In the year 1290, something very illiberal and intolerant happened in England – a country normally associated with fair play. King Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion, ordering all Jews in the kingdom to leave. Any country that deports an entire people is normally engaged in some form of genocide. Persecution of the Jews had been building up for a while but now boiled over into a full-scale pogrom.
King Edward’s action came sixteen years before Philip IV of France also expelled his Jewish population in 1306. Philip then seized their property and assets to fund his wars with England. At the same time that Philip moved against the Jews, he was trying to tax the church without asking the pope first – which led to an almighty bust up with Rome. And a year later, he moved against the Knights Templar – hoping to fill his coffers with their treasure.
Medieval kings regarded the Jews as their personal property – or in Latin, servi camerae mostrae. This could work two ways. In happier times, it meant that the crown protected the Jews from bigoted mobs who wanted to lynch them. But in less happy times, it meant a capricious monarch like Philip could turn against the Jews and dispose of them as he saw fit.
On July 18, 1290, Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion, a royal decree requiring all Jews to leave England by All Saints’ Day (November 1st). Writs (letters) were sent to the sheriffs of all counties, outlining that all Jews should leave England by the deadline. The expulsion meant that the Jewish community’s possessions, including houses and properties, would become the property of the crown.
The king had been making life difficult for England’s Jews for well over a decade. In 1275, he passed the Statue of Jewry mandating Jews to live in a certain part of any city – a ghetto in other words. You can still find streets in London and other English cities called…Jewry. More accurately in London it is called Old Jewry and runs north to south from Gresham Street to Poultry Street.
Jewish contribution to England’s medieval economy
Up until the reign of Edward I, English Jews had made a large contribution to their communities and a big impact – in relation to their numbers.
Aaron, a moneylender in Lincoln, financed the building of the local cathedral – which remains a glory on the skyline. He lent to the King of Scotland, the Archbishop of Canterbury and several Cistercian monasteries. When he died, his estate was taken over by the king and an entire department of state – the Scaccarium Aaronis – was required to work its way through his holdings.
One of the most prolific moneylenders was a women. Licoricia of Oxford gave two thousand, five hundred pounds towards the building of Westminster Abbey. Did she care about such a building? No. But it certainly helped her relations with the king (Henry III), who was, after all, her protector. Fund his pet projects and life could go on as usual. Belaset of Wallingford was another women in the usury game and her name is assumed to mean ‘nice assets’ – a little bit of medieval humour there!
It’s crucial to point out that not every Jew in England was a moneylender. But it was money lending that brought unwelcome attention. Increasingly, the Norman and then Angevin kings decided that it would be far more advantageous to tax the Jews instead of borrowing from them. So the Jews suffered an ever growing tax burden – which they no doubt passed on in part to their increasingly disgruntled customers.
The myth of blood libel
Even a king like Henry II – a friend to both the Jews and the Templars – drained Jewish finance for his own needs. His son Richard the Lionheart was brutal in squeezing the Jewish community – and the rest of England – to fund his crusades against Saladin.
In fact, it was in the year of Richard’s coronation – 1189 – that the first serious outbreaks of violence against Jews in England erupted. Most appallingly was the death of 150 Jews in York herded in to a castle tower and murdered. Elsewhere, the Jews were able to take refuge in castles and nobles felt obliged to extend the King’s protection over them. But the writing was on the wall – things were going to get a lot worse.
Matters were not helped by a series of so-called fictitious ‘blood libel’ incidents across northern Europe. In Norwich, a child called William was found crucified and his blood drained allegedly by the Jews. Similar cases occurred elsewhere. These were malicious fabrications, but they gave the mob a very good excuse to attack Jewish property.
The nail in the coffin was a hardening of attitude on the part of the Angevin kings. King John badly needed finance and even had one Jewish moneylender in Bristol tortured till he handed over ten thousand Marks. The method of torture was to have a tooth extracted every day until he agreed. He apparently got to the seventh tooth before giving in!
Henry III personally attended the torture of a Jewish man – Copin of Lincoln – accused of another blood libel against a child called Hugh. Torture extracted the required confession and he was dragged through the town then hanged. This legitimised assaults and murders on Jews and in 1263 on Palm Sunday in London, about four hundred Jews were slaughtered. Winder makes the point that this event hardly figures in most England history books.
Expulsion of the Jews gets underway
The kings were simply moving towards confiscation of Jewish wealth – no more borrowing or taxation – just seizure. In 1275, the final act in this tragedy unfolded as Edward I issued his Statutus de Judeismo which stated:
Forasmuch as the King hath seen that divers evils and the disinheriting of good men of his land have happened by the usuries which the Jews have made in time past, and that divers sins have followed thereupon albeit that he and his ancestors have received much benefit from the Jewish people in all times past, neverthless, for the honour of God and the common benefit of the people the King hath ordained and established, that from henceforth no Jew shall lend anything at usury either upon land, or upon rent or upon other thing.
So Edward basically said – thanks for everything you’ve done in the past but I’m now ending it all for you. Already Jews had been banished from several towns, now they would be forced to wear identification badges – so the Nazis weren’t the first to invent this:
And that each Jew after he shall be seven years old, shall wear a badge on his outer garment that is to say in the form of two tables joined of yellow fait of the length of six inches and of the breadth of three inches.
Measure by measure was enacted against the Jews, eventually banning their religious customs. In 1290, they were given a deadline of the first of November, All Saints Day, to leave England. One captain ferrying a boat load of Jews across the wide Thames estuary hit a sandbar and invited his passengers to get out and stretch their legs. He then sailed off, leaving them stranded, shouting obscenities to the effect that they could pray to Moses to save them. All of the passengers drowned.
It would take four hundred years and the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century for Jews to be re-admitted to England.
If you would like to know more about the Knights Templar, then get your hands on a copy of my book: The Knights Templar – History & Mystery. Published by Pen & Sword and available on Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, and WHSmith. Don’t miss out on your copy!
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