of 1190. These measures were taken not for the sake of the Jews but for the benefit of King John’s finances which were greatly diminished after the loss of Normandy to the French and his costly military campaign in Ireland. In late 1209 and early 1210, after plundering the Cistercians and provoking Pope Innocent III to excommunicate him, John turned his attention again to the small community of Jewish moneylenders. Holding them captive, he had their income assessed and then exacted a tax of sixty-six thousand marks. If not voluntarily paid, the money was forcibly taken by means of torture and imprisonment. According to one chronicler, John “pillaged them out of nearly everything they possessed and drove them out of their houses.” The chronicler wrote how the king had the eyes of some captives gouged out, or their teeth pulled, while others were starved, reduced to knocking on the doors of Christians to beg for food. Even if these accounts are exaggerations, when it came to filling his war chest and punishing his enemies, John was odious, craven, and remarkably cruel, even for such brutal times. No one can trust him, sang the troubadour Bertran de Born, for he was man with a “soft and cowardly” heart.15
When Henry III took the throne in 1216 as a boy of nine, the country was still riven with baronial discontent and rebellion. In royal tradition, he continued the demands for money and loans, burdening his population with heavy taxation and running roughshod over Magna Carta much to the barons’ alarm. Henry’s reign was initially a fruitful time for the Jewish communities, however, which numbered around two thousand living in around fifteen towns. By 1241, English Jews held around 200,000 marks in liquid assets, making it Europe’s most affluent Jewish community.16
Wealthy Jewish moneylenders enjoyed close commercial relations with similarly well-to-do Christians. One of most successful Jewish moneylending family in the thirteenth century was the le Blunds and when Aaron II le Blunds married, Christians attended the wedding, mingling with his relatives who were sumptuously “clothed in silk and gold.” Such was their wealth that in 1221 and 1223, Leo I and his son Aaron I together paid around 40 percent of the tallage—the tax levied in times of special needs—due to the king from London’s entire Jewish community. In 1220, Aaron I and his brother Elias I were granted a property in London stretching from Colechurch Lane to St. Thomas Hospital on the other side of the Thames to the Palace of Westminster. Their benefactor was Peter fitz Aluf, whose relative Constantine, a former sheriff of London, had attempted an insurrection against the king and was hanged without trial, his property confiscated. The land belonging to the le Blunds brothers was also ←32 | 33→appropriated by Henry III but returned to them on one condition: that no Jew should reside there due to its proximity to the hospital that commemorated the sainted Thomas Becket. Aaron duly sold the land to St. Thomas’s and purchased another property east of Colechurch Lane which was near to land owned by his brother Elias and his business colleague Aaron of York.17
The le Blunds’ clients included some of the most powerful merchants and families in England. In the close role of 1236 Aaron was given the nickname “the rich,” although the le Blunds’ wealth paled in comparison to other moneylenders such as Aaron of York, David of Oxford, and Leo of York. Leading members of the Jewish community tried to negotiate, sometimes successfully, the amount of tax they owed to the king. Aaron, son of Abraham of London, for example, came to an agreement with Henry III to reduce the tallage owed by the Jews. In general, though, taxes increased as the king’s financial needs grew. Those who did not pay their taxes had the misfortune to be imprisoned until payment was received, as in the case of Sampson Bunting, a Jew from Lincoln, who was locked up in the Tower of London for nonpayment of his part of the tallage. His release came only when Solomon, “the king’s Jew of London,” settled Bunting’s debt. It was not only Jews that the king targeted. Christians such as William Cade, a wealthy Flemish cloth trader and moneylender in London and fellow merchant Walter de Cheriton were financially ruined by the king’s demands and died penniless. Reginald de Conduit was imprisoned and William de la Pole, a wealthy wool merchant who lent huge sums of money to the Crown at the start of the Hundred Years’ War and organized further loans from merchants in London and York, was held at Devizes Castle on charges of wool smuggling. His lands were seized until the charges were eventually dropped.18
It was during Henry III’s reign that one of the wealthiest women in England, Licoricia of Winchester, lived and worked as a moneylender. From around 1230, she lent money in association with other Jews or alone, assisted by an attorney, becoming one of the most prominent moneylenders in Winchester. After the death of her first husband, Abraham, she married one of those richest Jewish moneylenders in England, David of Oxford. Their marriage was a complicated affair as David’s first wife refused to agree to a divorce until the intervention of Henry, the Archbishop of York, Walter de Grey, and the Jewish courts (bet din) in England and Paris. Upon David’s death in 1244, Licoricia was incarcerated in the Tower of London while the Jewish Exchequer scrutinized the official debts that were owed to her late husband. As the process dragged on, Licoricia languished in prison for months. Finally, the audit was completed and, as was usual with the ←33 | 34→king, there was a financial deal to be struck. In return for her freedom and the debts owed to her deceased husband, Licoricia was charged five thousand marks. A portion of that amount was earmarked for a project close to Henry’s heart. A fervent devotee of the cult of Edward the Confessor, the king intended to build a chapel to house a shrine dedicated to the former king.
Even after paying this large fine, Licoricia remained an extremely wealthy woman. She quickly returned to her life in Winchester and to the business of moneylending, providing loans to royalty, the nobility, and the clergy. Through her financial business, Licoricia developed a good relationship with Henry and members of his court and it was a friendship that proved beneficial. When the heir of Sir Thomas of Charlecote brought a court case against her over his estate, the king intervened on her behalf. In spite of her conviction by the court for unlawfully retaining Thomas’s late father’s estate, her penalty was a miniscule fine. Licoricia’s good fortune, however, was tragically cut short in 1277 when her daughter Belia found her lifeless body alongside that of her Christian maid, Alice of Bicton. Both women had been stabbed to death and an unknown sum of money was taken from her house. No one was apprehended or charged with either crime of robbery or murder, which was not an unusual occurrence. It was not until Henry’s son, Edward, became king that the justice system began to take shape.19
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In France, there were multiple efforts to curb usury. In 1182, King Philip II of France (r. 1180–1223) decided to help fill his treasure chests by expulsion and confiscation. This was a common practice for many reasons, used by authorities to rid themselves of a political foe or for religious reasons. In Philip’s case, it was for financial need and it was at the expense of the Jews, who were expelled from the French realm and their property and goods appropriated by the Crown. The king then restored to his knights lands and title deeds, without interest, which had been pledged to Jewish moneylenders. Philip’s son, Louis VIII, issued the Establissement sur les Juifs in 1223, which erased the interest off existing loans and stated that the principal sum had to be repaid to the Jews within three years. Nobles were given control over the loans with the power to collect the debt. But it was a change of policy that was not happily accepted by nobles who, like their English counterparts, were keen to challenge the king’s authority. They may have legally been the “king’s Jews,” but that did not stop powerful nobles from regarding Jews in their lands as “theirs.” Thibaut IV of Champagne baulked at ←34 | 35→these new regulations. He had a customary arrangement with the Jews of his region that in return for a high tax payment, they would be neither expelled nor have their property confiscated. Any property belonging to a Jew who died or left the region was to go to the Jewish community and not the count, who also agreed not to seize private goods, including horses, from the Jews. Thibaut’s reluctance to spoil this agreement to accommodate the king’s new laws led to conflict between the two men. Thibaut
