated the severity of
the provisions of 1275, and issued, probably a few years later, a new
Statute, in which he prescribed certain conditions under which usury
was to be permitted. He allowed loans to be made under contract for the
payment of interest at the rate of half a mark in the pound yearly,
but for three years only; and, in order to reduce the temptation to
conclude secret transactions, restored legal recognition to all debts
of the value of £20 or upwards that were made under the prescribed
conditions, and were registered before the chirographer and clerk,
and threatened heavy penalties against all who should lend up to that
amount without registration.[181]
Edward was wise in thus substituting for his earlier, harassing
measure, one that allowed for gradual change, and that attempted to
control the evil of which the immediate suppression was impossible. But
the few years’ experience that he had already had ought to have made
him go farther still. It ought to have shown him that it was hopeless
to expect the Jews to give up usury so long as the greater part of them
were practically excluded from all other pursuits, and that, if ever he
was to bring to a successful issue the policy that he had inaugurated,
he would have to find some means of enabling them to work side by side
with Christians, and to compete with them on equal conditions.
Such a task would have been full of difficulties, the greatest of
which resulted from the active hostility with which the rulers and
teachers of the Christian Church in the thirteenth century, unlike
their predecessors, regarded the Jews. The growth and nature of this
hostility must now be considered.
IX.--THE JEWS IN RELATION TO THE CHURCH OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
The Popes of the earlier part of the Middle Ages had found enough
employment for their energies in the effort to maintain their own
position in Christendom; and they had neither the wish nor the power to
seek a conflict with a race that remained wholly outside the Church.
In the twelfth century there was no other general Church Law directed
against the Jews than that which forbade them to live in the same
houses with Christians, and to have Christian servants.[182] In England
especially, Churchmen of the twelfth century showed towards the Jews
a tolerant spirit, and made no effort to augment their unpopularity
or to diminish their privileges. The examples of Anselm, and of his
contemporary, Gilbert of Westminster, show that in the attempts made at
that time by men of high position in the Church to convert the Jews, no
method was employed except that of reasonable persuasion.[183] Churches
and monasteries took charge, at times of danger, of the money, and
even of the families, of Jews. Such friendly intercourse as existed
between Jews and Christians was allowed to go on without any attempt at
ecclesiastical interference.[184]
The accession of Innocent the Third to the pontificate brought about a
rapid change in the attitude of the Church towards the Jews. Innocent
was the first to advance, on behalf of the Papacy, the claim that the
Lord gave Peter not only the whole Church, but the whole world to
rule,[185] and he endeavoured with a merciless enthusiasm, from which
all unbelievers and heretics in Christian countries had to suffer, to
make good his claim, and to establish in Europe one united Catholic
Church. He took his stand on the doctrine, which his predecessors had
held[186] in a modified form, and without ever acting on it, that the
Jews were condemned to perpetual slavery on account of the wickedness
of their ancestors in crucifying Christ; and he thought that they ought
to be made to feel, and their neighbours likewise, that it was only
out of Christian pity that their presence was endured in Christian
countries.
The position of the Jews at the time of Innocent’s accession to the
pontificate was very far from being such as his theory required. They
had magnificent synagogues, they employed Christian servants, they
married, or were said to marry, Christian wives; they refused, in what
some Christians regarded as a spirit of outrageous insolence, to eat
the same meat and to drink the same wine as the Gentiles, and they made
no secret of their disbelief in the sacred history of Christianity.
Moreover, they were suspected of exercising a considerable influence on
the growth of the heresies which it was the chief work of Innocent’s
life to combat. The Vaudois, the Cathari, and the Albigenses, all
kept up Jewish observances, and were said to have learnt from the
Jews their heretical dogmas; the Albigenses, indeed, were accused of
maintaining that the law of the Jews was better than the law of the
Christians. And, nevertheless, Christian kings supported the Jews
in every way. They countenanced their usury, they refused (so, at
least, Innocent said) to allow evidence against them on any charge
to be given by Christian witnesses, and they even employed them in
high offices of State. In view of these facts, Innocent thought that
a great effort of repression should be made, and he wrote to the King
of France, the Duke of Burgundy, and other monarchs, asking for their
assistance in the work of reducing the Jews to that condition of
slavery which was their due. He decreed in his general Church Council
that Jews should be excluded in future from public offices, and that
they should wear a badge to distinguish them from Christians; and
he renewed the old regulation of the Church, which required them to
dismiss Christian servants from their houses. In order to ensure that
the last provision should be observed, he decided that any Christians
having any intercourse with Jews that transgressed it should be subject
to excommunication. For the enforcement of his other anti-Jewish
measures he relied on the help of the temporal power in all Christian
countries.[187]
The declaration of war made by Innocent III. was a terrible calamity
for the Jews; but though it affected at once the whole of Christian
Europe, still its evil results might have passed away in time. Popes
were but men and politicians; and just as Innocent had, by the
publication of his wishes and decrees concerning the Jews, set himself
in opposition to his predecessors, so might his successors, in their
turn, moved by different feelings or taking a different view of the
interests and duties of the Church, set themselves in opposition to
him, and go back to the old lenient opinions and practice. But within
a few years of the death of Innocent, the work of attacking the Jews
ceased to be in the hands of any one man, and passed over to a body of
men habitually influenced not by personal or political considerations,
but only by what they conceived to be the interest of religion,
and filled with a hatred of the Jews more fierce and fanatical and
steadfast than that of the Popes could ever have been.
The Dominican order was formally constituted in 1223, and from the
earliest years of its existence devoted itself to the task of rooting
out unbelief from the Christian world. The work that its members
at first professed to regard as peculiarly their own was that of
preaching, but on the Jews their preaching had no effect. With an
ingenuity and determination worthy of the order that in a later
century was to provide the Inquisition with its chief ministers, the
Dominicans devised and carried out another plan of action. Assisted by
converted Jews who had joined them, they undertook the study of Hebrew,
and their master, Raymundus de Peñaforte, induced the King of Spain
to build and endow seminaries for the purpose.[188] Armed with this
new knowledge, they were able to attack first, what they represented
as the foolish and pernicious contents of such Jewish books as the
Talmud, and secondly, the stubbornness of the Jews who refused to
accept the doctrines of Christianity, the truth of which the Dominicans
professed to be able to demonstrate from the Old Testament. Two
incidents which must at the time have been famous throughout Europe
illustrate their method of warfare. In 1239 Nicolas Donin, a converted
Jew who had become a Dominican friar, laid before Gregory IX. a series
of statements concerning the Talmud. Helped, no doubt, by all the
influence of his order, he induced the Pope to issue bulls to the Kings
of France, England, and Spain, and the bishops in those countries,
ordering that all copies of the Talmud should be seized, and that
public inquiry should be held concerning the charges brought against
the book. In England and Spain nothing seems to have been done, but in
Paris the Pope’s instructions were carried out, and, at the instigation
of the leading Dominicans, St. Louis ordered that all copies of the
Talmud that could be found in France should be confiscated, and that
four Rabbis should, on behalf of the Jews, hold a public debate with
Donin, in order to meet, if they could, the charges that he was
prepared to maintain. In the course of the debate, which was held in
the precincts of the Court and in the presence of members of the Royal
family and great dignitaries of the Church, Donin asserted that the
Talmud encouraged the Jews to despise, deceive, rob, and even murder
Christians, that it contained blasphemous falsehoods concerning Christ,
superstitions and puerilities of all kinds, and passages disrespectful
to God and inconsistent with morality. The Rabbis answered as best
they could, but the court of Inquisitors decided that the charges
had been substantiated, and ordered that all the confiscated copies
of the Talmud should be burnt. After a delay of about two years the
_Auto-da-fe_ took place, and fourteen cartloads of the Talmud were
sacrificed.[189] The other famous incident of the kind took place in
Spain. Pablo Christiano, a converted Jew, who, like Donin, had joined
the Dominicans, challenged the Jews of Aragon to a discussion on the
differences between Judaism and Christianity, and induced James I.
to compel them to take up the challenge. The famous Nachmanides came
forward as the representative of his co-religionists. Pablo undertook
to show that the Old Testament, and other books recognised by the Jews,
taught that the Messiah had come, that he was “very God and very man,”
that he suffered and died for the salvation of mankind, and that with
his advent the ceremonial law ceased to be of any effect. Nachmanides
denied that any of these propositions could be substantiated from the
Jewish sacred books. For four days the disputation was carried on in
the presence of the king and many great personages of Church and State.
Of course the verdict was that the Christian disputant had beaten the
Jew.[190]
The method of conducting these two controversies showed that the
Dominicans were determined to use every possible weapon against the
Jews. The Talmud, a huge, heterogeneous and unedited compilation,
contains passages which are trivial and foolish, and others, written
by men who had memories of persecution fresh in their minds, which
express bitter hatred towards the “Gentiles,” that is, the Romans who
had taken Jerusalem, and had destroyed the nationality of the Jewish
race. It was easy for an opponent to pick out such passages, to assert
that what was said against the “Gentiles” expressed, not the feelings
of the victims of persecution against the Romans of the second century,
but the feelings of all Jews towards all non-Jews, at every time and
at every place, and to convince an uncritical audience that those who
held in honour the book that contained such passages were enemies of
religion, against whose influence it behoved all Christian powers to
guard the faithful. Similarly, by compelling the Jews to take part
in a discussion concerning the prophecies of the Old Testament, the
Dominicans imposed on them the choice between the two alternatives
of betraying their religion by acquiescing in what they believed to
be a false interpretation of their scripture, or else of proclaiming
publicly their disbelief in doctrines which were at the very foundation
of Christianity. The effect on the ruling classes in Europe of the
two discussions just mentioned must have been very great. And the
Dominicans were continually carrying on the same work, though, of
course, seldom before audiences so distinguished. Pablo, for example,
travelled about Spain and Provence, compelling the Jews, by virtue of
a royal edict that had been issued in his favour, to hold disputes
with him on matters of religion.[191] Many other members of the order
devoted their lives to the same pursuit,[192] and thus did their
best to fill the rulers of the Church with a dread of the terrible
consequences that the existence of Judaism threatened to the Christian
religion.
And, unfortunately for the Jews, their religion began to be feared
at the same time as cruel and powerful fanatics like Innocent and
the Dominicans were doing their best to cause it to be hated. There
is good reason to believe, though detailed evidence is not abundant,
that towards the end of the Middle Ages Judaism exercised over the
superstitions of other faiths the same fascination as in the first
century of the Roman Empire. Thomas Aquinas believed that unrestricted
intercourse between Jews and Christians was likely to result in the
conversion of Christians to Judaism, and for that reason he thought it
right, in spite of the general liberality of his opinions concerning
the Jews, that intercourse with them should be allowed to such
Christians alone as were strong in the faith, and were more likely to
convert them than to be converted by them.[193] “It happens sometimes,”
wrote a Pope of the thirteenth century, “that Christians, when they
are visited by the Lord with sickness and tribulation, go astray, and
have recourse to the vain help of the Jewish rite. They hold in the
synagogues of the Jews torches and lighted candles, and make offerings
there. Likewise they keep vigils (especially on the Sabbath), in the
hope that the sick may be restored to health, that those at sea may
reach harbour, that those in childbirth may be safely delivered, and
that the barren may become fruitful and rejoice in offspring. For the
accomplishment of these and other wishes, they implore the help of the
said rite, and in idolatrous fashion show open signs of devotion and
reverence to a scroll, not without much harm to the orthodox faith,
contumely to our Creator, and opprobrium and shame to the Universal
Church.”[194]
The anti-Jewish feeling that grew up from the causes that have just
been described called into existence new institutions and measures
designed for the purpose of humbling the Jews and checking the growth
of Judaism. In compliance with the cruel request of Innocent, most
of the monarchs of Europe compelled their Jewish subjects to wear
a badge.[195] Local church councils, which hitherto had contented
themselves with the attempt to enforce the old prohibition against
the employment by Jews of Christian servants and nurses, now went
further, and forbade Christians to allow the presence of Jews in their
houses and taverns, to feast or dance with them, to be present at the
celebration of their marriages, their new moons, and their festivals,
and to employ their services as doctors.[196] The Popes of the latter
part of the thirteenth century appointed Dominicans in various
countries of Europe to perform the duty of preaching to the Jews, and
of holding inquisitions into their heresies, in the hope that with the
help of the secular power they might stamp them out.[197]
In England the relation of the Jews to the Christians underwent
somewhat the same changes as in Continental Europe. Before the
thirteenth century the Jews in England had, as has been said above,
been free from molestation by the Church,[198] and their chief danger
had been from the brutality and greed of the disorderly populace, of
desperate outcasts, and of marauding Crusaders.[199] The first great
attack made on them by any constituted power came from Stephen Langton,
who, not content with passing at his Provincial Synod a decree which,
in accordance with the regulations of Innocent, enforced the use of the
badge and prohibited the erection of new synagogues, went so far as
to issue orders that no one in his diocese should presume, under pain
of excommunication, to have any intercourse with Jews, or should sell
them any of the necessaries of life. The Bishops of Lincoln and Norwich
issued the same orders in their dioceses.[200] Many other bishops in
the reign of Henry III. did their best, partly by legislation in their
diocesan synods and partly by the use of their personal and spiritual
influence, to check intercourse between Jews and Christians.[201] Of
course the king’s guardians, in the interest of the royal income, a
considerable part of which was derived from the Jewry, interfered to
prevent the measures of Langton and his colleagues from being carried
into effect. And Henry, when he took into his own hands the work of
government, while, on the one hand, he showed his sympathy with the
fears of the Church by building a house for the reception of Jewish
converts,[202] and by lending the sanction of the civil power to the
decree that ordered the use of the badge,[203] nevertheless followed
the example that his guardians had set, and protected the Jews against
the aggression of the Church.
There were many reasons which might have caused Edward to sympathise
more strongly than his father had done, with the anti-Jewish feelings
of the Church. He was a pious man and a pious king, filled with a sense
of his kingly duty towards “the living God who takes to himself the
souls of Princes.”[204] He was a Crusader, though the great crusading
age was over, a founder of monasteries, a pilgrim to holy places; and
through his confessors he was in close connection with, and under
the influence of, the Dominican order.[205] Some of his bishops were
determined enemies of the Jews. John of Peckham, for example, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, insisted at one time on the demolition of
all the small private synagogues in London, at which the Jews were in
the habit of worshipping after the confiscation of their great public
synagogues at the end of the reign of Henry III.; at another time he
demanded from the king the help of the temporal power against Jews
who having once been converted to Christianity, wished to go back to
their old faith; on another occasion he took the bold step of writing
to the Queen concerning her business transactions with the Jews,
solemnly warning her that unless she gave them up she could never
be absolved from her sins, “nay, not though an angel should assert
the contrary.”[206] At Hereford, Bishop Swinfield was so determined
to prevent intercourse with Jews that, when he heard that certain
Christians intended to be present at a marriage feast to be given by
some rich Jews of the city, he issued a proclamation threatening with
excommunication any who should carry out their intention, and, when his
proclamation was disregarded, he carried out his threat.[207]
Certain events that happened, or were said to have happened, in England
in Edward’s lifetime, some, indeed, under his own observation, may
well have seemed to him to justify the attitude of the Church. In
1275 a Dominican friar was converted to Judaism.[208] In 1268, while
Edward was in Oxford, the Chancellor, masters and scholars of the
University, and the Parochial Clergy, were going in procession to visit
the shrine of St. Friedswide when, according to a story that gained
general credence, a Jew of the city snatched from the bearer a cross
that was being carried at their head and trod it under foot.[209] At
Norwich, early in Edward’s reign, a Jew was burnt for blasphemy.[210]
At Nottingham, in 1278, a Jewess was charged with abusing in scandalous
terms all the Christian bystanders in the market-place.[211]
Edward’s conduct could not but be influenced by the general tone of
opinion in the Church, by the strong anti-Jewish feeling of some of his
bishops, and by the follies, real or supposed, of the Jews themselves.
In continuation of his father’s policy he made, throughout his reign,
such contributions as, with his scanty means, he could afford, to the
support of the House of Converts.[212] He renewed the edict concerning
the wearing of the badge, and extended it to Jewesses, whereas it had
formerly applied only to Jews.[213] In order that the Dominicans might
be able to carry on in England the same efforts at conversion as they
were already pursuing in France, Spain and Germany, he issued to all
the sheriffs and bailiffs in England writs bidding them do their best
to induce all the Jews in the counties and towns under their charge to
assemble and hear the word of God preached by the friars.[214] To meet
the danger to religion that might arise from the blasphemous utterances
of Jews, he ordered that proclamation should be made throughout England
that any Jew found guilty (after an enquiry conducted by Christians)
of having spoken disrespectfully of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the
Catholic faith, should be liable to the loss of life or limbs.[215]
Thus far, and no farther, was Edward prepared to go with measures for
the suppression of Judaism as a religion. He believed that the Jews,
so long as they remain Jews, lived in ignorance and sin, and he did
what he could to help the friars in the effort to convert them. He
believed that some among them were likely to make blasphemous attacks
on Christianity, and he did what he could to keep them in check. But he
believed that it was possible for them to live in peace and quietness,
carrying on trades and handicrafts, among Christian neighbours in
Christian towns. And it was to enable them to do so that he adopted
the policy of 1275, and bade the Jews renounce usury, giving them at
the same time permission “to practise trade, to live by their labour,
and, for those purposes, freely to converse with Christians.” But,
as we have seen, there were imposed on the Jews who attempted to
avail themselves of this permission, legal disadvantages which wholly
unfitted them for industrial competition with non-Jews, and compelled
them to continue the practice of usury. That Edward recognised this
fact is shown by the issue of the revised Statute of Usurers some years
after 1275; but that measure was inconclusive and inconsistent with the
rest of his policy. Sooner or later the conclusion would have forced
itself on him that until the Jews were, by the acquisition of the right
to become burgesses and gildsmen, enabled to enter into industrial
competition on equal terms with Christians, all his efforts to make
them traders instead of usurers would be wasted. He would then have had
before him two alternatives. He might, on the one hand, have declined
to sacrifice his seignorial rights over the Jews, whom he had described
in the Statute of 1275 as “talliable to the king as his own serfs, and
not otherwise,” and in that case he would have had to recognise that
his whole Jewish policy was an impossible one. Or he might, on the
other hand, have revoked the provision in the statute which forbade the
Jews to be in “scots, lots, or talliage with the other inhabitants of
those cities or burgesses where they remained.” Such a measure would
have been a step in the only direction which could possibly lead to the
success of his policy. But it would not by itself have been enough to
secure success; for, when the legal difficulties of the Jews had been
removed, there would still have remained the social difficulties which
proceeded from the dislike in which they were held by the Church and
the people; and, unless these difficulties also could be removed, so
that the Jews might be in a position of social equality, as well as
legal equality, with Christians, and associate with them in friendly
intercourse, the king’s policy would be as far from success as ever.
Which alternative Edward would have decided to adopt is, of course,
a question we have no means of answering; but the decision was taken
out of his hands by the interference, for the first and last time in
English history, of the head of the Catholic Church in the relations
between the Jews and the king.
At the end of 1286, Honorius IV. addressed to the Archbishops of
Canterbury[216] and York[217] and their suffragans the following bull:--
“We have heard that in England the accursed and perfidious Jews have
done unspeakable things and horrible acts, to the shame of our Creator
and the detriment of the Catholic faith. They are said to have a
wicked and deceitful book, which they commonly call Thalmud, containing
manifold abominations, falsehoods, heresies, and abuses. This damnable
work they continually study, and with its nefarious contents their
base thoughts are always engaged. Moreover, they set their children
from their tender years to study its lethal teaching, and they do not
scruple to tell them that they ought to believe in it more than in the
Law of Moses, so that the said children may flee from the path of God
and go astray in the devious ways of the unbelievers. Moreover, they
not only attempt to entice the minds of the faithful to their pestilent
sect, but also, with many gifts, they seduce to apostasy those who,
led by wholesome counsel, have abjured the error of infidelity and
betaken themselves to the Christian faith; so that some, being led away
by the treachery of the Jews, live with them according to their rite
and law, even in the parishes in which they received new life from the
sacred font of baptism; and hence arise injury to our Saviour, scandal
to the faithful, and dishonour to the Christian faith. Some also who
have been baptised they send to other places, in order that there
they may live unknown and return to their disbelief. They invite and
urgently persuade Christians to attend their synagogues on the Sabbath
and on other of their solemn occasions, to hear and take part in their
services, and to show reverence to the parchment-scroll or book in
which their law is written, in consequence of which many Christians
Judaise with the Jews.
“Moreover, they have in their households Christians whom they compel to
busy themselves on Sundays and feast-days with servile tasks from which
they should refrain. And so they cast opprobrium on the majesty of God.
They have in their houses Christian women to bring up their children.
Christian men and women dwell among them; and so it often happens,
when occasion offers and the time is favourable to shameful actions,
that Christian men have unblessed intercourse with Jewish women and
Christian women with Jewish men.
“Yet Christians and Jews go on meeting in each others’ houses. They
spend their leisure in banqueting and feasting together, and hence the
opportunity for mischief becomes easy. On certain days they publicly
abuse Christians, or rather curse them, and do other wicked acts which
offend God and cause the loss of souls.
“And although some of you have been often asked to devise a fitting
remedy for these things, yet you have failed to comply. Whereat we are
forced to wonder the more, since the duty of your pastoral office binds
you to show yourselves more ready and determined than other men to
avenge the wrongs of our Saviour, and to oppose the nefarious attempts
of the foes of the Christian faith.
“An evil so dangerous must not be made light of, lest, being neglected,
it may grow great. You are bound to rise up with ready courage against
such audacity in order that it may be completely suppressed and
confounded and that the dignity and glory of the Catholic Faith may
increase. Therefore by this apostolic writing we give orders that, as
the duty of your office demands, you shall use inhibitions, spiritual
and temporal penalties, and other methods, which shall seem good to
you, and which in your preaching and at other fitting times you shall
set forth, to the end, that this disease may be checked by proper
remedies. So may you have your reward from the mercy of the Eternal
King. We shall extol in our prayers your wisdom and diligence. Let us
know fully by your letters what you do in this matter.”
X.--THE EFFECTS OF THE CLERICAL OPPOSITION.
Edward was too religious to disregard the wishes of the Pope, expressed
thus formally and solemnly and with the utmost strength of language.
And he had special reasons for paying heed to the words of Honorius
IV., on whose money-lenders he was dependent for loans, and whose
predecessor had, by the exercise of his spiritual powers, secured for
him a tenth part of the goods of the clergy of England.[218] From the
moment of the issue of the bull, the policy inaugurated by the statute
of 1275 was doomed. For of the two alternatives that Edward would have
had before him in any further Jewish legislation that he might have
undertaken--the alternatives of the abandonment of the policy of 1275,
or the extension of it by further measures for the assimilation of the
status of Jews to that of Christians--the Church now demanded that he
should at once adopt the former. It demanded that the Jews of England
should live isolated from the Christians; and this they could do only
so long as they kept to pursuits, such as usury, for the practice of
which they required no connection with the organisation of a gild or a
town.
For a time Edward could take no decisive measures, since when the
bull reached England, he had left for Gascony.[219] In that province
nothing had apparently as yet been done to satisfy the demand made by
the Council of Lyons, in 1274, that alien usurers should no longer be
tolerated in the land of Christians. It was hopeless to try to enforce
in a distant dependency the policy that had been beset in England with
so many difficulties, and had now incurred the direct opposition of the
Church. The only alternative was expulsion, a measure that on French
soil suggested itself the more naturally, since two French kings had
practically adopted it already. Before he returned home, Edward issued
an order that all Jews should leave Gascony.[220]
The application of the same measure in England was a more serious
matter, since the English Jews were doubtless a much larger community
than those of Gascony. But, determined not to tolerate them as usurers,
and convinced of the hopelessness of his efforts to change them into
traders, Edward had no alternative but to treat them as he had treated
their coreligionists in Gascony.
No doubt he was influenced in his resolution by the members of his
family and court. His wife and mother and various of his officers had
been in the habit of receiving liberal grants from the property and
forfeitures of the Jews.[221] They must have known that this resource
was decreasing steadily, and was not worth husbanding, and they must
have welcomed a measure which would bring into the King’s hands a
fairly large amount of spoil capable of immediate distribution. And,
probably, some of the ecclesiastical members of the court felt, as
his mother certainly did,[222] a religious hatred of the Jews and a
religious joy at the prospect of their disappearance.
XI.--THE EXPULSION.
Of the course of events for the first few months after Edward’s return
to England, very meagre accounts have come down to us. His searching
inquiry into the conduct of the judges during his absence[223] must
have taken up most of his time and energy. As soon as he had meted out
punishment to those whom he had found guilty of corruption, he turned
to the Jewish question. On the 18th of July, 1290, writs were issued to
the sheriffs of counties, informing them that a decree had been passed
that all Jews should leave England before the feast of All Saints of
that year.[224] Any who remained in the country after the prescribed
day were declared liable to the penalty of death.[225]
Every effort was made by the King to secure the peace and safety
of the Jews during the short period for which they were allowed to
remain, and in the course of their journey from their homes to the
coast, and from the coast to their ultimate destination. The sheriffs
were ordered to have public proclamation made that “no one within the
appointed period should injure, harm, damage, or grieve them,” and
were to ensure, for such as chose to pay for it, a safe journey to
London. The wardens of the Cinque Ports, within the district of whose
jurisdiction many of the Jews would necessarily embark, received orders
in the same spirit as those that had been addressed to the sheriffs of
the counties. They were to see that the exiles were provided, after
payment, with a safe and speedy passage across the sea, and that the
poor among them were enabled to travel at cheap rates and were treated
with consideration.[226] These general orders were reinforced by the
issue of special writs of safe-conduct for individual Jews.[227] The
exiles were allowed to carry with them all of their own property that
was in their possession at the time of the issue of the decree of
expulsion, together with such pledges deposited with them by Christians
as were not redeemed before a fixed date. A few Jews who were high in
the favour of royal personages, such as Aaron, son of Vives, who was a
“chattel” of the King’s brother Edmund,[228] and Cok, son of Hagin, who
belonged to the Queen,[229] were allowed before their departure to sell
their houses and fees to any Christian who would buy them.
On St. Denis’s Day all the Jews of London started on their journey
to the sea-coast.[230] The treatment that they met with was not so
merciful as the king had wished. Many of the richer among them
embarked with all their property at London. At the mouth of the Thames,
the master cast anchor during the ebb-tide, so that his vessel grounded
on the sands, and invited his passengers to walk on the shore till
it was again afloat. He led them to a great distance, so that they
did not get back to the river-side till the tide was again full. Then
he ran into the water, climbed into the ship by means of a rope, and
bade them, if they needed help, call on their Prophet Moses. They
followed him into the water, and most of them were drowned. The sailors
appropriated all that the Jews had left on board. But subsequently the
master and his accomplices were indicted, convicted of murder, and
hanged.[231]
One body of the exiles set sail for France. During their voyage fierce
storms swept the sea. Many were drowned. Many were cast destitute on
the coast that they were seeking, and were allowed by the King to
live for a time in Amiens.[232] This act of mercy, however, called
forth the censure of the Pope, and the _Parlement de la Chandeleur_,
which met in the same year, decreed that all the Jews from England and
Gascony who had taken refuge in the French king’s dominions should
leave the country by the middle of the next Lent.[233] Another body,
numbering 1,335, and consisting, to a great extent, of the poor,
went to Flanders.[234] The only known fact that we have to guide our
conjectures as to the ultimate place of settlement of any of those who
left England is that, in a list of the inhabitants of the Paris Jewry,
made four years after the Expulsion, there appear certain names with
the additions of _l’Englische_ or _l’Englais_.[235] It may well be that
many Jews from England, speaking the French language, were able, in
spite of the Act of the _Parlement de la Chandeleur_, to become merged
in the general body of the Jews of France, who were many times as
numerous as those of England had been.[236] Many, too, may have thrown
in their lot with their 850,000 coreligionists of Spain.[237]
The property that the Jews left behind them in England consisted of
such dwelling-houses, and other houses, as remained to them in spite of
the strict conditions imposed by the Statute of 1275, of the synagogues
and cemeteries of their local congregations, and of bonds partly for
the repayment of money, and partly for the delivery of wool and corn
for which the price had been paid in advance. All fell into the hands
of the King,[238] except, possibly, the houses in some of those towns,
such as Hereford, Winchester, and Ipswich, of which the citizens had
by the purchase of manorial rights become entitled to all fines and
forfeitures.[239] The annual value of the houses, as shown in the
returns made by the sheriffs, was, after allowance had been made for
the right of the Capital Lords, about £130. The value of the debts, as
shown in the register made by the officers of the Exchequer, was about
£9,100, but the amount for realisation was diminished by the King’s
resolve to take from the debtors, not the full amount for which they
were liable, and which, under the amended statute of the Jewry,[240]
could include three years’ interest, but only the bare principal that
had been originally advanced. Even this was not fully collected;
payment was, by the King’s permission, delayed, and confirmations,
made in 1315 and 1327, of the renunciation of interest, show how long
some of the debts remained outstanding. Edward III. finally gave up the
claim to all further payment.[241]
It was ordered that the houses should be sold and the proceeds devoted
to pious uses.[242] But it appears that they were nearly all given away
to the King’s friends.[243]
XII.--THE NECESSITY FOR THE EXPULSION.
The Expulsion was not the act of a cruel king. The forbearance which
marks the orders to the officers who were charged with the execution
of the decree had been shown by Edward many a time before, when he
protected Jews against claims too rigorously enforced, and ordered that
his own rights should be waived where insistence on them would have
deprived his debtors of their means of subsistence.[244]
Nor was it prompted by greed. It is true that immediately after it,
and according to the account of many chroniclers, as an expression of
gratitude for it, the Parliament voted a tenth and a fifteenth.[245]
But this cannot have been a bribe offered beforehand, for the writs
announcing the decree were issued on the fourth day after that for
which the Parliament was summoned.[246] It is impossible to suppose
that in so short an interval the question was brought up, the policy
chosen, the price fixed, and the decree issued. It is equally
impossible that Edward’s conduct should have been affected by the
prospect of the confiscation of the small amount of property that the
Jews left behind them.
The Expulsion was a piece of independent royal action, made necessary
by the impossibility of carrying out the only alternative policy
that an honourable Christian king could adopt. And the impossibility
was not of Edward’s making. It was the result of many causes, and
the knowledge of it had been brought home to him by many proofs. The
guesses of our contemporary, and all but contemporary, authorities
who take on themselves to explain his action, show how many were the
obstacles before which he had to confess himself vanquished. In one
chronicle the Expulsion is represented as a concession to the prayer
of the Pope;[247] in another, as the result of the efforts of Queen
Eleanor;[248] in a third, as a measure of summary punishment against
the blasphemy of the Jews, taken to give satisfaction to the English
clergy;[249] in a fourth as an answer to the complaints made by
the magnates of the continued prevalence of usury;[250] in a fifth
as an act of conformity to public opinion;[251] in a sixth, as a
reform suggested by the King’s independent general enquiry into the
administration of the kingdom during his absence, and his discovery,
through the complaints of the Council, of the “deceits” of the
Jews.[252]
Each of these statements gives us some information as to the nature
and extent of the failure of Edward’s policy. None gives the true
cause, for none sets before us the true position of the Jews and their
relations with their neighbours. It is true that it was the bull of
Honorius that finally compelled Edward to give up his attempt to
assimilate the position of the Jews to that of Christian traders. It
is true, no doubt, that his mother had from the first dissuaded him
from generous treatment, and, perhaps, had induced him to lessen the
chance of the success of his policy by asserting his right over them
as over his serfs.[253] But the bull of the Pope and the personal
influence of the Queen-mother were alike unnecessary. If Edward had
waived all his rights, if the Church had in his reign relented towards
the Jews instead of increasing its bitterness towards them, both acts
of generosity would have come too late. The same causes that had
made the Jews accept the position of royal usurers at the end of the
eleventh century, and of royal chattels at the end of the twelfth,
made it impossible for them to give up either position at the end of
the thirteenth. From the moment of their arrival in England they had
been hated by the common people. They never had an opportunity of
acquiring interests in common with their neighbours, or of entering
their social or industrial institutions. Isolation brought with it
danger. For the sake of safety they had to accept royal protection;
and their protectors long held them in a close grip, until one at last
refused to tolerate them under the same conditions as had satisfied his
predecessors. But to have given them their freedom would only have
been to expose them to the old dislike and the old danger. If Edward
had allowed them to become citizens, and had set at naught the bull of
Honorius, he would have seen the English towns refusing to support his
policy and denying to the Jews the right to join the gild merchant,
to learn trades and to practise them, and to enjoy the protection of
municipal laws and customs.
For towards all new-comers, of whatever race or religion, the
English burgesses of the Middle Ages showed a spirit of unyielding
exclusiveness.[254] But the feeling against the Jews was far greater
than that against any other class. Every reference to them in English
literature, before the Expulsion and long after it, shows its strength
and bitterness. “Hell is without light where they sing lamentations,”
says one poet of them.[255] Another who, writing a few years after the
Expulsion, mentions the massacre at the coronation of Richard I., finds
in it nothing to wonder at, and nothing to regret. To him it is only
natural that “The king took it for great shame, That from such unclean
things as them any meat to him came.”[256] The chroniclers of the time
refer to them again and again, and always in the same tone of dislike.
“The Jews,” says Matthew Paris, in his account of one of the most cruel
of Henry III.’s acts of extortion, “had nearly all their money taken
from them, and yet they were not pitied, because it is proved, and is
manifest, that they are continually convicted of forging charters,
seals and coins.”[257] “They are a sign for the nation like Cain the
accursed,” he says elsewhere.[258] The eulogist of Edward I., when he
recounts the great deeds of his hero, tells with pride and without
a word of pity how “the perfidious and unbelieving horde of Jews is
driven forth from England in one day into exile.”[259] And just as no
punishment that they can suffer is regarded as too heavy for their
sins, so no story of their misdoings, whether it be of the murder of
Christian children, of insults to the Christian religion, or of fraud
on Christian debtors, is too improbable or too brutal or too trivial to
be repeated.[260]
The popular hatred showed itself in deed as well as in word. The
massacres of 1190 were imitated on a small scale at intervals during
the sojourn of the Jews in England. Braziers and hosiers, bakers and
shoemakers, tailors and copperers, priests and Oxford scholars were all
ready to take part in the looting of a Jewry.[261]
Nor was there any influence exercised by the higher classes to make
the populace less intolerant. A great lady declared that it was a
disgrace for one of her rank to sit in a carriage in which a Jewess
had sat.[262] A great noble thought it a good jest, when a Jew on his
estate fell into a pit on a Friday, to order that he should not be
helped out either on the Jewish Sabbath or on the Christian, in order
that the absurdity of the Mosaic legislation might be demonstrated--at
the cost, as it resulted, of the Jew’s life.[263]
Bishops supported with eagerness the charge of child-murder repeatedly
brought against the Jews,[264] though Popes and Councils had declared
it to be groundless[265]; and the judge who showed the greatest
eagerness for the punishment of the Jewish prisoners who were accused
on the monstrous charge of having murdered Hugh of Lincoln, was a man
who was held in especial honour by his contemporaries as a scholar and
“a circumspect and discreet man.”[266]
Thus the Christians were not likely to endure the Jews as neighbours
and fellow-workers, and the Jews, even if they had been permitted,
would have been as little willing to live the life and follow the
ordinary pursuits of citizens. It was not that they loved usury as
a calling. On the contrary, they entered willingly into all those
professions that gave them the opportunity of being their own
masters and living according to their own fashion. Many of them were
physicians, and among the most esteemed in Europe.[267] In Italy,
where the municipal and gild organisations were easier to enter,
and less narrow and exacting in their constitution, than those of
England,[268] they worked at trades.[269] In Sicily, under Frederic
II., some Jews were employed as administrators, and many more were
agriculturists.[270] In Rome, one was treasurer of the household of
Pope Alexander III., and in Southern France another filled the same
office under Count Raymond, of Toulouse.[271] In Austria, they were
the financial ministers of the Archduke,[272] and in Spain, one was
chamberlain to Alphonso the Wise, and many others were in the service
of the same king.[273] In England, some Jews were attached to the Court
of Henry III., and treated with special favour; others were useful and
valued adherents of Richard, King of the Romans,[274] and, after the
prohibition of usury, others, as we have seen, became corn-merchants,
and wool-merchants.
But the whole character of the Jews, their religious beliefs, and
their national hopes, were such as to make repellent to them those
close relations with Christians and Englishmen which would have
been necessary if they had entered into the feudal or municipal
organisations of the Middle Ages. Though there was no religious
obstacle to prevent them from entering a Gild, still they could not,
without violating their religion, eat at a Gild feast, or take part in
its religious ceremonies. Their teachers, like those of the Church,
warned them against social intercourse with the Christians, “lest it
might lead to inter-marriage.”[275] They did not speak the English
language.[276] They remained willingly outside the national and
municipal life.
Their isolation caused them no sorrow. Rather must it have been dear
to them as a sign that they were faithful members of the one race to
which in truth they belonged, the race of Israel. The interests that
filled their mind were those that were common to them, not with the
inhabitants of the country in which they lived, but with their brethren
in faith and race scattered throughout the world. The rapidity and
copiousness with which the stream of Jewish literature poured forth in
the Middle Ages, showed how unfailing was the strength of the Jewish
life which was its source. In Southern Europe the Jews waged among
themselves fierce controversies over problems such as were suggested by
the support that some of their Rabbis gave, or appeared to give, to the
Aristotelian doctrines of the eternity of matter and the uncreativeness
of God.[277] Among the English Jews, and in the communities of Northern
France with whom the English Jews were in continual communication,
literature, though less controversial and engaged with less deep
questions, sufficed, nevertheless, even better to provide continual
and engrossing interest for the orthodox. There were read and written,
down to the last years before the Expulsion, commentaries and
super-commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud, lexicons and grammars,
treatises on ritual and ceremonial. The Rabbis discussed what blessings
it was right to use on all the occasions of life, on rising in the
morning, or on retiring to rest at night, on eating, on washing, on
being married, on hearing thunder.[278] The English Jews were strict
observers of the ceremonial law,[279] they made use in daily life of
the minutiæ of Rabbinical scholarship, they drew up their contracts
“after the usage of the sages,”[280] and thus, like all the Jews of
mediæval Europe, they were continually reminded, in the pursuit of
their ordinary interests and occupations, that they were a peculiar
people. How proud they were of the position is shown by the poetical
literature which, as preserved in the Jewish prayer book, is the most
precious legacy that mediæval Judaism has left us. It was common to
Jews in all lands; it commemorated all the sorrows of their nation, and
gave expression to all their hopes. It made them feel that, scattered
as they were, they yet had a destiny of their own, and it banished from
their minds, as a counsel of baseness, the thought of making themselves
one with the “Gentiles” around them. It reminded them that exile and
persecution, and ultimate triumph were the appointed lot of Israel, and
that the same teachers who had prophesied that the Chosen People should
suffer, had also prophesied that in the fulness of time they should be
redeemed. They knew that in the hour of danger and persecution there
had never been wanting martyrs to testify in death to the unity of God
and to the Glory of his Name. And they could not doubt that the Lord
of Mercy and Justice would mete out due recompense to the oppressors
and the oppressed.[281]
Thus the memory of their past, and the commonplace occurrences of their
daily life, continually strengthened the bonds that bound Jews together
after twelve centuries of dispersion. In the thirteenth century of
the Christian era, as in the first, they still regarded the Holy Land
as their true home. Three hundred Rabbis from France and England went
thither in 1211.[282] There Jehudi Halevi ended his days.[283] There
Nachmanides taught that it was the duty of every Jew to live, and, true
to his own lesson, he set out on his pilgrimage in the seventieth year
of his age. And in his own and the next generation many Jews from Spain
and Germany followed his example.[284] A Jewish traveller of the Middle
Ages says of certain of the communities of his coreligionists that he
visited: “They are full of hopes, and they say to one another, ‘Be of
good cheer, brethren, for the salvation of the Lord will be quick as
the glancing of an eye:’ and were it not that we have hitherto doubted,
and thought that the end of our Captivity has not yet arrived, we
should have been gathered together long ago. But now this will not be
till the time of song arrives, and the sound of the turtle-dove gives
warning. Then will the message arrive, and we shall ever say ‘The Name
of the Lord be exalted.’”[285]
Nowhere in Europe could such men have been content to live the life of
those around them, to bind themselves with the ties of citizenship, to
find their highest hopes on earth in the destiny of the town, or the
country, in which they dwelt. They were but sojourners. They lived in
expectation of the time when the Lord should return the Captivity of
Zion, and they should look back on their exile as reawakened dreamers.
Without the privilege of isolation they could not live; and if in
England the communities of the Gentiles had been open to them, they
would never have entered them.
* * * * *
The Expulsion of the English Jews was an event of small importance
alike in English and in Jewish history. In England the effect that
it produced was barely perceptible. The loss of their capital was
too slight to produce any economic change.[286] The only class that
benefited from their departure was the Florentine merchants, whose
trade grew from this time even greater than before.[287] Political
results of importance have sometimes been attributed to the Expulsion.
The victory of the towns over the King has been said to have been
hastened by the loss of the financial support of the Jews.[288]
But it cannot have come any the sooner for the disappearance of a
community from whom the King had long ceased to get any real help
in his enterprises abroad, or in his struggles at home. The trading
classes still complained after the Expulsion, as they had done before
it, of the prevalence of the “horrible practice of usury, which has
undone many, and brought many to poverty,”[289] and the “horrible
practice” prevailed none the less; and perhaps the poorer agricultural
classes of England, the newly enfeoffed rent-payers, found, as did the
corresponding class in France,[290] that the expulsion of the Jews
only compelled them to go to more cruel money-lenders than before.
The coin was clipped as regularly after the Expulsion as before it,
and the Christian goldsmiths were as rigorously treated as the Jewish
money-lenders had been.[291] The Church, which had helped to drive out
the Jews, soon found itself in conflict with Christian heresy, compared
with which Jewish unbelief was harmless.
The Jews, on their side, were driven from a land which thirty-five
years earlier they had begged in vain to be allowed to leave.[292]
They went forth to join the far greater bodies of their countrymen in
other lands, and with them to fulfil the career of sorrow that they
had begun. The loss of their inhospitable home in England was but one
episode in their tragic history. From France they were again to be
expelled, despoiled and destitute.[293] In Germany the blood-accusation
met them as in England.[294] In Spain popular massacres and clerical
persecution were already preparing the ground for the Inquisition.[295]
The time was still far off when Jew and Christian could live side
by side and neither suffer because he would not worship after his
neighbour’s fashion. That time could not come until society was more
heterogeneous, and the circles of interest of ordinary men wider, than
they could be in the thirteenth century, until the citizen ceased to
live his life, bodily and spiritual, within the walls of his native
town, under the shadow of the Church.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] J. Jacobs, _Jews of Angevin England_, 43–4; 64–5.
[2] Cf. the account of the litigation of Richard of Anesty in
Palgrave’s _Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth_, Vol. II.
(Proofs and Illustrations), pp. xxiv.–xxvii.
[3] See Jewries of Oxford and Winchester, in the plans in Norgate’s
_England under Angevin Kings_, I., pp. 31, 40; and Jewry of London,
described in _Papers of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition_, pp. 20–52.
[4] _Chronica Rogeri de Hoveden_ (Rolls Series) II., 261; _Gesta
Henrici II. et Ricardi I._ (Rolls Series), I. 279.
[5] _Gesta Henrici II. et Ricardi I._ (R. S.), I. 182; _Chronica Rogeri
de Hoveden_ (R. S.), II. 137.
[6] Depping, _Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age_, 170; Jacobs’ _The Jews of
Angevin England_, 54, 178; _Statutes of the Realm_ (Edition of 1810),
I. 202 (Judicium Pillorie) and 203 (Statutum de Pistoribus). See also
_Leet Jurisdiction in Norwich_ (Selden Society, 1891), p. 28, where, in
a list of amercements inflicted at the Leet of Nedham and Manecroft,
the following entry occurs:--“De Johanne le Pastemakere quia vendidit
Carnes quas Judei vocant trefa, 2s.”
[7] Mansi, _Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio_, Venice, 1775, XX. 399;
Wilkins, _Concilia Magnae Britanniae_, I. 591, 675, 719; _Gesta Henrici
II. et Ricardi I._ (R. S.), I. 230. _Chronica Rogeri de Hoveden_
(R. S.), II. 180.
[8] Cf. the words of John’s Charter: “Libertates et consuetudines sicut
eas habuerunt tempore Henrici avi patris nostri.”--_Rotuli Chartarum_,
p. 93.
[9] _Recueil des Historiens des Croisades--Historiens Occidentaux_
(Paris, 1866), III. 321, 727. Cf. especially (p. 727), Altaria suis
foeditatibus inquinata subvertunt, Christianos circumcidunt, cruoremque
circumcisionis aut super altaria fundunt aut in vasis baptisterii
immergunt (Roberti Monachi, _Historia Iherosolimitana_).
[10] Neubauer and Stern, _Hebräische Berichte über
die Judenverfolgungen während der Kreuzzüge_; Hefele,
_Conciliengeschichte_, V., 224, 270; Graetz, _Geschichte der Juden_
(second edition) VI., 89–107.
[11] C. U. Hahn, _Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter_, III. 17.
[12] Graetz, _Geschichte der Juden_ (second edition), VI., 155–170. Cf.
Hefele, V., 498, _n._ 2.
[13] Jacobs, _Op. Cit._, 20, 257.
[14] _Historia et Cartularium Monasterii S. Petri Gloucestriae_
(R. S.), I., 21; _Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda_ (Camden Society),
12, 113–14; _Annales Monastici_ (R. S.), I., 343, II., 347; Matt.
Paris, _Chronica Majora_ (R. S.), IV., 377, V., 518; Jacobs’ _Jews of
Angevin England_, 19; and cf. _Chronicles of Reigns of Stephen, Henry
II., Richard I._ (Rolls Series), I., 311.
[15] _Materials for History of Thomas Becket_ (Rolls Series), IV. 148;
Jacobs, _Jews of Angevin England_, 43, 155.
[16] Cf. the protection given to Jews of Norwich by the Sheriff
(Jacobs, 257).
[17] _Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II., and Richard I._
(Rolls Series), I. 294–9.
[18] Radulfi de Diceto, _Opera Historica_ (R.S.), II. 75–6. Jacobs,
_Jews of Angevin England_, 176; _Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen,
Henry II., and Richard I._ (Rolls Series), I. 309–10, 312–322.
[19] _Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II., and Richard I._
(R.S.) I. 323–4.
[20] Jacobs, _Jews of Angevin England_, pp. 91–6; Gervase of Canterbury
(R.S.) I. 422.
[21] Enormous wealth was possessed by Abraham fil Rabbi, Jurnet of
Norwich and Aaron of Lincoln. Jacobs, _Op. Cit._, 44, 64, 84, 90, 91.
[22] Rymer, _Fœdera_ I. 51.
[23] _Chronica Rogeri de Hoveden_ (R.S.), III. 266–7.
[24] _Chronicon Johannis Brompton_ in Twysden’s _Historiæ Anglicanæ
Scriptores_ X., col. 1258.
[25] _Rotuli Chartarum_ (Record Commission), p. 93.
[26] Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 81.
[27] _Gesta Henrici II. et Ricard. I._ (R.S.), II. 218; M. Paris,
_Chronica Majora_ (R.S.) II. 381, and Jacobs, 162–4.
[28] Jacobs, 222, 228–30, 239–40.
[29] _Ibid._, 328.
[30] Jacobs, 222.
[31] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_ (R.S.) II. 528; _Annales Monastici_
(R.S.) I. 29, II. 264, III. 32, 451; _Chronicles of Lanercost_
(Maitland Club), p. 7.
[32] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_ II., 528.
[33] Depping, _Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age_, 185.
[34] Bouquet, _Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France_,
xvii. 9.
[35] Depping, _Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age_, 59, 60, 185, 194. Cf.
_Rotuli Chartarum_, I. 75 (_Carta Willielmi Marescalli, de quodam
Judaeo apud Cambay_).
[36] Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 78–9.
[37] Stamford was an exception in this respect, Madox, _Firma Burgi_ p.
182.
[38] Et Judæi non intrabunt in placitum nisi coram nobis aut coram
illis, qui turres nostras custodierint in quorum ballivis Judæi
manserint, _Rot. Chart._, 93.
[39] Cutts, _Colchester_, 123; Tovey, _Anglia J._, 50; _Forty-Seventh
Report of Deputy-Keeper of Public Records_, 306; Lyte, _History of
the University of Oxford_, 59; _Papers of Anglo-Jewish Historical
Exhibition_, 35–6; _De Antiquis Legibus Liber_ (Camden Soc.), p.
16, (A.D. 1249, Nam rex concessit quod Judei qui antea warantizati
fuerunt per breve de scaccario, de cetero placitassent coram civibus
de tenementis suis in Londoniis). _Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda_
(Camden Soc.), p. 2, (Venit Judeus portans literas domini regis de
debito sacristæ).
[40] Cp. _Chronica Monasterii de Melsa_ (R.S.), I., 177. Interea
mortuus est Aaron Judæus Lincolniæ, de quo jam dictum est, et compulsi
sumus, regis edicto totum quod illi debuimus pro Willielmo Fossard
infra breve tempus domino regi persolvere.
[41] Rymer, _Fœdera_, I., 89.
[42] _Calendar of Patent Rolls from 1281 to 1292_, p. 15; Tovey,
_Anglia Judaica_, 77, 78, 79.
[43] Tovey, 101; _Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany_, I., 326.
[44] _Annales Monastici_ (Rolls Series), iv. 91.
[45] Especially irritating must have been the fact that the one
restriction on the business of Jews, as money-lenders, was the order
that forbade them to take in pledge the land of tenants on the royal
demesne. W. Prynne, _The Second Part of a Short Demurrer to the Jews’
long discontinued remitter_, etc., London, 1656, p. 35; _Norfolk
Antiquarian Miscellany_, I. 328.
[46] _Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda_ (Camden Society), p. 33.
[47] Thompson, _Leicester_, 72; Madox, _Hist. of Exchequer_, I. 260,
notes O and P; J. E. Blunt, _Establishment and Residence of Jews in
England_, 45; Papers Anglo-J. H. Ex. 190; Prynne, _The Second Part of
a Short Demurrer_, etc., p. 37; _Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany_, I.
326, (De Judeis dicebant quod major multitudo manet in civitate sua
quam solebat, et quod Judei qui aliis locis dissainati (_sic_) fuerunt
venerunt ibidem manere ad dampnum civitatis).
[48] Prynne, _The Second Part of a Short Demurrer_, etc., p. 75; Madox,
_History of the Exchequer_, I. 249: Et quod nullus Judaeus receptetur
in aliqua villa sine speciali licentia Regis, nisi in villis illis in
quibus Judaei manere consueverunt.
[49] Jacobs, _Jews of Angevin England_, 269–271.
[50] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, V. 245. Cf. the article in the
Constitutions enacted by Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, at
his diocesan synod in 1240: Quia vero parum refert, an quis per se vel
per alium incidat in crimen usurarum, prohibemus ne quis Christianus
Judæo pecuniam committat, ut eam Judæus simulate suo nomine proprio
mutuet ad usuram. Wilkins, _Magnæ Britanniæ Concilia_, I. 675, 676.
Stubbs, _Select Charters_, 385–6.
[51] For the nature and duration of the earlier struggle between the
king and the barons, see Stubbs, _Constitutional History of England_
(Library Edition), II., 40, 44, 63, 67, 69–77. For the king’s acts of
extortion from the Jews, see Matthew Paris, _Chronica Majora_, III.,
194, 543; IV., 88; V., 114, 274, 441, 487; Madox, _History of the
Exchequer_, I., 224–5, 229; Prynne, _Second Part of a Short Demurrer_,
40, 48, 66, 70, 75, 57. For the appointment by the Council of one
Justice of the Jews, M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, iv. 367.
[52] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, 385–6.
[53] _Annales Monastici_, II. 101, 363, 371, III. 230, IV. 141,
142, 145, 449, 450; _Liber de Antiquis Legibus_ (Camden Society),
62; _Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft_ (R. S.), II., 151; _Chronicle
of William de Rishanger_ (Camden Society), 24, 25, 126; _Florentii
Wigorniensis Chronicon ex Chronicis_ (English Historical Society), II.
192.
[54] Tout, _Edward I._, 13, 39.
[55] Palgrave, _Rotuli Curiæ Regis_ (Record Commission), II., 62
(Judaei habeant seisinam); _Gesta abbatum Monasterii S. Albani_
(R. S.), I., 401; _Placitorum Abbreviatio_ (Record Commission), p. 58;
Jacobs, pp. 90, 234.
[56] _Chronicles of the Abbey of Melsa_ (Rolls Series), I., 173, 174,
306, 367, 374, 377; II., 55, 109, 116; _Archæological Journal_, vol.
38, pp. 189, 190, 191, 192.
[57] Blunt, _Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England_, 136;
Prynne, _Second Part of a Short Demurrer_, p. 105.
[58] A very long list of landowners indebted to the Jews could be
extracted from Madox, _History of Exchequer_, Vol. I., p. 227, _sq._
Cf. Prynne, _Second Part_, etc., pp. 96, 98, 106; _Calendar of Patent
Rolls from 1281 to 1292_, p. 25.
[59] _Gesta Henrici II._ (R. S.), I., 106; _Giraldi Cambrensis Opera_
(R. S.), VII., 36; _Cronica Jocelini de Brakelonda_ (Camden Soc.), p. 2.
[60] III., 328.
[61] V. 189.
[62] _Letters of John of Peckham_ (Rolls Series), I., 20, 156.
[63] _Ibid._, I., 203.
[64] _Ibid._, I., 341.
[65] _Ibid._, I., 177, 187.
[66] Roberts, _Excerpta e Rot. Finium_ (Record Commission), II., 68.
[67] _Letters of John of Peckham_, I., 261.
[68] _Ibid._, I., 380.
[69] _Ibid._, I., 194.
[70] _Obedientiary Rolls of S. Swithin’s, Winchester_ (Hampshire Record
Society), 1892, pp. 10, 18.
[71] _Letters of John of Peckham_, I., 244; Kitchin, _Winchester_, 55;
_Obedientiary Rolls of S. Swithin’s_, pp. 22, 25.
[72] Cf. _Letters of John of Peckham_, I., 542.
[73] Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 175–7.
[74] _Gesta Abbatum Monasterii S. Albani_ (Rolls Series), I. 401;
_Placitorum Abbreviatio_ (Record Commission), p. 58, col. 2.
[75] _De Antiquis Legibus Liber_ (Camden Society), 234 _sq._
[76] Hefele, _Conciliengeschichte_, V., 1028.
[77] _Annales Monastici_ (R.S.), IV., 221.
[78] Blunt, _Establishment and Residence_, etc., 134–9.
[79] Stubbs, _Constitutional History_, II., 116.
[80] Ashley, _Economic History and Theory_, I., 126–32, 148–50.
[81] Hefele, _Conciliengeschichte_, V., 175.
[82] _Ibid._, 438–441.
[83] Jacobs, _The Jews of Angevin England_, 23.
[84] _Corpus Juris Canonici_ (Leipzig, 1839), II., 786.
[85] Raumer, _Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit_, III., 581.
[86] Endemann. _Studien in der Romanisch-Kanonistischen Wirthschafts-
und Rechtslehre_, I., 16–18. Stintzing, _Geschichte der Populären
Literatur des Römisch-Canonischen Rechts_.
[87]
E pero lo minor giron suggella,
Del segno suo e Sodoma e Caorsa.
_Inferno_, XI. 49, 50.
[88] _Monumenta Franciscana_ (Rolls Series), XLV., L., 10, 38–9, 61.
[89] Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, I., 399–400.
[90] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, V., 245.
[91] _Ibid._, III., 48.
[92] _Ibid._, III., 332–3.
[93] _Ibid._, IV., 8.
[94] M. Paris, _Historia Anglorum_, III., 104.
[95] Ashley, _Economic History and Theory_, I. 150; Labbeus,
_Sacrosancta Concilia_, xi. 991, 2.
[96] Depping, _Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age_, 202, 207; Muratori,
_Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Aevi_, I. 899, 900; _Ninth Report of the
Historical Manuscripts Commission_, p. 14 (No. 264).
[97] _Forty-fourth Report of Deputy-Keeper of Public Records_, pp. 8,
9, 72; _The Question whether a Jew_, etc., by a Gentleman of Lincoln’s
Inn (London, 1753), Appendix, § 18.
[98] Jacobs, 328.
[99] _Papers Anglo-Jewish Hist. Exhibition_, 195.
[100] Stubbs’ _Constitutional History_, II. 601.
[101] Rymer, _Foedera_, I. 489. Cf. _Jewish Chronicle_ for April 26,
1895, p. 19, col. 2.
[102] _Chronicles Ed. I. and II._ (ed. Stubbs), Vol. I., p. C. Cf.
_Forty-second Report of Deputy-Keeper of Public Records_, p. 479 (At
the beginning of his reign Edward says, in his writs to the sheriffs,
“Pecuniæ plurimum indigemus”). _Forty-third Report_, 419.
[103] Muratori, _Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Aevi_ (Dissertatio XVI);
Depping, _Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age_, 213–6; Rymer, _Foedera_, I.,
644.
[104] Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, I. 405, 6; and see Peruzzi,
_Storia del Commercio e dei Banchieri di Firenze_, 170.
[105] Peruzzi, 169; _Archaeologia_, xxviii. 218, 219.
[106] Muratori, _Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Aevi_, I. 889.
[107] _Archaeologia_, xxviii. 221; Cunningham, _Growth of English
Industry and Commerce, Early and Middle Ages_, Appendix D; Peruzzi,
_Storia del Commercio_, 70.
[108] Rymer, _Foedera_, I. 660, 823, 905.
[109] _Archaeologia_, xxviii. 261–272.
[110] Rymer, _Foedera_, I. 644, 788.
[111] Peruzzi, 174.
[112] _Archaeologia_, xxviii. 244–5.
[113] _Ibid._, 231, Note 1.
[114] Peruzzi, 172–5.
[115] _The Question whether a Jew_, etc. Appendix, § 18. Prynne, _A
Short Demurrer_, 58.
[116] Blunt, _Establishment and Residence_, etc., 139–144.
[117] Thomas Aquinas, _Opusculum_, XXI. (_Ad Ducissam Brabantiae_ in
Vol. XIX. of the Venice edition, 1775–88.)
[118] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, V. 361, 2.
[119] Blunt, _Establishment and Residence_, etc., 141.
[120] This is the number of those who left the country in 1290. _Flores
Historiarum_ (Rolls Series), iii. 70. Probably the number of those in
the country in 1275 was about the same.
[121] Gross, _The Gild Merchant_, I. 38.
[122] _Ibid._, I., 39–40.
[123] _Ibid._, II., 68, 138, 214, 243, 257.
[124] One Jew alone is known to have become a member of a Gild
during the residence of the Jews in England before 1290. He became a
citizen at the same time. His election took place in 1268 (Kitchin’s
_Winchester--Historic Towns Series_, p. 108). After 1275 it would have
been illegal.
[125] Gross, _The Gild Merchant_, I. 41.
[126] Gross. _The Gild Merchant_, I. 45, 46, 47.
[127] _Liber Custumarum_ (Rolls Series), 215.
[128] Ochenkowski, _Englands Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange
des Mittelalters_, 51–4.
[129] _Liber Custumarum_ (Rolls Series) 80–81, 101–2, 121; _Liber
Albus_ (Rolls Series), 726, 734. Riley, _Memorials of London_, 179.
[130] Johnson, _Customs of Hereford_, 115–6.
[131] _Liber Custumarum_, 418–425.
[132] _Liber Custumarum_, 78, 81, 124. Riley, _Memorials of London_,
179, 216.
[133] _Liber Custumarum_, 79, Ochenkowski, _Op. Cit._, 64.
[134] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, 470.
[135] Jacobs, 116.
[136] Walsingham, _Historia Anglicana_ (Rolls Series), I. 30.
[137] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, v. 56–8.
[138] Ochenkowski, _Englands wirthschaftliche Entwickelung_, 157.
[139] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Early and
Middle Ages_, 175.
[140] _Liber Custumarum_ (Rolls Series), xxxiv.–xlviii., 61–72; _Liber
Albus_, xcv., xcvi., 287; Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, I. 388–9.
[141] _Liber Custumarum_ and _Liber Albus_, as referred to in preceding
note: Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Early
and Middle Ages_, 181–6; Ochenkowski, _Englands wirthschaftliche
Entwickelung_, 180; _Calendar of State Papers (Venetian)_, lx.–lxix.;
Peruzzi, _Storia dei Banchieri e del Commercio di Firenze_, 70.
[142] Cunningham, _Growth_, etc., 185; Macpherson, _Annals of
Commerce_, pp. 415, 481; _Calendar of State Papers (Venetian)_,
lxvi.–lxvii.
[143] Jacobs, 66–7; _Archæological Journal_, xxxviii. 179.
[144] This was the procedure adopted by the Italians: They paid down a
sum as earnest-money, and then took a bond (Peruzzi, 70). Cf. Tovey,
207.
[145] For pledges still unredeemed, land still in the hands of the Jews
and old debts still unpaid long after the Statutes of 1270–1275 had
been passed, see MSS. in Public Record Office (_Queen’s Remembrancer’s
Miscellanea_, 557, 13–23); Rymer, I. 570; John of Peckham, I. 937;
_Calendar of Patent Rolls_, 1281–1292, p. 81; Prynne, _Second
Demurrer_, pp. 74 and 80 (=154).
[146] Labbeus, _Sacrosancta Concilia_, XI. 649–50.
[147] Vinogradoff, _Villeinage in England_, 179, 307.
[148] M. Paris, V. 245; Wilkins, _Conc._, I. 675; _De Antiq. Legibus_,
234 sq. (Archbishop of York’s remarks on the corruption of the Great
Council and on the _fautores_ of Jews.)
[149] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, V. 404–5.
[150] Muratori, _Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Aevi_, I., 893.
[151] _Rotuli Parliamentorum_, I. 1, 2.
[152] “The Debts and Houses of the Jews of Hereford,” in _Transactions
of the Jewish Historical Society of England_, vol. I.
[153] _Royal Letters_ (Rolls Series), II. 24.
[154] _Leet Jurisdiction of Norwich_ (Selden Society), p. 10; Cf.
_Ancren Riwle_ (Camden Society), 395. “Do not men account him a good
friend who layeth his pledge in _Jewry_ to redeem his companion?”
[155] Rymer, _Foedera_, I. 503, 634; _Papers of the Anglo-Jewish
Historical Exhibition_, 187–190.
[156] _Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany_, I. 326, quoted _supra_, p. 20
(_n._ 3).
[157] _Calendar of Patent Rolls_, 1281–1292, p. 98; _Papers
Anglo-Jewish Hist. Ex._ 167.
[158] See _Dictionary of Political Economy_, Article JEWS, (House for
Converted).
[159] _Chronica Majora_, V. 15.
[160] _Annales Monastici_ (Rolls Series), II. 339.
[161] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, V. 15, 16.
[162] Ruding, _Annals of the Coinage_, I. 179.
[163] Ashley, _Economic Hist., Theory_, I. 169.
[164] Ashley, I., 215, n. 95; cf. Jacobs, 73 and 225.
[165] _Annales Monastici_ (Rolls Series), IV. 278.
[166] _Annales Monastici_, IV. 278; _Liber Custumarum_, 189.
[167] John of Peckham, _Registrum Epistolarum_ (Rolls Series), I. 22.
[168] _Annales Monastici_, III. 295.
[169] _Historia Anglorum_, III. 76.
[170] Tovey, 109; Madox, _History of the Exchequer_ I. 245, z.
[171] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, IV. 608.
[172] _Ibid._, V., 16.
[173] _Annales Monastici_, IV. 278.
[174] _Calendar of Patent Rolls from 1281 to 1292_, 128, 147, 173, 176,
213, 291, 451; _Chron. Ed. I._, I. 93; _Rotuli Parliamentorum_, I. 51a;
Rymer, _Fœdera_, I., 570.
[175] _Papers Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition_, 42–3.
[176] Tovey, 211–13.
[177] _Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward II._ (Rolls Series), I., 88;
_Chronicon Petroburgense_ (Camden Society), 29.
[178] “Whereas in the time of our ancestors, kings of England, loans at
interest were wont and were allowed to be made by Jews of our kingdom,
and much of such profits fell into the hands of those our ancestors,
as the issues of our Jewry; and we, led on by the love of God, and
wishing to follow more devoutly in the path of the Holy Church, did
forbid unto all the Jews of our kingdom who had viciously lived from
such loans, that none of them henceforth in any manner be guilty of
resorting to loans at interest, but that they seek their living and
sustain themselves by other legitimate work and merchandise, especially
since by the favour of Holy Church they are suffered to sell and live
among Christians. Nevertheless, afterwards, in a blind and evil spirit,
turning to evil, under colour of merchandise and good contracts and
covenants, what we established by rational thought, premeditating
mischief anew, they do it with Christians by means of bonds and divers
instruments, which remain with the Jews, and in which, on a given debt
or contract, they put double, treble, or quadruple more than they lend
to the Christians [this reads like an exaggeration], penally abusing
the name of usury....” (_Papers Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition_,
225–6).
[179] For Coining, see Ruding, _Annals of the Coinage_ I. 197;
_Calendar of Patent Rolls from 1281 to 1292_, 97; _Abbreviatio
Rotulorum Originalium_ (Record Commission), 49; Peckham, _Registrum
Epistolarum_, I. 146. For Usury, _Forty-fourth Report of the
Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records_, pp. 8 and 9; _Archæologia_,
XXVIII., 227–9; Peckham, II., 542; and for a later period, _Rotuli
Parliamentorum_, II. 332_a_, (VII.) 350_b_.
[180] _Papers of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition_, p. 192 (note 54)
and p. 222.
[181] _Papers of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition_, pp. 224–9.
[182] See the Decrees of the Third Lateran Council of 1179, Mansi,
_Concilia_, XXII., 231.
[183] St. Anselm, _Epistolæ_, III., 117 (Migne, _Patrologiæ Cursus
Completus_, Vol. 159, columns 153–155); Gilbert of Westminster,
_Disputatio Judaici cum Christiano_ (_Ibid._ 1005–1036).
[184] _Chronicles of Stephen, Henry II., and Richard I._ (Rolls
Series), I., 310 (among the victims of the massacre at Lynn in 1190
was _quidam Judæus, insignis medicus, qui et artis et modestiæ suæ
gratia Christianis quoque familiaris et honorabilis fuerat_); _Gervase
of Canterbury_ (Rolls Series), I., 405. (The Jews help the monks of
Canterbury in their struggle with the Archbishop in 1188); _Rotuli
Litterarum Clausarum_ (Record Commission), I., 20_b_. (_Rex, &c.,
domino Lincolniensi Episcopo, &c.; mandamus vobis quod non permittatis
injuste catalle Judæorum receptari in ecclesiis in diocesi vestra_,
February 28th, 1205); _Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonde_ (Camden
Society), p. 33. (A.D. 1190, _Abbas jussit solempniter excommunicari
illos qui de cetero receptarent Judeos vel in hospicio reciperent in
villa Santi Ædmundi_); Jacobs, _The Jews of Angevin England_, 269.
(“_English Jews drink with Gentiles._”)
[185] Moeller, _History of the Christian Church, Middle Ages_ (Eng.
Tr.). p. 279.
[186] Mansi, _Concilia_, XXII. 231.
[187] Letters of Innocent (Migne, _Patrologiæ Cursus Completus_,
Vols. 214–217); Lib. VII., 186; Lib. VIII., 50, 121; Lib. X., 61,
190; _Corpus Juris Canonici_ (Leipzig, 1839), II., 747–8; Graetz,
_Geschichte der Juden_, VII., 7, 8; Depping, _Les Juifs dans le
Moyen Age_, 183; Hahn, _Geschichte der Ketzer_, III., 6, 7; Hurter,
_Geschichte Papst Innocenz des Dritten_, II., 234; Güdemann,
_Geschichte des Erziehungswesens, u.s.w._, I., 37; Rule, _History of
the Inquisition_, I. 10, 17.
[188] Graetz, _Geschichte der Juden_, VII., 27.
[189] _Revue des Etudes Juives_, I. 247, 293; II. 248; III. 39; Noel
Valois, _Guillaume d’Auvergne_, pp. 118, 137.
[190] _Histoire Littéraire de la France_, XXVII., 562–3; Graetz,
_Geschichte_, VII., 131, 135.
[191] Graetz, _Geschichte der Juden_, VII., 135; J. Jacobs, _Inquiry
into the Sources of the History of the Jews in Spain_, xviii., 18.
[192] _Scriptores Ordinis Prædicatorum_ (Quétif and Echard), I., 246,
396, 398, 594.
[193] Thomas Aquinas, _Summa Theologiæ_, Secunda Secundæ, Quæstio X.
[194] Baronius, _Annales Ecclesiastici_ (ed. Theiner), XIII., 87.
[195] _Revue des Etudes Juives_, VI. 81; VII. 94.
[196] Mansi, _Concilia_, XXIII., 1174–6; Martène, _Thesaurus_, IV., 769.
[197] Depping, 198; Hahn, _Geschichte der Ketzer_, III., 13; Rule,
_History of the Inquisition_, 27, 80, 81, 91, 332, 335–6.
[198] _Supra_, p. 53.
[199] _Supra_, pp. 12, 13, 19.
[200] Wilkins, _Magnæ Britanniæ Concilia_, I., 591; Tovey, _Anglia
Judaica_, 83; Rye, _History of Norfolk_, 87.
[201] Wilkins, _Magnæ Britanniæ Concilia_, I., 657, 693, 719; _Letters
of Bishop Grosseteste_ (Rolls Series), 318.
[202] Matthew Paris, _Chronica Majora_, III., 262.
[203] Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 148.
[204] Rymer, _Fœdera_, I., 743.
[205] Tout, _Edward I._, pp. 69, 149.
[206] John of Peckham, _Registrum Epistolarum_ (Rolls Series), I., 239;
II., 407; III., 937; Wilkins, _Magnæ Britanniæ Concilia_, II., 88–9;
Prynne, _Second Demurrer_, 121–2.
[207] _Household Roll of Bishop Swinfield_ (Camden Society), pp. c., ci.
[208] Graetz, _Geschichte der Juden_, VII., note 11. _Florence of
Worcester_ (English Historical Society), II., 214.
[209] Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 168.
[210] _Forty-ninth Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records_,
p. 187.
[211] _Forty-seventh Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public
Records_, p. 306.
[212] _Dictionary of Political Economy_, Article, “Jews (House for
Converted).”
[213] Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 208.
[214] _Forty-ninth Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records_,
p. 95; Rymer, I., 576; Madox, _Exchequer_, I., 259.
[215] Tovey, p. 208.
[216] Baronius, _Annales Ecclesiastici_ (ed. Theiner), XIII., 10, 11.
[217] _Revue des Etudes Juives_, I., 298.
[218] Rymer, I., 560–1.
[219] Edward left England in May, 1286. _Florence of Worcester_
(English Historical Society), II., 236.
[220] _Willelmi Rishanger Chronica et Annales_ (Rolls Series), 116;
_Flores Historiarum_ (Rolls Series), III., 70–71.
[221] _Forty-second Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records_,
593; _Forty-fourth Report_, 109, 295; _Forty-fifth Report_, 72, 163;
_Forty-ninth Report_, 81; _Calendar of Patent Rolls from 1281 to 1292_,
62, 193; _Archæologia_, VI., 339; Madox, _History of the Exchequer_, I.
225 _w_; 230 _b_; 231 _l_; John of Peckham, _Registrum Epistolarum_,
II. 619; III., 937; Rogers, _Oxford City Documents_ (Oxford Historical
Society), 208, 219; Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 200.
[222] Graetz, _Geschichte der Juden_ (Second Edition), VII., note 11.
[223] _Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward II._ (Rolls Series), I., 97;
_The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft_ (Rolls Series), II., 185–6.
[224] Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 240.
[225] _Bartholomæi de Cotton, Historia Anglicana_ (Rolls Series), p.
178.
[226] Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_, 240–2.
[227] _Ib._ 241; _Calendar of Patent Rolls from 1281 to 1292_, 378,
381, 382.
[228] _Calendar of Patent Rolls_, 379.
[229] _Ib._ 384.
[230] _Ib._ 232.
[231] Walter of Hemingburgh, _Chronicon_ (English Historical Society),
I., 21, 22; Bartholomæus Cotton, _Historia Anglicana_ (Rolls Series),
178; _Annales Monastici_, III., 362, IV., 327.
[232] _Opus Chronicorum_ in _Chronicles of S. Albans, J. de Trokelowe,
etc., Annales_ (Rolls Series), 57.
[233] Laurière, _Ordonnances des Rois de la France_, I., 317.
[234] _Fortieth Report of Deputy-Keeper of Public Records_, p. 474.
[235] _Revue des Etudes Juives_, Vol. I., pp. 66, 67, 69.
[236] Graetz, VII., 267.
[237] _Ibid._, 155.
[238] Langtoft, II., 189; Hemingburgh, II., 21; Madox, _Exch._, I., 261.
[239] Johnson, _Customs of Hereford_, p. 100; Madox, _Firma Burgi_,
12, 19, 23. I am not at all confident of the accuracy of Mr. Johnson’s
statement, on which the latter half of this sentence is founded.
Certainly some of the houses of the Jews of Hereford, Winchester, and
Ipswich, were granted away by the king (_Lansdowne MSS._, British
Museum, Vol. 826, part 5, Transcript 4), _Rotuli Originalium_ (Record
Commission), I., 73_b_–76_a_.
[240] _Papers Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition_, p. 230.
[241] _Rotuli Parliamentorum_, I., 346_b_; II., 8_a_, 402_a_; _Statutes
of Realm, 1 Ed. III._, Stat. 2, § 3.
[242] Tovey, 235; Prynne, _Second Demurrer_, 127; _Papers, Anglo-Jewish
Historical Exhibition_, 21.
[243] A list, not quite complete, of the houses belonging to the
expelled Jews is contained in the Manuscript known as _Q. R.
Miscellanea_: “Jews,” No. 557, 9 and 11 (Public Record Office). A list
of persons who received from the King grants of Jews’ houses, to hold
at a nominal rental, is printed in _Rotulorum Originalium Abbreviatio_
(Record Commission) pp. 73a-76b, and the deeds of gift are copied in
full in _Lansdowne MSS._ (British Museum) Vol. 826, Part 5, Transcript
4. Nearly all the houses mentioned in _Q. R. Miscellanea_ are granted
away by deeds included in the _Rotuli Originalium_ and the Lansdowne
Transcript.
[244] Madox, _Exch._ I. 2, 248_h_, 258_i_, etc.; Tovey, 207; Prynne,
_2nd Demurrer_, 59, 76; Rymer, _Fœdera_, 523, 598.
[245] _Chronica Monasterii de Melsa_ (Rolls Series), II., 251–2.
_Annales Monastici_, III., 362; W. de Hemingburgh, _Chronicon_ (English
Historical Society) II., 22.
[246] Parliament was summoned for July 15th; see Parliamentary Paper
69, of 1878 (H. of C.) “Parliaments of England.” The writs ordering the
Expulsion were issued on July the 18th; see Tovey, 240.
[247] French Chronicler of London, in Riley’s _Chronicles of Old
London_, 242.
[248] _Annales Monastici_, II., 409.
[249] _Ib._, III., 361.
[250] W. de Hemingburgh, II., 20.
[251] _Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward II._ (Rolls Series) Vol. I.
99 (“Omnes Judæi ... _concedente_ Rege Edwardo ... exulantur”).
[252] _The Chronicle of Pierre Langtoft_ (Rolls Series), II., 187–89.
[253] Cum ... concesserimus Karissimæ matri nostrae Aleanorae Reginae
Angliae quod nullus Judaeus habitet vel moretur in quibuscunque villis
quas ipsa mater nostra habet in dotem.... _Papers of the Anglo-Jewish
Historical Exhibition_, pp. 187–8. _Forty-fourth Report of the Deputy
Keeper of the Public Records_, p. 6. Graetz, _Geschichte der Juden_
(Second edition), VII., note 11.
[254] Compare the treatment of the Flemings, who settled as weavers
in different towns of England soon after the Conquest, but had to
retreat to one district in Wales, where they lived under special royal
protection. Cunningham, _The Growth of English Industry and Commerce_,
176; and see Gross, _Gild Merchant_, II., 155–6.
[255] Jacobs, 14.
[256] _Ibid._, 107.
[257] _Historia Anglorum_, III., 76.
[258] _Ibid._, III., 103.
[259] _Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward II._ (Rolls Series),
_Commendatio Lamentabilis_, II., 14.
[260] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, V., 114; _Annales Monastici_, IV.,
503; _Gesta Abbatum Monasterii, S. Albani_ (Rolls Series), I., 471.
[261] _Annales Monastici_, IV., 91; _Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany_,
I., 331; _Forty-fourth Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public
Records_, 188; _De Antiquis Legibus_, Camden Soc., 50; Tovey, 156;
Prynne, _Second Demurrer_, 118.
[262] Jacobs, 26.
[263] W. Rishanger, _Chronica et Annales_ (Rolls Series), p. 4.
[264] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, IV. 30, 31.
[265] Hahn, _Geschichte der Ketzer_, III., 35, n. 2.
[266] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, V. 517; _Annales Monastici_, I. 345.
[267] _Revue des Etudes Juives_, XVIII., 258; _East Anglian_, V. 10;
Jacobs, 88–9.
[268] Perrens, _Histoire de Florence_, III., 220–1, 226. Gregorovius,
_Gesch. der Stadt Rom._, V., 308.
[269] Thomas Aquinas, _Opusculum_, XXI.
[270] Güdemann, _Gesch. des Erziehungswesens_, etc., II., 287.
[271] Güdemann, II., 71; _Hist. Litt. de la France_, XXVII., 520.
[272] Graetz, VII., 97.
[273] _Ib._, 125–7.
[274] _Royal Letters_ (Rolls Series), II., 46; Madox, I., 257 _g_;
Rymer, _Fœdera_, I., 356.
[275] Jacobs, 269.
[276] JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, IV., 12, 551; _Hist. Litt. de la
France_, 27, 485, 650, _sq._
[277] _Hist. Litt. de France_, XXVII., 27, 650, _sq._
[278] _Hist. Litt._, 435, 441, 462, 484, 487, 507, _sq._; JEWISH
QUARTERLY REVIEW, IV., 25.
[279] Jacobs, 286.
[280] _Archæological Journal_, XXVIII., 180.
[281] Cf. L. Zunz, _Die Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters_, Berlin,
1856.
[282] Graetz, VII., 6.
[283] _Ibid._, VI.
[284] VII., 138; VII., 307–8; VII., 188–9.
[285] Benjamin of Tudela, trans. Asher, I., 163.
[286] See the Tables in Thorold Rogers’ _History of Agriculture and
Prices_ Vols. I. and II.
[287] Peruzzi, _Storia del Commercio e dei Banchieri de Firenze_, 175.
[288] Papers, _Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition_, p. 211.
[289] _Rotuli Parliamentorum_, II., 332–350.
[290] Graetz, VII., 101.
[291] J. de Trokelowe, etc., _Chronica et Annales_ (Rolls Series), 58;
Ruding, _Annals of the Coinage_ (Third Edition), I., 198–202.
[292] M. Paris, _Chronica Majora_, V., 441, 487.
[293] Graetz, VII., 264–7; Depping, 228–9.
[294] Graetz, VII., 181–8, 252.
[295] _Ibid._, 163–4, 318–20, 363.
Transcriber’s Note
Some inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have
been retained. Obvious punctuation misprints were silently corrected.
This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. Small capitals
changed to all capitals.
Changed “Révue” in “Révue des Etudes Juives” to “Revue” (footnotes 189,
217, 267).
p. 27: changed “Newneton” to “Newnton” (The Church of Newnton could not
afford clergymen)
p. 36 n. 4: (footnote 106 in this file) changed “Italicae” to “Italicæ”
(Muratori, Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Aevi, I. 889.)
p. 47: changed “no” to “not” (where there did not exist a chest)
p. 55 n. 1: (footnote 187 in this file) changed “der” to “des”
(Geschichte Papst Innocenz des Dritten)
p. 72: changed “Statue” to “Statute” (conditions imposed by the Statute
of 1275)
p. 76: added comma in “The king took it for great shame, That” to align
with reference material from attached footnote. It comes from verse.
Verified with source material located on archive.org.
p. 77: changed “Bradiers” to “Braziers” (Braziers and hosiers, bakers
and shoemakers)
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