Crusades from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century.
The Jews settled around Jew Street (now Old Jewry) and Cheapside. Until 1177 the only Jewish cemetery was in Cripplegate. From the middle of the twelfth century the rise of Italian banking houses gave the monarchs an alternative – Christian – source of finance. It was Richard I’s coronation that occasioned the first series of pogroms against Jews. Elders who came to pay their respects to the new king at Westminster unwittingly sparked a riot that left thirty Jewish families dead. John Stow records looting of the Jewish community in London during the Barons’ Wars, 1199–1216. In 1215 the Pope enacted a decree that all non-Christians (that is, Muslims and Jews) should have to wear distinguishing clothing to prevent them mingling with Christians. In 1262 a London mob attacked a synagogue at Lothbury in the heart of the City, killing 700 people. In 1282 the Bishop of London was ordered to destroy all synagogues in his diocese.
In 1275 Edward I issued the Statute of Jewry which prohibited Jews from charging interest on loans and ruled, on pain of forfeit, that they must collect all outstanding debts by the following Easter. The new Statute also made it law that all Jews from the age of seven had to wear a yellow felt badge six inches long and three inches wide. A poll tax of 3 pence was imposed on every Jew over the age of 12 years. Finally the Jews were ordered out of England. On 18 July 1290 every Jew was told to leave the country. About 16,000 Jews were forced to flee.
Jews were not the only ‘aliens’ who were the victims of the prejudice generated by the economic contradictions of medieval society. These paradoxes were ultimately rooted in the social structure defended by elites, but they could not help but affect the lives of ordinary Londoners. Consequently there could be a popular dimension to prejudice, although it was rarely universal or uncontested. Besides Jews there were many other trading communities in medieval London. Italian merchants could be found around modern day Lombard Street and excavations at One Poultry found a large tenement let to merchants from Lucca, Tuscany, in 1355. The site of Cannon Street station was once a walled enclave of German traders from the Hanseatic League, who had arrived in London in the mid-1200s. We know of the Flemish community and the peasants who invaded London in 1381 singled them out as a result of the trade wars that had been raging in the preceding period. One account reminds us that they suffered along with the elites as targets of the Revolt: ‘on Corpus Christi day, was the rising of Kent and Essex, and they ware called Jake Strawes men, and came to London, and . . . went to the tower of London, and there toke out sir Simon Beuerle (Sudbury) Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England . . . and divers other, and beheaded them at the Tower Hill, and slew many Flemings and other men.’14
THE CITY AND THE CROWN
Division between City and Crown also gave space to popular revolt in the thirteenth century. In 1245 Henry III’s establishment of two new fairs in Westminster, outside City jurisdiction, directly affecting trade and his repeated meddling with London government angered the City oligarchy. In the 1260s his polices of granting access to London markets to foreign traders, heavy taxation and royal favouritism further annoyed the City.
The first we know of St Paul’s Cross, the preaching cross and open-air pulpit in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, is in 1236 when a king’s justice convened a folkmoot, or general assembly of the people, to proclaim Henry III’s desire that London should be well governed. In 1259 a second meeting at St Paul’s Cross was more divisive when Londoners were summoned to swear allegiance to Henry. They did so, but only because the army held the gates of the city. Later they reassembled on the same spot and swore allegiance to Simon de Montfort, whose baronial challenge to Henry became the trigger for popular mobs to take to the London streets, besieging Henry’s Queen Eleanor in the Tower. One alderman was aghast at the intervention of the popular movement:
This mayor . . . has so pampered the City populace, that, styling themselves the ‘Commons of the City’, they had obtained the first voice in the City. For the Mayor, in doing all that he had to do, acted and determined through them, and would say to them, – ‘Is it your will that so it shall be’ and then, if they answered ‘Ya, Ya’, so it was done. And on the other hand, the aldermen, or chief citizens were little or not at all consulted on such a matter.15
The defeat of de Montfort’s revolt ended the popular movement. Henry III’s heir Prince Edward had a hand in the subsequent punishment of the City, and when he succeeded to the throne in 1272 he remodelled City government. Edward I finished the inner wall of the Tower begun by his father, and added an outer wall. This did not prevent a fresh outbreak of disorders in 1284, when a leading member of the Goldsmiths’ Company was killed in St Mary-le-Bow, the site of Longbeard’s last stand the century before. That and the riot at Newgate prison a year later gave Edward the pretext for an even harsher set of penal codes, and, when the mayor and aldermen protested, he replaced them with a royal warden. In 1289 a final humiliation was visited on the City: a royal treasurer was sent into Guildhall to take control of City finances.
This long night of exclusion for the City elite lasted through most of the reign of Edward II; some of its powers were returned in the charters granted in 1319 and in 1327, the year that Edward III came to the throne.
Much of Edward III’s reign was peaceable in the City of London, if bloody on the fields of the Hundred Years War. But in the late 1300s the relationship between the City and the Crown was becoming unstable once again. The debts of the Hundred Years War hung heavily around the neck of the monarchy and the glorious victories of the English archers, at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers a decade later, were fading from memory. But one aspect of the battles of the mid-century did perhaps linger in the minds of the men who fought in France. Those battles had meant that ‘the prestige of the armoured feudal cavalry had received its death blow’, because the longbow ‘placed the trained peasant archer on terms of equality with his lord, robbing the latter of his main claim to special consideration, his position as a specialist in war’.16
For much of his reign Edward III held sway over the City of London, even when unpopular policies like selling licences to Italian merchants raised royal revenues at domestic merchants’ expense. But as the king grew old, the City began to flex its muscles. The ‘good Parliament’ of 1376, as part of a wider purge of those loyal to the Crown, impeached three aldermen who were allies of the king. Power increasingly fell into the hands of the king’s son, the duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. At first he placated powerful London wool merchants by re-establishing the monopoly practice whereby English wool was only to be traded on favourable terms through Calais, then an English possession, the so-called Calais staple.
John of Gaunt also feted the rogue but popular member of the Court of Aldermen, John de Northampton. In doing so he set in train a three-way search for alliances in the City. The mayor and aldermen, fearing John of Gaunt’s alliance with Northampton, did their own deal with him. This required them to accede to Northampton’s demand that the Common Council be elected by the misteries or guilds, the craft organizations, rather than the wards, and that it be consulted by the aldermen twice a quarter. Thus the infighting among the elite paved the way for changes to the way London worked, and to the City constitution, that had radical implications for the future.
The following year, 1377, the tables turned again. Edward III died and Richard II, at barely eleven years old, became king. Meanwhile John of Gaunt remained the de facto ruler of the country, and was no lover of the City’s liberties. When it was rumoured that he intended to bring the City under royal control, a mob attacked his Savoy Palace, sited on the Strand with gardens running down to the Thames and one of the grandest palaces in Europe. It was an ominous foretaste of events during the revolt four years later. But John of Gaunt pressed on: in 1377 the Gloucester Parliament withdrew the concessions of the previous year and enabled Italian merchants to trade directly between Genoa and Southampton, thus revoking the monopoly of the Calais staple. The City was prepared to pay the Crown handsomely for this entitlement to be returned to them, but the Italian merchants’ pockets were deeper. Moreover, French naval strength constituted a threat to English merchant trade with which John of Gaunt seemed incapable
