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 arnol5 prise lEssa?, 1894. 
 
 THE EXPULSION OF THE 
 JEWS FROM ENGLAND IN 1290 
 
 BY 
 
 B. L ABEAHAMS 
 
 Formerly Scholar of Balliol College, 
 
 
 B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 and 51, BROAD STREET 
 XonDon 
 
 SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. 
 
 M DCCC XCV 
 
 /aX- Half -a- Crown, Net. 
 
K 
 
 r^IR^ARV 
 
 UNIVfeeSIT 
 
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 Accessions No.wt)^^^. 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Arciiive 
 
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 littp://www.arcliive.org/details/expulsionofjewsfOOabrarich 
 
arnol& pil3e JEeea^, 1894* 
 
 THE EXPULSION OF THE 
 JEWS FROM ENGLAND IN 1290 
 
 BY 
 
 B. L. ABRAHAMS 
 
 Formerly Scholar of Balliol College. 
 
 
 B. H. BLACKWELL 50 and 51, BROAD STREET 
 XonDon 
 
 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 Revieio 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 Bihliotheca Anglo- 
 Judaica : a Bihliographical Guide to Anglo- Jewish History ^ 
 compiled by Messrs. Joseph Jacobs and Lucien Wolf, 
 and to The Jeivs 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 ex- 
 planation. 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. 
 
6 The Expukion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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 monej^ bub 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 ; ^ 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.^ 
 
 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 English- 
 man. 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 English- 
 man 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 Eng- 
 land, 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 
 
 * J. Jacobs, Jews of Ayigevin England, 43-4 ; 64-5. 
 
 2 Cf. the account of the litigation of Richard of Anesty in Palgrave's 
 Jlisi' and Progress of the English Commonwealth, Vol. II. (Proofs and 
 Illustrations), pp. xxiv.-xxvii. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 7 
 
 in which they dwelt.^ 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 for- 
 bidden to keep the mail and hauberk which the rest 
 of the nation was bound to have at hand to help in pre- 
 serving the peace.^ 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 syna- 
 gogue 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.^ 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.'^ The presence of 
 
 ' See Jewries of Oxford and Winchester, in the plans in Norgate'a 
 England under Angevin Kings, I., pp. 31, 40 ; and Jewry of London, de- 
 scribed in Papers of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhihition, pp. 20-52. 
 
 2 Chronica Rogeri de Hoveden (Rolls Series) II., 261 ; Gesta Henrici 
 TI. et Ricardi I. (Rolls Series), I. 279. 
 
 ^ Gesta Henrici II. et Ricardi I. (R. S.), I. 182 ; Chronica Rogeri dt 
 Hoveden (R. S.), II. 137. 
 
 "* Depping, Les Juifs dans le Mnyen Age, 170 ; Jacobs' The Jews of 
 Anger in England, 54, 178 ; Statutfis of the Realm (Edition of 1810), I. 202 
 
8 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 Christian servants and nurses in their households made it 
 impossible that any of their peculiarities should remain 
 unobserved or generally unknown.^ 
 
 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,^ 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 after- 
 wards 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 pre- 
 sent 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 
 
 (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 follow- 
 ing entry occurs :— " De Johanne le Pastemakere quia vendidit Games 
 quas Judei vocant trefa, 2s." 
 
 ' '^dunsi^ Sacrorum Conciliorum CoUectio,Yemce, 1775, XX. 399; Wilkins, 
 Concilia Magnae Britanniae, I. 591, 675, 719; Gesta Ilenrici II. et 
 Ricardi I. (R. S.), I. 230. Chronica Rogeri de Hoveden (R. S.), II. 180. 
 
 ' Cf. the words of John's Charter : " Libertates et consuetudines sicut 
 eas habuerunt tempore Henrici avi patris nostri." — Rotuli Chartarum, 
 p. 93. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 9 
 
 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. ^ Such denun- 
 ciations, 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 be- 
 tween 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.^ 
 
 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 
 
 * Recueil des Historiens des Croisades—Eistoriens Oceidentaux (Paris, 
 1866), III. 321, 727. Cf. especially (p. 727), Altaria suis foeditatibus 
 inquinata subvertunt, Christianos circumcidunt, cruoremque circum- 
 cisionis aut super altaria fundunt aut in vasis baptisterii immergunt 
 (Roberti Monachi Historia Iherosolimitana). 
 
 2 Neubauer and Stem, Hehrdische Berichte ilher die Judenverfolgungen 
 wdhrend der Kreuzzilge ; Hefele, ConcUiengescMchte, V., 224, 270; Graetz, 
 GescMchte der Juden (second edition) VI., 89-107. 
 
10 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 to be the means. A monk, " who skilfully imitated the 
 austerity of religion, but had no immoderate amount of 
 learning,'* ^ 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 elo- 
 quence 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.^ 
 
 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 Cru- 
 sading spirit, working in a superstitious mediaeval popula- 
 tion, 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 Cru- 
 sade 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 
 
 ' 0. U. Hahn, GescMchte der Ketzer im Mittelalter, III. 17. 
 2 Graetz, GescMchte der Juden (second edition), VI., 155-170. Cf. 
 Hefele, V., 498, n 2. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 11 
 
 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.^ 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.^ 
 
 Under the firm reign of Henry IL, anti-Jewish feeling 
 found no further expression in act. The King, like his 
 predecessors, gave and secured to the Jews special privi- 
 leges 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.^ They were placed, apparently, 
 under the special protection of the royal officers of each 
 district.^ 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 hi-st English Crusading King, brought trouble, as 
 was but natural, to the rich and royally favoured infidels 
 
 1 Jacobs, Op. at., 20, 257. 
 
 2 Historia et Cartular'mvi Monasterii S. Petri Gloucestriae (R. S.), I., 
 21 ; Clironica Jocelini de Brahelonda (Camden Society), 12, 113-14 ; 
 Annales Monasticl (R. S.), I., 343, II., 347 ; Matt. Paris, Chronica 
 Majora (R. S.), IV., 377, V., 518 ; Jacobs' Jews of Angevin England, 19 ; 
 and of. Chronicles of Reigns of Stephen, Henry II., Richard I. (Rolls 
 Series), I., 311. 
 
 ' Materials for History of Thomas Becket (Rolls Series), IV. 148 ; 
 Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, 43, 155. 
 
 * Cf . the protection given to Jews of Norwich by the Sheriff (Jacobs, 
 257). 
 
12 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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 ex- 
 asperated the crowd, and in the mediaeval 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 mag- 
 nates 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.^ 
 
 Though the King was bitterly angry at what had hap- 
 pened, 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 
 
 ' Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II., and Richard 1. (Rolls 
 Series), I. 294 -9. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 13 
 
 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 con- 
 tinually 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. Ed- 
 munds, Lynn, Lincoln, Colchester, and Stamford.^ Again 
 the Royal officers were unable to bouch 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.^ 
 
 It was clear that the King must strengthen his con- 
 nection 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.^ 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 
 
 » 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. 
 
 2 Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry Tl.y avd Richard I. 
 (R.S.)I.323-4. 
 
 3 Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, pp. 91-G ; Gervase of Canterbury 
 (R.S.) I. 422. 
 
 i^^^M 
 
14 The Erpuhion of the Jeicsfrom England in 1290. 
 
 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 pro- 
 perty, and what was still more important, it was concen- 
 trated in few hands. It was easily found and easily 
 taken away.^ 
 
 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,^ 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 com- 
 plete 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.^ No Jew was to plead before any court but that 
 of the King's officers, and special Justices were appointed 
 
 ^ Enormous wealth was possessed by Abraham fil Rabbi, Jurnet of 
 Norwich and Aaron of Lincoln. Jacobs, Op. Cit., 44, 64, 84, 90, 91. 
 * Rymer, Feeder a I. 51. 
 2 Chronica liayeri dt; lloveden (R.S.), III. 2(30-7. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jpwf^from England in 1290. 15 
 
 to hear cases in which Jews were concerned, and to 
 exercise a general control over their business.^ 
 
 These arrano-ements 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 ^ ; and the royal hold 
 over them wa§ 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.^ 
 
 This elaborate constitution did not indeed aflford com- 
 plete 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 ferward, 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 Long- 
 champ towards the expenses of Richard's Crusade,* 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.'^ 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,*^ 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 
 
 ' Chronicon Johannis Brompton in Twysden's Historice AnglicancB 
 Scriptores X., col. 1258. 
 
 ^ Rotuli Chartarum (Record Commission), p. 1)3. 
 
 ■* Tovey, Anglia Juffaica, 81. 
 
 * Gesfa Henricl II. et Rimrd. I. (R.S.), II. 218 ; M. Paris, Chronica 
 Majnra (R.S.) II. 381, and Jacobs, 162-4. 
 
 •' Jacobs. 222, 228-30, 239-40. ^ Ihid. 328. 
 
16 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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.^ 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.^ 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.^ 
 
 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 •,'^ those of France had been 
 expelled in 1182, and though they were soon recalled, might 
 at any time be expelled again.^ 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.^ 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 
 
 ' Jacobs, 222. 
 
 2 M. Paris, Chronica Majora (R.S.) II. 528 ; Amiales Monastici (R.S.) 
 I. 29, II. 264, III. 32, 451 ; Chronicles of Lanevcost (Maitland Club), p. 7. 
 
 3 M. Paris, Chronica Majora II., 528. 
 
 * Depping, Les Juifs dans le Moyen Aye, 185. 
 
 ^ Bouquet, Recueil des Historiens des Gaides et de la France, xvii. 9. 
 
 6 Depping, Les Juifs dans le Moijf.n Age, 59, 60, 185, 194. Cf. RotuU 
 Chartarum, 1. To {Carta Willielmi Marescalli, de quodam Judaeo apiid 
 Canibay). 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 17 
 
 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 im- 
 munities that had been granted to them.* 
 
 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 
 
 ^ Tovey, Anglia Judaioa, 78-9. 
 B 
 
18 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 officers, free from the visits of the royal sheriffs, and paying 
 a fixed sura 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 per- 
 missioa 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,^ but .even 
 from the jurisdiction of those authorities which were respon- 
 sible for peace and good government.^ This was exasperat- 
 ing 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.^ 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 
 
 ^ Stamford was an exception in this respect, Madox, Firma Burgi 
 p. 182. 
 
 ' Et Judjei non intrabunt in placitum nisi coram nobis aut coram illia, 
 qui turres nostras custodierint in quorum ballivis Judsei manserint, 
 Rot. Chart., 93. 
 
 ' Cutts, Colchester, 123 ; Tovey, Anglia J., 50 ; Forty -Seventh Report 
 of Deputy-Keeper of Public Records, 306 ; Lyte, History of the Uni- 
 versity of Oxford, 59 ; Papers of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhihition, 
 35-6 ; De Aritiquis Legihus 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 Brahelonda (Camden Soc), p. 2, (Venit 
 Judeus portans literas domini regis de debito sacristee). 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 19 
 
 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.^ 
 
 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 TIL 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.^ 
 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.^ 
 Such measures only increased the ill-feeling of the 
 burgesses. At Norwich in 1234 the Jewry was fired and 
 looted.* 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."^ 
 
 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 
 
 ' Cp. Chronica Monasterii de Melsa (R.S.), I., 177. Interea mortuus 
 est Aaron Jud^eus Lincolnise, de quo jam dictum est, et compulsi sumus, 
 regis edicto totum quod illi debuimus pro Willielmo Fossard infra breve 
 tempus domino regi persolvere. 
 
 2 Rymer, Foedera, I.. 89. 
 
 * Calendar of Patent Rolls from 1281 to 1292, p. 15 ; Tovey, Anglia 
 Judaica, 77, 78, 79. 
 
 * Tovey, 101, HorfolTt Antiquarian Miscellany^ I., 326. 
 5 Annales Monnstici (Rolls Series), iv. 91. 
 
 B 2 
 
20 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 charter from the King, or was still dependent on an inter- 
 mediate 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.^ The abbot 
 of Bury St. Edmund's induced the King to expel the Jews 
 from the town in 1190.^ The burgesses of Leicester 
 obtained a similar grant from Simon de Montfort in 1231, 
 those of Newcastle in 1234, of Wycombe in 1235, of South- 
 ampton in 123G, 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.^ 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.'* [ 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. 
 
 ' 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 dis- 
 continued remitter, etc., London, 1656, p. 35 ; NorfolTt Antiquarian Mis- 
 cellany, I. 328. 
 
 2 Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda (Camden Society), p. 33. 
 
 3 Thompson, Leicester, 72 ; Madox, Rist. of Exchequer, I. 260, notes 
 and P ; J. B, Blunt, Estahlishment and Residence of Jews in England, 
 45 ; Papers A.nglo-J. H. Ex. 190 ; Prynne, The Second Part of a Short 
 Demurrer, etc., p. 37 ; Norfolh Antiquarian Miscellany, I. 326, (De Judeia 
 dicebant quod major multitude manet in civitate sua quam solebat, 
 et quod Judei qui aliis locis dissainati [sic') fuerunt venerunt ibidem 
 manere ad dampnum civitatis). 
 
 ^ Prynne, The Second Part of a Short Demurrer, etc., p. 75 ; Madox, His- 
 tory of the Exchequer, I. 249 : Et quod nullus Judaeus receptetur in 
 aliqaa villa sine speciali licentia Regis, nisi in villis illis in quibus 
 Judaei manere consueverunt. 
 
The ExpuUioh of the Jews from England in 1290. 21 
 
 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 makino: 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.^ Moreover some of them imitated on their own 
 estates the King's policy of sharing in the profits of 
 usury .^ Hence they were little influenced by personal 
 grievances, and it was no doubt partly from political con- 
 siderations, 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 
 
 ^ Jacobs, Jeivs of Angevin England, 269-271. 
 
 2 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 ref ert, an quis per se vel per alium incidat 
 in crimen usurarum, prohibemus ne quis Christianus Judseo pecuniam 
 committat, ut earn Jud^eus simulate suo nomine proprio mutuet ad usuram. 
 Wilkins, Magnce Britannics Concilia, I. 675,676. Stubbs, Select Charters, 
 385-6. 
 
 I 
 
22 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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 Govern- 
 ment 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 Govern- 
 ment 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.* 
 
 1 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, Secojid 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, Ch^ronica 
 Majora, iv. 367. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 28 
 
 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 com- 
 pelled 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 contri- 
 butions to the exchequer. A landholder's debt to a Jew 
 would, when once contracted, have been, under any cir- 
 cumstances, difficult to pay off". But the lower baron- 
 age, 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 some- 
 times 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 5e 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." 1 
 
 The special wrongs of the lower baronage were, in the 
 course of the Civil War, temporarily lost sight of. Never- 
 theless, the action of the whole baronial party throughout 
 the war contributed greatly, though indirectly, to the ulti- 
 mate banishment of the Jews from England. Just as the 
 
 ^ Stubbs, Select Charters, 385-6. 
 
24 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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 twdce 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." ^ " 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 Restric- 
 tion. 
 
 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 thO 
 Council and the most powerful man in England,^ 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 
 
 > Annales Monastici, II. 101, 363, 371, III. 230, IV. 141, 142, 145, 
 449, 450 ; Liher de Antiquis Legihus (Camden Society), 62 ; Clironicle 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, 
 2 . Tout, Edward /,, 13, 39, 
 
The Expulsion of the Jeivs from. England in 1290. 25 
 
 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 Mort- 
 main 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 re- 
 venue and the symmetry of the feudal organisation suffered, 
 though the King might gain a great deal in other ways ;* 
 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,^ and then the land came under the " dead hand "; 
 sometimes they contented themselves with a perpetual 
 rent-charge,^ and then it would be hard, if not impossible, 
 for the struggling debtor to discharge his feudal obliga- 
 tions.* 
 
 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 
 
 * Palgrave, Rotuli Curies Regis (Record Commission), II., 62 (Judaei 
 habeant seisinam) ; Gesta ahhatum Monasterii S. Alhani (R. S.), I., 401 
 Placltorum Ahhreviatio (Record Commission), p. 58 ; Jacobs, pp. 90, 234. 
 
 2 Chronicles of the Abbey of Melsa (Rolls Series), I., 173, 174, 306, 367 
 374, 377 ; II., 55, 109, 116 ; Archceological Journal, vol. 38, pp. 189, 190 
 191,192. 
 
 ^ Blunt, Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England, 136 : 
 Prynne, Second Part of a Short Demurrer, p. 105. 
 
 4 A very long list of landowners indebted to the Jews could be ex 
 tracted 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. 
 
26 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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 build- 
 ings, and their debts had gone on growing, partly in conse- 
 quence 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.^ 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." ^ " Wise 
 men knew that the land was corrupted by them." ^ 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.* The buildings of 
 the cathedral were becoming dilapidated for want of 
 money to repair them.^ Those of the neighbouring Priory 
 of Christ Church were in an equally bad state, and its 
 revenue was equally encumbered.^ 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.^ The Bishop 
 of Hereford had been compelled to seek the intervention 
 of Henry III., in order to obtain respite of his debts to 
 
 ^ Gesta Henrici II. (R. S.), I., 106 ; Giraldi Camhrensis Opera (R. S.), 
 VII., 36 ; Cronica Jocelini de Brahelonda (Camden Soc), p. 2. 
 III., 328. 3 V. 189. 
 
 Letters of John of Peckham (Rolls Series), I., 20, 156, 
 5 Ibid., I., 203. « Ibid., I., 341. 
 
 ' Tbid., I., 177, 187. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jeusfrom England in 1290. 27 
 
 the Jews.'^ The Abbey of Glastonbury was weighed down 
 by " immeasurable debts," and, in order to save it from 
 farther calamities, the Archbishop had to order a reorgani- 
 sation of expenditure so thorough as to include regulations 
 concerning the number of dishes with which the abbot 
 might be served in his private room.^ 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.^ The Church of 
 Newneton could iiot afford clergymen.* 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, some- 
 times to the amount of several thousand pounds.^ 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.^ 
 They borrowed from English usurers, from Italians, from 
 Jews, and from one another."^ 
 
 If the l ay and eccle siastical esta tes of England were to 
 be freed from their burdens, heroic measures were neces- 
 sary. 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 efiective, 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 
 
 1 Koberts, Excerpta e Rot. Finium ^Record Commission), II., 68. 
 
 2 Letters of John of Peclham, I., 261. ^ Ihid., I., 380. 
 * Ihid., I., 194. 
 
 5 Obedientiary Molls of S. Swithiii's, Winchester (Hampshire Record 
 Society), 1892, pp. 10, 18. 
 
 ^ Letters of John of Pechham^ I., 244 ; Kitchin, Winchester, 55 ; 
 Obedientiary Rolls of S. Swithin's, pp. 22, 25. 
 
 ' Cf. Letters of John of Pechham, I., 542. 
 
28 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 first measure in the programme of reform was one for the 
 relief of the debtors of the Jews. Any interference with 
 t Jewish business would, of course, entail a loss to theKoyal 
 ^» 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 difficul- 
 ties, 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 aliena- 
 tion 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.^ 
 
 But this was only a slight measure compared with what 
 was to follow. The Jews might still acquire land by pur- 
 chase, 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,^ and, according to the story 
 of an ancient historian,^ they chose this moment to 
 ask the King to grant them the enjoyment of the privi- 
 leges 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 
 
 1 Tovey, Anglia Judaica, 175-7. 
 
 * Gesta Abhatum Monasterli S. Alhani (Rolls Series), I. 401 ; Plaoi- 
 torum Abbreviatio (Record Commission), p. 58, col. 2. 
 ' De Antiquit Legibui Liber (Camden Society), 234 *q. 
 
The Expukion of the Jews from England in 1290. 29 
 
 Church recognised the latter,^ 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,^ 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, enfeoflfment, confirmation, or any other 
 grant, or by any other means whatever. They were for- 
 bidden 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 
 
 ^ Hefele, ConGilienyesc kicMe, V., 1028. 
 » Annales Monastici (R.S.), IV., 221. 
 
so The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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 
 
 YI. — 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 practi- 
 cally 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 defini- 
 tion of duties and the spheres of duty," - 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 
 
 ^ Blunt, Estallishment and Besidenee, etc., 134-9, 
 ^ Stub'us, Constitutional History^ II., 116. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 81 
 
 usury and speculative trading generally had nob 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.^ 
 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;^ 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.^ 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 ^ that those Avho 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 
 
 ' Ashley, Economie History and Theory^ I., 126-32, 148-50. 
 
 ^ Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, V., 175. 
 
 ' Ibid. J 438-441. * Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin Migland, 23. 
 
32 The Expulsion of the J exes from Bnghnd in 1290. 
 
 exclusion from the society of Christians, to return to 
 their crusading debtors any interest that they had already 
 received from them.^ 
 
 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 
 Penaforte, was entrusted by Gregory IX. with the 
 preparation of the Decretals, which formed the chief 
 part of the canon law of the Church.^ And friars of 
 both orders codified with indefatigable labour the moral 
 law of Christianity, and set it forth in hand-books, or 
 SummcB, which were universally accepted as guides for 
 the confessional, and which all agreed in condemning 
 usury.^ 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 
 
 * Corpus Juris Canonici (Leipzig, 1839), II., 786. 
 
 * Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstanfen und ihrer Zeit, III., 581. 
 
 ' Endemann. Studien in der Romanisch-Kanonistischen WirthschaftS' 
 und Mechtslehf-e, I., 16-18. Stintzing, Geschichte der Populdren Literatur 
 des Romisch- Canonischen RecTits. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 83 
 
 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.^ 
 
 There was everj^ 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.^ 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.^ From some of the magnates 
 they obtained protection (for which they are said to nave 
 paid with a share of their profits),'* 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.^ 
 In London Bishop Roger had solemnly excommunicated 
 them all, and excluded them from his diocese.^ 
 
 No English king who wished to follow the teachings of 
 Christianity could willingly countenance any of his sub- 
 jects 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 king- 
 dom,'' and had religious scruples about the retention of 
 the Jews.^ But, as has been shown, he could not do with- 
 
 * E pero lo minor giron suggella, 
 Del segno suo e Sodoma e Caorsa. 
 
 Inferno, XI. 49, 50. 
 ' Monumenta Franciscana (Rolls Series), XLV., L., 10, 38-9, &\. 
 ' Macpherson, AnnaU of Commerce, I., 399-400. 
 < M. Paris, Chronica Majora, V., 245. * Ibid., III., 48. 
 
 •^ /^i^., III., 332-3. ' Ibid.,lY.,^. 
 
 ^ M. Paris, Historia Anglornm, III., 104. 
 
 C 
 
34 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 out the Jewish revenue. Edward was not only free from 
 dependence on that source of income, but he was also a far 
 more relio^ious kino^ than his father. He was a man to 
 obey the behests of the Church, instead of setting them at 
 nauoht 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 Chris- 
 tian world far greater efforts against usury than ever 
 before.^ 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.^ 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.^ 
 And the events of the last reign enabled him to pro- 
 ceed 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 
 
 i Ashley, Economic Bistory and Theory, I. 150 ; Labbeus, Sacrosancta 
 Concilia, xi. 991, 2. 
 
 2 Depping, Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age, 202, 207 ; Muratori, Antiqui- 
 tates ItaliccB Medli Aevi, I. 899, 900 ; Ninth Report of the Historical 
 Manuscripts Covimission, p. 14 (No. 264). 
 
 ' Forty-fourth Report of Deputy -Keeper of Public Records, pp. 8, 9, 72 ; 
 The Question whether a Jew, etc., by a Grentleman of Lincoln's Inn 
 (London, 1753), Appendix, § 18. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 35 
 
 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,^ and for some parts 
 of the thirteenth century the average collection of tallage 
 has been estimated at £5,000 f 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^ — 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.* 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.^ He had to seek richer supporters than the 
 Jews, and such were not wanting. 
 
 The Italian banking companies were the only organisa- 
 tions 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, 
 
 * Jacobs, 328. * Papers Anglo-Jewish Hist. Exhibition, 195. 
 ^ Stubbs' Constitutional History, II. 601. 
 
 " Rymer, Foedera, I. 489. Cf. Jewish Chronicle for April 26, 1895, p. 19, 
 col. 2. 
 
 * 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 
 bis reign Edward says, in bis writs to the sheriffs, " Pecuniae plurimum 
 indigemua "). Forty-third Report, 419. 
 
 c 2 
 
 X 
 \ 
 
36 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, 
 
 to France, England, Brabant, Switzerland, and Ireland.^ 
 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 advan- 
 tage 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.^ They were 
 thus the greatest financial agents of the time. They trans- 
 acted the business of the Pope. At the Court of Rome 
 ambassadors had to borrow from them.^ In France their 
 position was established by a regular diplomatic agreement 
 between the head of their corporation and Philip III.'* 
 In England they had in their hands the greater part of the 
 trade in corn and wool f and the protection and favour of 
 English kings was often besought by the Popes on their 
 behalf in special bulls.^ 
 
 Edward began his reign in financial dependence on the 
 Italians. His father had in thq^earliest period of his per- 
 sonal government incurred obligations -to them which he 
 himself, as heir apparent, had to increase considerably 
 at the time of his Crusade.'' When in later years be 
 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.^ So great were the amounts that they ad- 
 vanced to him, that between 1298 and 1308 the Friscobaldi 
 
 ' Muratori, Antiquitates Italicce Medii Aevi (Dissertatio XVI) ; Dep- 
 ping, Les Juifs dans le Mnyen Age, 213-6 ; Rymer, Foedera, I., 644. 
 
 2 Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, I. 405, 6 ; and see Peruzzi, Storia 
 del Commercio e dei Banchieri di Firenze, 170. 
 
 3 Peruzzi, 169 ; Archaeologia, xxviii. 218, 219. 
 
 ^ Muratori, Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi, I. 889. 
 
 * Archaeologia, xxviii. 221 ; Cunningham, Growth of Fnglish Industry 
 and Commerce, Early and Middle Ages, Appendix D ; Peruzzi, Storia dei 
 Commercio, 70. 
 
 6 Rymer, Foedera, I. 660, 823, 905. 
 
 ^ Archaeologia, xxviii. 261-272. ® Rymer, Foedera, I. 644 , 788. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from Fnglnnd in 1290. 37 
 
 Bianchi alone, one of the thirty-four companies thf>.t 
 he employed,^ received in repayment nearly £100,000.^ 
 He was compelled to favour them, although he attempted 
 to stop their usury. He gave them a charter of privi- 
 leges.^ 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.* 
 
 Edward's close connection with a body of financiers so 
 rich and powerful made the Jews unnecessary to hiin. 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 justi- 
 fication 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 for- 
 bidden Christians,^ 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.^ 
 
 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 
 
 1 Peruzzi, 174. ' Archaeologia, xxviii. 244-5. 
 
 5 Ibid, 231, Note 1. " Peruzzi, 172-5. 
 
 • The Question whether a Jew, etc. Appendix, §18. Prynne, ^ Shoit 
 Demurrer, 58. ^ Blunt, Establishment and Residence, etc., 139-144. 
 
38 The Expukion of the Jewsfiom England m 1290. 
 
 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." ^ 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 teach- 
 ing of Thomas Aquinas. In 1253 St. Louis sent from the 
 Holy Laud an order that all Jews should leave France 
 for ever, except those who should become traders and 
 workers with their hands.^ And now, when Eldward 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 
 
 ' Thomas Aquinas, OpU'fGulum, XXI. (^Ad Ducissam Brahantiae in 
 Vol. XIX. of the Venice edition, 1775-88.) 
 " M. Paris, Chronioa Majora^ V. 361, 2. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 39 
 
 lands, shall continue in force for ten years from the making 
 of this Act, and no longer/' ^ 
 
 The 16,000^ 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 ex- 
 cluded 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.^ But most of the Gilds were exclusive bodies, to 
 which all non-burgesses would find it hard to gain 
 admission,^ and Jewish non-burgesses, though not as a 
 rule kept out by a disqualifying religious formula,* would 
 on account of the unpopularity of their race and religion, 
 find it trebly hard.^ 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."^ 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, 
 
 * Blunt, Establishment and Residence, etc., 141. 
 
 2 This is the number of those who left the country in 1290. Flores 
 Historiarum (Rolls Series), iii. 70. Probably the number of tliose in the 
 country in 1275 was about the same. 
 
 3 Gross, The Gild Merchant, I. 38. * Ihid., I. 39-40. 
 
 5 lUd. II., 68, 138, 214, 243, 257. 
 
 6 One Jew alone is known to hav^e become a member of a G-ild 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. 
 
 ' Gross, The Gild Merchant, I. 41. 
 
40 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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.^ 
 
 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.^ 
 
 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.^ But many crafts were at the time 
 coming under the regulations of craft-gildsw 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.* In Hereford there were Gilds for nearly thirty 
 trades.^ It was probably very often the case, as it was with 
 the Weavers' Gild in London, that a craft-gild existing 
 
 ^ G-ross, The Gild Merchant, I. 45, 46, 47. 
 2 Tdher Custumarum (Rolls Series), 215. 
 
 ' OcliQakowski , Englands Wirthschaftliche EntwicTtelung im Ausgange 
 des Mittelaltei's, 51-4. 
 
 * Liher Custuviarum (Rolls Series) 8Q-8], 101-2, 121 ; Liher Aldus (Rolls 
 Series), 726, 734. Riley, Blamorials of London, 179. 
 
 * Jolinson, Customs of Hereford, 115-6. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 41 
 
 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.^ 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.^ 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.^ 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 Win- 
 chester, and are recounted in the words of its preamble, 
 de jour en jour roheries^ homicides, arsons, phis sovenerement 
 sent fetes que avaunt ne soleyent} If he survived the 
 dangers of the road and reached a fair, he would find 
 
 * Liber Oiistum,aruin,4:18-i25. 
 
 2 Liber Custumarum, 78, 81, 124. Riley, Memorials of London, 179, 
 216. 
 
 3 Liber Custumarnm, 79, Ochenkowski, Op. Cit., 64. 
 
 * Btuhhs, Select Charters, i70.,^,^, 
 
 i- 
 
 / 
 
42 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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,^ or 
 those who at Boston killed the merchants and plundered 
 their goods, until "the streets ran with silver and gold,"^ 
 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.^ 
 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 regula- 
 tions of some fairs, could destroy the goods of any trader 
 if their quality did not please them.^ 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 com- 
 plainant to that of the wrong-doer.^ 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. 
 
 * Jacobs, 116. 
 
 ' Walsingham, Historia Anglicana (Rolls Series), I. 30. 
 
 * M. Paris, Chronica Majora, v. 56-8. 
 
 * Ochenkowski, Englands wirthschaftliche EntwicJielung ^ 157. 
 
 ^ Cunningliam, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Early and 
 Middle Ages, 175. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 43 
 
 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.^ 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."^ 
 
 -^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 
 
 ' Liher Custumarum (Rolls Series), xxxiv.-xlviii., 61-72 ; Liber Alhus^ 
 xcv., xcvi., 287 ; Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, I. 388-9. 
 
 ' Liber Custnmarum 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 Entwicke- 
 lung, 180 ; Calendar of State Papers ( Venetian'), Ix.-lxix. ; Peruzzi, Storia 
 dei Banchieri e del Commercio di Firenze, 70. 
 
44 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 and Italian merchants, and sent to Flanders and Italy to be 
 woven and dyed.^ The Jews had, apparently, long taken 
 some slight part in wholesale trade,^ 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.^ 
 
 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/ and for the registration of any new agree- 
 
 1 Cunningham, Growth, etc., 185 ; Macpherson, Annals of Commerce 
 pp. 415, 481 ; Calendar of State Papers (^Venetian^, Ixvi.-lxvii. 
 
 2 Jacobs, 66-7 ; Archceological Journal, xxxviii. 179. 
 
 3 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. 
 
 < 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 Ofl&ce (^Queen's Rememhrancer's 
 Miscellanea, 557, 13-23) ; Rymer, I. 570 ; John of Peckham, I. 937 ; 
 Calendar of Patent Bolls, 1281-1292, p. 81 ; Prynne, Second Demurrer, 
 pp. 74 and 80 (=154). 
 
\ 
 
 The ^pulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 45 
 
 ments 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 bor- 
 rowers 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,^ 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,^ 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.^ 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.* 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.^ Sometimes by a still 
 more elaborate device, the Italians combined their two 
 
 * Labbeus, Sacrnsancta Concilia., XI. 649-50. 
 
 ' Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, 179, 307. 
 
 3 M. Paris, V. 245 ; Wilkins, Cone, I. 675 ; De Antiq. Legibvs, 234 sq. 
 (Archbishop of York's remarks on the corruption of the G-reat Council and 
 on the fautoi'es of Jews.) 
 
 * M. Paris, Chronica Majora, V. 404-5. 
 
 * Muratori, Antiquitates Italicce Medii Aevi, I., 893. 
 
46 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 professions of money-lenders and merchants, by inducing 
 a monastery which bad 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.^ 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 doubt- 
 less represent collusive transactions, in which the offence of 
 usury was to be avoided by the substitution of a recom- 
 pense 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.^ 
 
 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,^ or else to imitate in a 
 humble way their financial transactions, either by keeping 
 pawnshops,* 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 strict- 
 ness with which Edward enforced the old legislation 
 
 * Rotuli Parliament omm^ I. 1, 2. 
 ' " The Debts and Houses of the Jews of Hereford," in Transactions of 
 
 the Jewish Historical Society of England^ vol. I. 
 3 Royal Letters (Rolls Series), II. 24. 
 
 * Leet Juiisdiction of Norwich (Selden Society), p. 10 ; Cf. Aneren 
 Riwle (Camden Society), 395. *' Do not men account him a good friend 
 who layeth his pledge in Jewry to redeem his companion ? " 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 47 
 
 against the residence of Jews in towns where there did no 
 exist a chest for the deposit of Jewish debts, and a staff of 
 clerks to witness and register thein.^ There was thus 
 nothing to which the poorer Jews could turn. Crowded 
 as unwelcome intruders into a small and decreasing number 
 of towns,^ 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 ; ^ some went into the House of Converts, 
 where they got l^d. a day and free lodging.* 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." * 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,^ 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.' The opportunity for dishonesty was too tempt- 
 ing. The coins that actually circulated in the country 
 
 ' Rymer, Foedera, I. 503, 634 ; Papers of the Anglo-Jewish Historical 
 Exhibition, 187-190. 
 ' Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany, I. 326, quoted supra, p. 20 Qn. 3). 
 
 ' Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1281-1292, p. 98 ; Papers Anglo-Jewish Hist. 
 Ex. 167. 
 
 * See Dictionary of Political Economy, Article Jews, (House for 
 Converted). 
 
 * Chronica Majora, V. 15. 
 
 ^ Annales Monastici (Rolls Series), II. 339. 
 ^ M. Paris, Chronica Majora, Y. 16, 16. 
 
48 The Ex2ml8ton of the Jews from England m 1290. 
 
 were of many different issues/ they were not milled at the 
 edges,^ they were so liable to damage and mutilation of all 
 kinds that their deficiency of weight had to be recognised 
 and allowed for.^ 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.)/ 
 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 dis- 
 organised, shopkeepers refused the money tendered to them, 
 and the necessities of life were withdrawn from the mar- 
 kets.^ 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 com- 
 plained 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.^ 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 im- 
 poverished by the change in the coinage of the realm." ^ 
 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 ^ And that 
 the suspicion was not absolutely without justification is 
 shown by the fact, that early in Henry III.'s reign, the 
 
 ' Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, I. 179. 
 
 ' Ashley, Economic Hist., Theory, I. 169. 
 
 ' Ashley, I., 215, n. 95 ; cf. Jacobs, 73 and 225. 
 
 * Annales Monastici (Rolls Series), IV. 278. 
 
 ^ Annales Monastici, IV. 278 ; Liber Oustumarum, 189. 
 
 ^ John of Peckham, Rerfistrum Eplstolariim (Roll'* Series), I. 22. 
 
 ' Annules Monastici, III. 295. " Historia Anglorum, III. 76. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 49 
 
 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.^ When in- 
 quiries 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.^ The oiBScial verdict included 
 them v/ith the Caursines and the Flemish wool-merchants 
 in its condemnation.^ 
 
 It was not unnatural that Edward, when the evil re- 
 appeared 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 prepa- 
 rations for an inquiry into the whole subject of the 
 coinage, he caused all the Jews of England to be im- 
 prisoned in one night, their property to be seized, and 
 their houses to be searched. At the same time the gold- 
 smiths, and many others against whom information was 
 given by the Jews, were treated in the same way.* 
 
 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 
 
 ^ Tovey, 109 ; Madox, History of the Exchequer I. 245, z, 
 
 2 M. Paris, Chronica Majora, IV. 608. 
 
 3 Ibid., V. 16. 
 
 '' Aiinales Monastiai, IV. 278. 
 
50 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 accusations against those among them whom they dis- 
 liked on personal or religious grounds, especially as there 
 '^ras a good chance of extorting hush-money from the 
 accused, or, in case of condemnation, of concealing from 
 the escheators some of their property.^ The Jews and the 
 King recognised the danger One Manser of London, for ex- 
 ample, 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.^ 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.^ 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.* 
 
 The activity with which Jews took part, or were supposed 
 to take part, in the debasement of the coinage, and in the pro- 
 hibited practice of usury ,^ must have aroused in the mind of 
 
 » 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, 
 Feeder a, I., 570. 
 
 ' Papers Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition^ 42-3. 
 
 » Tovey, 211-13. 
 
 * Chronicles of Edward 1. and Edward IT. (Rolls Series), I., 88 ; 
 Chronicon Petroburgense (Camden Society), 29. 
 
 s " 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 
 
The Expulsion of the Jeivs from England in 1290. 51 
 
 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 .^ 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 f 
 suddenly as he had wished. The country could not d(> 
 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 
 
 path of the Holy Church, did forbid unto all the Jewe 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 
 vrork 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). 
 
 ^ For Coining, see Kuding, Annals of the Coinage L 197 ; Calendar of 
 Patent Molls from 1281 to 1292, 97 ; Abbreviatio Rotulorum Originalium 
 (Record Commission), 49 ; Peckham, Registrum Eplstolarum, 1. 146. For 
 Usury, Forty-fourth Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, 
 pp. 8 and 9 ; Archtsologia, XXVIII., 227-9; Peckham, II., 542 ; and for a 
 later period. Rottdi Parliamentorum, II. 332«, (VII*) 350t/. 
 
 D 2 
 
52 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 Crown as the succession due on Jewish property.^ 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, there- 
 fore, 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 con- 
 tract 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 condi- 
 tions, and were registered before the chirographer and 
 clerk, and threatened heavy penalties against all who 
 should lend up to that amount without registration.^ 
 
 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 imme- 
 diate 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 
 
 ' Papers of Anglo-Jeicish HUtorical Exhibition, p. 192 (note 54) and 
 p. 222. 
 
 2 Papers of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, pp. 224-9. 
 
The Expuhion of the Jews from England in 1290. 53 
 
 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 Chris- 
 tian servants.^ In England especially, Churchmen of the 
 twelfth century showed towards the Jews a tolerant spirit, 
 and made no eflfort 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.^ Churches and 
 monasteries took charge, at times of danger, of the money, 
 and even of the families, of Jews. Such friendly inter- 
 course as existed between Jews and Christians was 
 allowed to go on without any attempt at ecclesiastical 
 interference.^ 
 
 The accession of Innocent the Third to the pontificate 
 
 * See the Decrees of the Third Lateran Council of 1179, Mansi, Concilia ^ 
 XXII., 231. 
 
 2 St. Anselm, Epistolcc, III., 117 (Migne, Patrologice Cursus Completug, 
 Vol. 159, columns 153-155) ; Gilbert of Westminster, Duputatio Judaici 
 cum Christlano (Ibid. 1005-1036). 
 
 3 Chronicles of Stephen^ Henry II., and Richard I. (Rolls Series), I., 
 
54 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 brought about a rapid change in the attitude of the 
 Church towards the Jews. Innocent was the first to ad- 
 vance, on behalf of the Papacy, the claim that the Lord 
 gave Peter not only the whole Church, but the whole 
 world to rule,^ 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 ^ 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 acces- 
 sion 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 Chris- 
 tians 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 
 
 310 (among- the victims of the massacre at Lynn in 1190 was quidam 
 Judceus, insignis medicus, qui et artis et inodestice svce gratia C/iristianig 
 guofiue familiaris et honorahiUs fueraf) ; Gervase of Canterbury (K-olls 
 Series), I., 405. (The Jews help the monks of Canterbury in their strug-gle 
 with the Archbishop in 1188) ; Rotuli Litterarum ClausaTum (Record 
 Commission), I., 20J. (Rex^ ^"-c, domino Lincolniensi Epincopo, ^'c.; 
 mandamus vobis quod nan permittatis infjnste catalle Judceorum receptari 
 in ecclesiis in diooesi i'e*^?'^, February 28th, 1205) ; Chronica Jocclini ds 
 Brahelande (Camden Society), p. 33. (a.d. 1190, Abbas jussit solempniter 
 excommunioari illos qui de cetero reoeptarent Judeos vel in hospicio 
 reciperent in villa Santi jEdmundi') ; Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin 
 England, 269. (^'■English Jews drink with Gentiles^) 
 
 ' Moeller, History of the Christian Church, Middle Ages (Eng. Tr.). 
 p. 279. 
 
 2 Mansi, Concilia, XXII. 231. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 55 
 
 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 repres- 
 sion 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 ofiices, 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 excom- 
 munication. For the enforcement of his other anti-Jewish 
 measures he relied on the help of the temporal power in all 
 Christian countries.^ 
 
 The declaration of war made by Innocent III. was a 
 terrible calamity for the Jews; but though it affected at 
 
 ' Letters of Innocent (Migne, PatrologicB Cursus Contpletus^ Vols. 214- 
 217) ; Lib. VII., 186 ; Lib. VIII., 50, 121 ; Lib. X., 61, 190 ; Corpus Juris 
 Canonici (Leipzig, 1839), II., 747-8 ; G-raetz, Geschichte der Juden, VII., 
 7, 8 ; Depping, Les Juifs dajis le May en Age, 183 ; Hahn, Geschichte der 
 Ketzer, III., 6, 7 ; Hurter. Geschichte Papst Innocenz der Dritten, II., 234 ; 
 G-iidemann, Geschichte dex Erzlehungswesens, u.s.w., I., 37 ; Rule, History 
 n/the Iriqnisition, I. 10, 17. 
 
56 The Expulsion of the Jcwh from England in 1290. 
 
 once the whole of Christian Europe, still its evil results 
 might have passed away in time. Popes were but men 
 and pohticians ; and just as Innocent had, by the publica- 
 tion 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 unbehef 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, Raymundas de Penaforte, induced the King of 
 Spain to build and endow seminaries for the purpose.^ 
 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 
 
 ' Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, VII.. 27. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 57 
 
 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 con- 
 cerning 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.^ 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 dis- 
 cussion on the difierences between Judaism and Chris- 
 
 ' Revue des Etudes Juives, I. 247, 293 ; II. 248 ; III. 39 ; Noel Valois, 
 Guilhn/ntc (V Auvrgne, pp. 118, 137. 
 
58 The Expuhion of the Jeicsfrom England in 1290. 
 
 tianity, and induced James I. to compel them to take 
 up the challenge. The famous Nachmanides came for- 
 ward 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.^ 
 
 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, hetero- 
 geneous 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 
 
 * Histoire Litteraire de la France, XXVII., 562-3 ; Grraetz, Geschichte, 
 VII., 131, 135. 
 
The Expuhion of the Jews from England in 1290. 59 
 
 acquiescing in what they believed to be a false interpreta- 
 tion of their scripture, or else of proclaiming publicly their 
 disbelief in doctrines which were at the very foundation 
 of Christianity. The effect on the ruKng 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, compeUing the Jews, by virtue of a royal 
 edict that had been issued in his favour, to hold disputes 
 with him on matters of rehgion.^ Many other members of 
 the order devoted their lives to the same pursuit,^ 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 super- 
 stitions of other faiths the same fascination as in the first 
 century of the Roman Empire. Thomas Aquinas beheved 
 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.^ " It 
 happens sometimes," wrote a Pope of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, " that Christians, when they are visited by the Lord 
 with sickness and tribulation, go astray, and have recourse 
 
 ^ G-raetz, GescMohte der Juden^ VII., 135 ; J. Jacobs, Inquiry into the 
 Sources of the History of the Jews in Spain, xviii., 18. 
 
 2 Scriptores Ordmis Prcedieatorum (Quetif and Echard), I., 246, 396, 
 398, 594. 
 
 ' Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologies, Secunda Secundae, Qusestio X. 
 
60 The Expuhion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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 ac- 
 complishment 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."^ 
 
 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 ot 
 the monarchs of Europe compelled their Jewish subjects to 
 wear a badge.^ 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 forbaae 
 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.^ 
 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.* 
 
 In England the relation of the Jews to the Christians 
 underwent somewhat the same changes as in Continental 
 
 * Baronius, Aiinales Ecclesiastici (ed. Theiner), XIII., 87. 
 2 Revue des Etudes Juives, VI. 81 ; VII. 94. 
 
 ' Mansi, Concilia, XXIII., 1174-6 ; Martene, Thesaurus, TV., 769. 
 
 * Depping, 198 ; Hahn, Geschichte der Ketzer, III,, 13 ; Rule, History of 
 the Inquisition, 27, 80, 81, 91, 332, 335-6. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 61 
 
 Europe. Before the thirteenth century the Jews in Eng- 
 land had, as has been said above, been free from molestation 
 by the Church,^ and their chief danger had been from the 
 brutality and greed of the disorderly populace, of desperate 
 outcasts, and of marauding Crusaders.^ 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.^ 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.* 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,^ and by 
 lending the sanction of the civil power to the decree that 
 ordered the use of the badge,^ nevertheless followed the 
 example that his guardians had set, and protected the Jews 
 against the aggression of the Church. 
 
 » Supra, p. 53. « Supra, pp. 12, 13, 19. 
 
 ' Wilkins, Mag nee BritannicB Concilia. I., 591 ; Tovey, Anglia Judaica^ 
 83 ; Rye, History of NorfolTt, 87. 
 
 * Wilkins, Magnce Britannics Concilia, I., 657, 693, 719 ; Letters of 
 Bishop Grosseteste (Rolls Series), 318. 
 
 * Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, III., 262. 
 
 * Tovey, Anglia Judaica, 148. 
 
62 The Expulsion of the Jews from England w 1290. 
 
 There were many reasons which might have caused 
 Edward to sympathise more strongly than his father 
 had done, with the anti-Jewish feehngs 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."^ 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 ^vvith, and under 
 the influence of, the Dominican order.^ 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."^ 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 ex- 
 communication any who should carry out their intention, 
 and, when his proclamation was disregarded, he carried out 
 his threat.* 
 
 » Rymer, Fcedera, I., 743. 
 
 2 Tout, Edivard /., pp. 69, 149. 
 
 3 John of Peckham, Registrum Epistolarum. (Rolls Series), I., 239 ; 
 II., 407 ; III., 937 ; Wilkins, MagncB Britannice Concilia, II., 88-9 ; 
 Prynne, Second Demvrrer, 121-2. 
 
 - * Hfliisfhold Roll ojf Buhop Swinfield (Camden Society), pp. c, ci. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. CS 
 
 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 Domini- 
 can friar was converted to Judaism.^ 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.^ 
 At Norwich, early in Edward's reign, a Jew was burnt 
 for blasphemy.^ At Nottingham, in 1278, a Jewess was 
 charged with abusing in scandalous terms all the Christian 
 bystanders in the market-place.* 
 
 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.^ He 
 renewed the edict concerning the wearing of the badge, 
 and extended it to Jewesses, whereas it had formerly 
 applied only to Jews.^ 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 
 
 ' Graetz, GeschicTite der Juden, VII., note 11. Florence of Worcester 
 (Eng-lisli Historical Society), II., 214. 
 
 ^ Tovey, Anglia Judaica, 168. 
 
 ' Forty-ninth Report of the Deputy -Keeper of the Public Records, 
 p. 187. 
 
 * Forty-seventh Report of the Deputy 'Keeper of the Public Records, 
 p. 306. 
 
 * Dictionary of Political Economy^ Article, "Jews (House for Con- 
 verted)." 
 
 " Tovey, Anfflia Judaica, 208. 
 
64 The Expulsion of the Jeivsfrum England in 1290. 
 
 the Jews in the counties and towns under their charge 
 to assemble and hear the word of God preached by the 
 friars.^ 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.^ 
 
 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 prac- 
 tise 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 incon- 
 sistent 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 
 
 ' Forty-ninth Report of the Deputy -Kecyer of the Public Records, 
 p. 95 ; Rymer, I., 576 ; Madox, Exchequer, I., 259. '^ Tovey, p. 208. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England tn 1290. 65 
 
 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 re- 
 mained." 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 ^ and York^ 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 
 
 ' Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici (ed. Theiner), XIII., 10, 11. 
 '^ Reme den Etudes Juives, I., 298. 
 
 E 
 
66 The Exjmlsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 Catholic faith. They are said to have a wicked and 
 deceitful book, which they commonly call Thalmud, con- 
 taining 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 astmy 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 
 infidehty 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 Hfe 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 re- 
 frain. 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 
 
The Expulsion of the Jeics from England in 1290. 67 
 
 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 feast- 
 ing together, and hence the opportunity for mischief be- 
 comes 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. There- 
 fore 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 dis- 
 ease 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 
 
 e 2 
 
68 The Expulsion of the Jews from England m 1290. 
 
 predecessor had, by the exercise of his spiritual powers, 
 secured for him a tenth part of the goods of the clergy of 
 England.^ 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 connec- 
 tion 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.* 
 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 it- 
 self the more naturally, since two French kings had practi- 
 cally adopted it already. Before he returned home, Edward 
 issued an order that all Jews should leave Gascony.^ 
 
 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 
 
 • Rymer, I., 560-1. 
 
 ' Edward left England in May, 1286. Florence of Worcester (English 
 Historical Society), II., 236. 
 
 ' Willelmi Bishanger Chronica et Annnles (Rolls Series), 116 ; Flores 
 Bistoria/rum (Rolls Series), III., 70-71. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 69 
 
 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 mem- I 
 bers of his family and court. His wife and mother and i 
 various of his officers had been in the habit of receiving i 
 liberal grants from the property and forfeitures of the | 
 Jews.^ 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,^ 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^ 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.* Any who remained in the country 
 
 ^ Forty-second Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, 
 593 ; Forty-fourth Report, 109, 295 ; Forty-ffth Report, 72, 163 ; 
 Forty-ninth Report, 81 ; Calendar of Patent Rolls from 1281 to 1292, 
 62, 193 ; ArchcBologia, VI., 339 ; Madox, History of the Exchequer, 1. 
 225 w ; 230 h ; 231 I ; John of Peckham, Registrum Epistularum, II. 
 619 ; III., 937 ; Rogers, Oxford City Documents (Oxford Historical 
 Society), 208, 219 ; Tovey, Anglia Judaica, 200. 
 
 2 Graetz, Geschichte der Juden (Second Edition), VII., note 11. 
 
 ' CJironicles of Edward I. and Edward II. (Rolls Series), I., 97 ; The 
 Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft (Rolls Series), II., 185-6. 
 
 * Tovey, Anglii Judaica, 240. 
 
 JiTIVBSlSJTY 
 
70 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 after the prescribed day were declared liable to the penalty 
 of death.^ 
 
 Every effort was made by the King to secure the peace 
 find 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.^ These general orders were reinforced 
 by the issue of special writs of safe-conduct for individual 
 Jews.^ 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,^ and Cok, son of Hagin, who belonged to the 
 Queen,^ 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.*^ The treatment that they 
 met with was not so merciful as the king had wished. 
 
 1 Bijrtholom(ei de Cotton, Ilutoria Attglicana (Rolls Series), p. 178. 
 
 2 Tovey, An^Un Jndaica^ 240-2. 
 
 s Th. 241 ; Calendar of Patent RolU from 1281 to 1292, 378, 381, 382. 
 4 Calendar of Patent IMIs, 379. . ' lb. 384. « lb. 232. 
 
The Expuhion of the Jews from England in 1290. 71 
 
 Many of the richer among them embarked with all their 
 property at Lori'don. 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.^ 
 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.^ 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.^ Another body, numbering 1,335, 
 and consisting, to a great extent, of the poor, went to 
 Flanders.^ 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 in- 
 habitants of the Paris Jewry, made four years after the 
 Expulsion, there appear certain names with the additions 
 of I 'Englische or / 'Englais!' It may well be that many Jews 
 
 * Walter of Hemingburgh, CJtroniGon (English Historical Society), 1., 
 21, 22 ; Bartholom^eus Cotton, Historia Anglicana (Rolls Series), 178 ; 
 A/males Mojiastici, III., 362, IV., 327. 
 
 2 Opus Ghronicorum in Chronicles of S. Albans, J. de Trohelowe, etc., 
 Annates (Rolls Series), 57. 
 
 * Lauriere, Ordonnances des Rots de la France, I., 317. 
 
 * Fortieth Rej?ort of Deputy -Keeper of Public Records, p. 474. 
 » Revue des Etu les Juives, Vol. I., pp. 66, 67, 69. 
 
72 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 from England, speaking the French language, were able, in 
 spite of the Act of the Parlement cle Ici Chandeleiir, to become 
 merged in the general body of the Jews of France, who 
 were many times as numerous as those of England had 
 been.^ Many, too, may have thrown in their lot with their 
 850,000 coreligionists of Spain.^ 
 
 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 Statue 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 com for which the price had been paid in advance 
 All fell into the hands of the King,^ except, possibly, the 
 houses in some of those towns, such as Hereford, Win- 
 chester, and Ipswich, of which the citizens had by the 
 purchase of manorial rights become entitled to all fines and 
 forfeitures.* 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 re- 
 solve to take from the debtors, not the full amount for 
 which they were liable, and which, under the amended 
 statute of the Jewry ,^ 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, 
 
 ' Graetz, VII.. 267. ^ j^i^i^ 155 
 
 « Langtoft, II., 189 ; Hemingburgli, II., 21 ; Madox, Exch., I., 261. 
 * Jolmson, Customs of Hereford, p. 100 ; Madox, Firma Burgi, 12, 
 19, 23. I am not at all confident of the accuracy of Mr. Johnson's state- 
 ment, 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&- 
 76a. * Papers Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition , p. 230. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 73 
 
 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.^ 
 
 It was ordered that the houses should be sold and the 
 proceeds devoted to pious uses.^ But it appears that 
 they were nearly all given away to the King's friends.^ 
 
 XII. — The Necessity for the Expulsion. 
 
 The Expulsion was not the act of a cruel king. The 
 forbearance which marks the orders to the ofiicers 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.* 
 
 Nor was it prompted by greed. It is true that im- 
 mediately 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.^ But this can- 
 
 ' Rotuli Parl'mmentorum^ I, 3465 ; II., 8a, 402a ; Statutes of Realm^ 1 
 Ed. IIL, Stat. 2, § 3. 
 
 * Tovey, 235 ; Prynne, Second Demurrer, 127 ; Papers, Anglo-Jewish 
 Historical Exhibition, 21. 
 
 ^ 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 Rotuloruni Originalium Abbreviatio (Record Commission) 
 pp. 73"- 76^, 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 
 Rotidi Originalium and the Lansdowne Transcript. 
 
 * Madox, ExcJi. I. 2, 248A, 258i, etc. ; Tovey, 207 ; Prynne, 2nd Demurrer, 
 59, 76 ; Rymer, Fasdera, 523, 598. 
 
 * Chronica Monasterii de Melsa (Rolls Series), II., 251-2. AnnMes Monas- 
 tici, III., 362 ; W. de Hemingburgh, CJironicon (English Historical 
 Society) II., 22. 
 
74 The Ejcpuhion of the Jeicsfrom England in 1290. 
 
 not 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.^ 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 
 :oul adopt. And the impossibility was not of Edward's 
 makings It was the^esuirof~many causes, andHEhe know- 
 ledge 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 f in 
 another, as the result of the efforts of Queen Eleanor f in a 
 third, as a measure of summary punishment against the blas- 
 phemy of the Jews, taken to give satisfaction to the English 
 clergy ;* in a fourth as an answer to the complaints made by 
 the magnates of the continued prevalence of usury f in a fifth 
 as an act of conformity to public opinion f in a sixth, as a 
 reform suggested by the King's independent general enquiry 
 into the administration of the kingdom during his absence, 
 
 • Parliament was summoned for July IStli ; 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. 
 
 2 French Chronicler of London, in Riley's Chronicles of Old London^ 
 242. 
 
 ' Annales Monastici., II., 409. 
 
 * Ih., III., 361. 
 
 5 W. de Hemingburgh, II., 20. 
 
 « Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward II. (Rolls Series) Vol. I. 99 
 (" Omnes Judsei .... concedente Rege Edwardo exulantur"). 
 
The Expuhion of the Jeics fiwn England in 1290. 75 
 
 and his discovery, through the complaints of the Council, 
 of the " deceits " of the Jews.^ 
 
 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.^ 
 But the bull of the Pope and the personal influence -of the 
 Queen-mother were ahke 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 posi- 
 tion of loyal 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 ~~i}3^4he 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 
 
 * The Chronicle of Pierre Langtoft (Rolls Series), II., 187-89. 
 
 2 Cum . . concesserimus Karissimge 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 EnhiMtion, pp. 187-8. Forty-fourth Beport of the Deputy 
 Keeper of the Puhlic Records, p. 6. Glraetz, Geschichte der Juden (Second 
 edition), VII., note 11. 
 
*y 
 
 j\ 
 
 76 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 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.^ 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.^ 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." ^ 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." * 
 " They are a sign for the nation like Cain the accursed," he 
 says elsewhere.^ The eulogist of Edward I., when he 
 recounts the great deeds of his hero, tells with pride and 
 
 ' Compare the treatment of the Fleminpfs, 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. 
 Cunninpfham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce^ 176 ; and 
 see Gross, Gild Merchamt, II., 155-6. 
 
 2 Jacobs, 14. ' Ihid., 107. 
 
 * Historm Anglorum, III., 76. * Ibid., III., 103. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews -from England m 1290. 77 
 
 without a word of pity how "the perfidious and un-i 
 believing horde of Jews is driven forth from England in 
 one day into exile." ^ 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.^ 
 
 The popul ar 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 Eng- 
 land. Bradiers and hosiers, bakers and shoemakers, tailors 
 and copperers, priests and Oxford scholars were all ready 
 to take part in the looting of a Jewry.^ 
 
 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.* 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.^ 
 
 Bishops supported with eagerness the charge of child- 
 murder repeatedly brought against the Jews,^ though Popes 
 and Councils had declared it to be groundless^; and the 
 judge who showed the greatest eagerness for the punish- 
 
 ' Clironides of Edward I. and Edward II. (Eolls Series), Comrnendatio 
 Lamentahilis, II., 14, 
 
 '^ M. Paris, Chronica Majora, V., 114 ; Annales Monastici, IV., 503 ; 
 Gesta Ahhatum Monasterii, S. Alhani (Rolls Series), I., 471. 
 
 ' Annales Monastici, IV., 91 ; Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany, I., 331 ; 
 Forty -fourth Report of the Deputy -Keeper of the Public Records, 188 ; 
 De Antiquis Legihus, Camden Soc, 60 ; Tovey, 156 ; Prynne, Second 
 Demurrer, 118. " Jacobs, 26. 
 
 * W. Rishanger, Chronica et Annales (Rolls Series), p. 4. 
 
 * M. Paris, Chronica Majora, IV. 30, 31. 
 
 ' Hahn, Gesehichte der Ketxer, III,, 35, n, 2, 
 
 3l 
 
 ■■i 
 
J 
 
 78 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 ment 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 con- 
 temporaries as a scholar and " a circumspect and discreet 
 man."i 
 
 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.^ 
 In Italy, where the municipal and gild organisations were 
 easier to enter, and less narrow and exacting in their con- 
 stitution, than those of England,^ they worked at trades.* 
 In Sicily, under Frederic II., some Jews were employed 
 as administrators, and many more were agriculturists.'^ 
 In Rome, one was treasurer of the household of Pope 
 Alexander III., and in Southern France another filled the 
 same ofiice under Count Raymond, of Toulouse.^ In 
 Austria, they were the financial ministers of the Archduke,^ 
 and in Spain, one was chamberlain to Alphonso the Wise, 
 and many others were in the service of the same king.^ 
 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 
 
 ' M. Paris, Chronica Major a^ V. 517 ; Annales Mo/iastici, I. 34.5. 
 
 2 Revue des Etudes Juives, XVIII., 258 ; East Anglian, V. 10 ; Jacobs, 
 88-9. 
 
 3 Perrens, Histoire de Florence, III., 220-1, 226. G-regorovius, Gesch. der 
 Stadt Rom., V., 308. 
 
 * Thomas Aquinas, Opuscnlum, XXI. 
 
 * Grudemann, Gesch. des Erziehungswesens, etc., II., 287. 
 
 « Gudemann, II., 71 ; Hist. Litt. de la France, XXVII., 520. 
 ' Graetz, VII., 97. 
 8 /&., 125-7. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 79 
 
 Romans,^ 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."^ 
 They did not speak the English language.^ 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 faith- 
 ful 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.* Among the English Jews, and in the communities 
 of Northern France with whom the English Jews were in 
 continual communication, literature, though less contro- 
 
 ' llojjal Letters (Rolls Series), II., 46 ; Madox, I., 257 g ; Rymer, Foedei-a, 
 I., 356. 2 Jacobs, 269. 
 
 3 Jewish Quarterly Review, IV. 12, 551 ; Hist. Litt. de la France^ 
 27, 485, 650, sq. 
 
 * [list. Litt. de France, XXVII., 27, 650, sg. 
 
 kml^l^ ITT) 
 
 ^ 
 
80 The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 
 
 versial and engaged with less deep questions, sufficed, 
 nevertheless, even better to provide continual and engros- 
 sing 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.^ The 
 English Jews were strict observers of the ceremonial law,^ 
 they made use in daily life of the minutiae of Rabbinical 
 scholarship, they drew up their contracts " after the usage 
 of the sages," ^ and thus, like all the Jews of mediaeval 
 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 
 mediaeval 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 
 
 > Hist. Litt., 435, 441, 462, 484, 487, 507, sq. ; Jewish Quarteely 
 Review, IV., 25. 
 2 Jacobs, 286. 
 * Areheeological Journal, XXVIII., 180. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 8l 
 
 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.^ 
 
 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.^ There Jehudi Halevi 
 ended his days.^ 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.* A Jewish 
 traveller of the Middle Ages says of certain of the communi- 
 ties 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.' "^ 
 
 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 ex- 
 pectation of the time when the Lord should return the 
 Captivity of Zion, and they should look back on their 
 exile as reawakened dreamers. 
 
 ' Cf. L. Zunz, Die Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters, Berlin, 1856. 
 
 2 Graetz, VII., 6. ' lUd., VI. " VII., 138 ; VII., 307-8 ; VII., 188-9. 
 
 ^ Benjamin of Tudela, trans. Asher, I., 163, 
 
 %>^ Of xra ^^ 
 
82 The Expulsion of the Jeivsfrom E}t gland in 1290. 
 
 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. 
 Tn England the effect that it produced was barely per- 
 ceptible. The loss of their capital was too slight to 
 produce any economic change.^ The only class that bene- 
 fited from their departure was the Florentine merchants, 
 whose trade grew from this time even greater than before.^ 
 Political results of importance have sometimes been at- 
 tributed 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.^ 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,'"^ 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,^ 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 gold- 
 smiths were as rigorously treated as the Jewish money- 
 
 » See the Tables in Thorold Rogers' History of Agriculture and Prices 
 Vols. I. and II. 
 
 2 Pernzzi, Storia del Commercio e del Banchieri de Firenze, 175. 
 
 • Papers, Anglo-Jewish Historical ExhiMtion, p. 211. 
 
 < Rotuli Parliamentorum, II., 332-350. * Graetz, VII., 101. 
 
The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. 8S 
 
 lenders had been.^ The Church, which had helped to 
 drive out the Jews, soon found itself in conflict with Chris- 
 tian 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.^ 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.^ In 
 Germany the blood-accusation met them as in England.* 
 In Spain popular massacres and clerical persecution were 
 already preparing the ground for the Inquisition.^ The 
 time was still far ofl* when Jew and Christian could live 
 side by side and neither sufler 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. 
 
 ' J. de Trokelowe, etc., Chronica et Annales (Rolls Series), 58 ; Ruding 
 Annals of the Coinage (Third Edition), I., 198-202. 
 2 M. Paris, Clironica Majora, V., 441, 487. 
 
 ' Graetz, VII., 264-7 ; Depping, 228-9. * GTraetz, VII., 181-8, 252, 
 
 ' i&i<?., 163-4, 318-20, 363. 
 
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