courtiers, forced a solution to the issue of usury. Having already rebelled against King John at the beginning of the century, action that led to the signing of Magna Carta, kings were well aware that the barons and knights had the ability to rebel successfully.33
A series of statutes in the 1250s promulgated that no Jew was permitted to reside in England unless he was in service to the king. These laws, combined with the tallages and the downturn in profits, convinced some Jews that there was no future for themselves as moneylenders in England. This included Aaron I le Blunds who, along with his son Samuel, his brother Elias, and their wives, attempted to leave England in 1252 with their realisable assets. They were apprehended before they departed, their houses and property held until they had paid their fine in full, and ordered to give a security bond to ensure that they would not attempt to flee again. These hefty communal taxes effectively destroyed the capital of these magnates. By 1255, Aaron of York was bankrupt.34
Violence and revolt surfaced once more after disease and torrential storms moved through the kingdom, bringing famine and plague and leaving the dead in the streets, their stomachs swollen with hunger. In 1260, the Jewish Exchequer that kept a record of the debts owed to Jewish moneylenders was ransacked and the rolls were stolen. A number of attacks on Jews followed a revolt against King Henry by his brother-in-law and friend-turned-enemy, the French nobleman and crusader, Simon de Montfort, the earl of Leicester and one-time ally of the king’s son, Edward. Simon had expelled the Jews from Leicester, accusing them of causing Christians to suffer because of their usury. In leading the Second Baron’s War (1263–64), Montfort ousted the king, removed his authority, and included ordinary townsmen in the parliament. With the country in chaos, an incident in ←41 | 42→London in which a Jew supposedly wounded a Christian with a knife resulted in a mob-hunt for the Jewish culprit.35
As night fell and the crowd turned to looting, the local mayor and sheriffs drove “away those offenders by force of arms.” A murderous riot by Londoners who welcomed Montfort’s anti-royalist troops broke out a week before Palm Sunday in 1263. The Annals of Thomas Wykes that describes the rampage gives a simple reason for the violence: greed. According to one chronicler, the rioters pillaged the property of Jews who were “stripped naked, despoiled and afterwards murdered by night in sections.” Authorities loyal to the king stepped in to stop the slaughter, although London’s Jewry was “destroyed.” They did, however, manage to save the chest of chirographs that held the debts to Jewish moneylenders, which had been put in the Tower of London for safekeeping.36
A year later, Henry III had regained the throne and Simon de Montfort lay dead on the battlefield of Evesham, his body mutilated with his head cut off and his testicles hung either side of his nose, his hands and feet severed and sent to different parts of the country. Property in London was redistributed as a means of punishment for the city’s support of Montfort and a 20,000 mark fine was assessed in return for a pardon. All of Montfort’s lands and the title of Earl of Leicester were transferred to Henry’s son Edmund. The surviving rebels were able to regain their lands only by paying a hefty fine, which was in accordance with their culpability in the revolt.37
In 1264, Henry appointed the “twenty-four,” a “self-perpetuating” group of “trustworthy and wise” men to act as guardians to the Jewish community of Winchester. Among the most prominent of the Jews of Winchester was Licoricia’s son, Benedict, who, by 1280, owned nine properties in Winchester, Southampton, Bristol, York, and London. Like Elias of London and Benedict of Lincoln, Benedict of Winchester must have felt sufficiently secure to choose to make his home outside of the Jewish quarter. This is also borne out by the close commercial relationship between the Jews and the wealthy Christians of the town. Tension arose between the twenty-four and the general population when the group’s members made Benedict a guild member. As the “twenty-four” were wool merchants, the credit that the Jews provided was vital to their business but to those outside the business Benedict’s admittance was “a manifest scandal to Christian men.” In an attempt to restore the economic wellbeing of the Jews, Henry took the Winchester Jews under his special protection and appointed a further twenty-five men as “guardians and protectors” of the Jews. These included Simon le Draper, a wool merchant and mayor, and a convert, Henry de Winchester, an exporter of wool. The twenty-five were to inform the public that ←42 | 43→no one “do the Jews harm, on pain of life and limbs, and protect them and their households, lands, rents and possessions, and if harm be done to them to have it amended at once.”38
In order to rein in the abuses by courtiers who were buying up Jewish debt in the hope of grabbing the pledged land, legal restrictions were placed on Jewish moneylenders. Debts to Jews were no longer allowed to be sold without the king’s permission and, if he permitted the sale, there was to be no interest added. But there was little effort made to implement this restriction and so the practice and the resentment continued to fester as the power passed from Henry to his eldest son in 1272.39
Henry’s son and successor was Edward I, a tall, broad chested, blonde, imposing figure who was the first king to be crowned in Westminster Abbey, the building of which had been overseen by his father. He had a reputation for courage, exceptional ferocity, and spending his subjects’ money. The biggest armies, the largest parliaments, and the greatest chain of castles were built during his reign in Britain. Military campaigns in France, Wales, and Scotland and crusades demanded vast sums of money. His palaces, such as Windsor, as well as his castles were sumptuously decorated with elegant floor tiles, sculpted marble pillars, wall paintings, tapestries, and courtyard gardens. To meet these expenditures, Edward pressed parliament to approve taxes, while shire knights insisted the king confirm the tenets of Magna Carta and enforce the restrictions on Jewish moneylending.
It was said that Edward’s kingdom was “awash” in moneylending. But it was the Christian Riccardi bankers of Lucca, not Jews, who monopolized international finance and upon whom the king had become reliant to keep him in credit in the form of short-term loans that supplemented the king’s existing funds. These Lombardi moneylenders had the benefit of a well-developed Italian economy behind them and in the first seven years of Edward’s reign, he had received over £200,000 from them. As Edward’s bankers, they financed his military campaigns and provided for the construction of castles, in return for control over the new custom system for the wool trade. To raise more reliable sources of income, as opposed to his father’s irregular tallages, Edward introduced custom duties on England’s most profitable export which he placed in the hands of the Italian bankers. The Riccardis thus handled thousands and tens of thousands of pounds, infinitely more than the amounts handled by the majority of Jewish moneylenders.40
Edward’s deal with knights in 1270 for a crusader tax was in exchange for a renewal of Magna Carta. This bargain included a restriction on Jewish usury that allowed debtors more time to repay their loans. Curbing the ability of Jewish ←43 | 44→moneylenders to insist on prompt repayment was a popular demand by the barons, who were eager to delay settling their debts or willing to default on them. His debts from his crusade led him once again to ask parliament for another tax. In return, the knights of the shire demanded that he end the Jewish debt issue, which had led to smallholders losing their lands, once and for all. Resentment on the part of knights and the general population prompted Edward to take harsher action against Jewish moneylenders. As conflict continued in Winchester between the twenty-four and the community, Edward personally intervened, bringing the town under his control and destroying the power of the twenty-four. Benedict had already decamped to London, and by 1274, many other Jews left Winchester for other cities. In the fall of 1274, Edward ordered the mayor and sheriffs of London to issue a proclamation demanding that, “all merchant-usurers shall depart thence within twenty days from the date of these letters, and shall leave the kingdom, under pain of forfeiture of their bodies and goods, and if they be found in the city after that date, to cause them to be arrested and kept safely until otherwise ordered ….” This was not aimed specifically at Jews, but at all merchant usurers, including the Lombards who practiced the “vice” of usury over the “virtue”
