EXPULSION FROM ENGLAND IN 1290 - RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC IDENTITIES IN FLUX FROM ANTIQUITY TO TH

‘You have achieved in one day’, commented one chronicler, ‘what the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt failed to do’.¹ Other chroniclers, the chattering clerical paparazzi of the day, made their own different comments on the Expulsion of the Jews from England. They also provided many other explanations for the event. They saw the final act of banishment as a concession to papal pressure; as the result of the ef-forts of Queen Eleanor; as punishment against the blasphemy of the Jews taken to satisfy the English clergy; as an answer to the complaints about usury and indebt-edness made by indebted magnates; as an act of conformity to public opinion; as a reform suggested by the King’s independent enquiry into the administration of the kingdom during his absence in Gascony; and as Edward I ‘s discovery, through the complaints of the Council, of the continued deceits of the Jews. Whatever their views the majority of these commentators were clearly happy with the result of the royal policy and took the opportunity to say so at the time.²

The official statement for the Expulsion directly blames the Jewish commu-nity and specifically casts the ‘royal villeins’ as the ultimate villains of the piece.

It suggests (with medieval spin doctoring) that the Jews brought banishment on themselves. It refers back to the Statute of the Jewry of 1275 and claims that the Jews had been ordered not to lend anything at usury and to earn their living by trade and labour. It then accuses them of ‘maliciously deliberating amongst themselves and of depressing the King’s people with a worse type of usury called

1 I felt it apt and right, after thirty-four years of involvement in the History of the Medieval Anglo-Jew, to dedicate this paper to Miklos Klein, who left Budapest for Margate in Kent sometime between 1943 and 1956. Miklos (Mikki) and other members of the Margate Jewish community were partially responsi-ble for inspiring my own long travel back in time. Some of their stories remain and some will remain un-known. I would also like to thank John Tolan, Relmin and CEU for giving me the opportunity to revisit and update my views on the Banishment from the edge of the World in June 2013.

Chronicles of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II, Commendatio Lamentabilis, ed. William Stubbs, (London: Rolls Series, 1883), 2, p. 14.

2 Barnett L. Abrahams, ‘The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290’, Jewish Quarterly Review, (1894) 7, pp. 75–100, 236–258, 428–458, particularly pp. 449–450. Gerd Mentgen, ‘Die Vertreibungen der Juden aus England und. Frankreich im Mittelalter’, Aschkenas, 7, (1987), pp. 11–54.

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curialitas’.³ This clearly was the definitive official exposition of the act of mass Expulsion from England which justified the imposition of banishment, which was normally an act of punishment for criminals and outlaws. Indeed after the Expulsion, as Paul Brand points out in what he suggests is a ‘favourable official gloss’, the Jews were deemed by the Exchequer scribes who listed their possessions to have ‘abjured the realm’. Whether, this may have, as Brand further surmises, been a pun: ‘abjuration’ does imply a promise made by criminals who have con-fessed their guilt of a major criminal offence to leave the country and never to return. It also suggests a ‘show trial’.⁴

Since this banishment historians have tried hard to find the touchstone which would ultimately explain the mass Expulsion of Jews from England. In the nine-teenth century, as we have seen, B L Abrahams seemed to point towards a multi-causal explanation.⁵ In the twentieth century, Peter Elman suggested a straight-forward economic explanation for the Expulsion, which for a long time became the accepted norm. He claimed that the Jews had simply lost their economic importance and thus were expelled.⁶ More recently in his seminal analysis of the English Expulsion, Robert Stacey patiently and thoughtfully, produced what might be called a timeline of the events which led to banishment in 1290 – a road map to Expulsion. He concluded that somewhere between 18 June and 8 July 1290, Edward I suddenly changed his mind and decided to go for the wholesale expulsion of his Jewish subjects. Stacey also argued that the decision to expel the Jews was a short-term political expedient which Edward I did not take entirely on his own initiative: ‘they were expelled because their expulsion was useful to Edward in negotiating with the much wider political nation which had emerged during the thirteenth century’.⁷ He claimed that the impoverished king could get

3 Calendar of Close Rolls 1288–1296, (London: 1904), p. 99 (hereafter CCR). I have always found it hard to get a full definition of curialitas. ‘Courtesy’ to my mind implies a hidden charge or a handling charge made within a loan. Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution – Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 108–120, (hereafter Solution). Robin R. Mundill,

‘Clandestine Crypto-Camouflaged Usurer or Legal Merchant? Edwardian Jewry, 1275–90’, in The Jews in Medieval England, Jewish Culture and History, ed. by Colin Richmond, (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 3, no. 2, pp. 73–97.Robin R. Mundill, ‘Changing Fortunes: Edwardian Anglo-Jewry and Their Credit Operations in Late Thirteenth-Century England’, Haskins Society Journal, 14, (2003), pp. 83–90.

4 Paul Brand, ‘Jews and the Law in England, 1275 – 90’, English Historical Review, 115, (2000) p. 1157.

5 See note 1 above.

6 Peter Elman, ‘The economic causes of the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290’, Economic History Review, 7, (1938) pp. 145–154. Peter Elman, ‘Jewish finance in thirteenth century England with special reference to royal taxation’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 15, (1938), pp. 112–113. John M. Veitch,

‘Repudiation and Confiscations by the Medieval State, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46, (1986), pp. 31–36.

7 Robert C. Stacey, ‘Parliamentary negotiation and the Expulsion of the Jews from England’ in Thirteenth Century England: Proceedings of the Durham Conference, 1995–6, ed. by Michael Prestwich;

Richard H. Britnell; Robin Frame, (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 77–78, 82–93. (hereafter Stacey). Robert C. Stacey ‘Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewry and the Problem of the Expulsion’, in

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more from wooing and taxing his Christian subjects than by once again taxing his Jewish subjects.⁸ Thus, to Stacey the trigger for expulsion was almost a knee jerk. The Jews had finally become political pawns to be used by Edward I as a bargaining chip in return for a massive one off tax. Whether Stacey’s estimate of Edward I’s capriciousness is correct: it is true that the Jewish community was finally sacrificed in november 1290 and Edward did receive, ‘the largest single grant of taxation conceded by parliament to any medieval English King’.⁹ It is just possible – given the descriptions we have of Edward who was prone to both vacillation and temper and described by a contemporary as the ‘pard’ or leop-ard that changed his spots, that a royal whim might be a possible explanation.¹⁰ Yet I believe the English Expulsion was more due to growing conjunctural and structural causes and that the final decision had already been taken earlier than 1290.¹¹

The most recent explanations for the Expulsion have tended to return to long term causes and show that the roots of the final decision lie somewhere between the evolution of the destruction of feudalism and the growth of negotiated state-building accompanied by the development of an embryonic nationalism. Whilst stating that the Expulsion was not inevitable, Ira Katznelson has pointed towards the awakening of political democracy, nationalism and fiscal austerity as being factors which need consideration. He concludes that pressure had been building towards the possibility of expulsion:

its likelihood had vastly increased with the shift in institutional arrangements and in state-society relationships since de Montfort’s rebellion. The growth of a new politi-cal society, the rise of parliament, the augmentation of Englishness, and the pressing need for revenue together altered the way in which the King came to frame the Jewish

Expulsion and Resettlement (in Hebrew), ed. Yosef Kaplan and David Katz (Jerusalem: 1993), pp. 9–25.

Solution, pp. 249–256.

8 Robert C. Stacey ‘Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Jewry and the Problem of the Expulsion’, in Expulsion and Resettlement (in Hebrew), ed. Yosef Kaplan and David Katz (Jerusalem: 1993), pp. 9–25. Certainly Stacey did not rule out the long term causes for mass expulsion which he stated could be ‘divided into four main categories: a possible consequence of the Jew’s legal status, a consequence of their financial debility, a solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ or an expression of Anti-Semitic bigotry’. Solution, p. 260.

9 Stacey, p. 77.

10 Michael Prestwich, Edward I, (London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 24. Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, (London: Hutchinson, 2008), p. 75. (Hereafter Morris, A Great and Terrible King). Caroline Burt, Edward I and the Governance of England, 1272–1307, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 76.

11 Solution, pp. 249–285. Robin R Mundill, The King’s Jews: Money, Massacre and Exodus in Medieval England, (London: Continuum, 2010) pp. 154–155. (Hereafter King’s Jews). Henry G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings, (London: JHSE, 1961), p. 228.

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question. This shift radically altered the period’s matrix of possibilities, opening the way for expulsion to become a real option.¹²

In an intriguing revamp of an economic explanation, which again argues the case for the decline of the Jews’ fiscal capacity, Mark Koyama has also delineated the expulsion as part of a wider change in feudal government:

The rise of parliament meant the end of the Exchequer of the Jewry because the king could only make credible promises to parliament if he gave up his ability to raise non-parliamentary tax revenue. The Exchequer of the Jewry was consistent with the political incentives facing the king so long as England remained a domain state. When this political environment changed, kings like Edward I came to realize that they could obtain far larger revenues from regular taxation through parliament than they ever could raise solely from exercising their feudal rights.¹³

More recently Koyama and others have also tried to juxtapose Jewish Expulsion with climatic conditions and what they term negative income shocks in Europe.¹⁴ In seeking different models and panels they suggested several paradigms for European Jewish Expulsion such as ‘fiscally weak cities and states which expelled Jews in order to satisfy revenue needs’ or situations where expulsions occurred because ‘the King was too weak to protect the minority community’ and finally a

‘top-down expulsion’ by the King as a means to seize the assets of the Jewish com-munity.¹⁵ Yet, neither Stacey’s explanation nor these recent contributions seem to have fully explained the real context of the English Expulsion.

There can be no doubt that the Expulsion of the Jews from England was a massive and total U turn; after all the Jews had first come to England soon after 1066 with royal backing and approval.¹⁶ To many of the population Jews were per-ceived as being protected and outside the common law. They were, as elsewhere

12 Ira, Katznelson, ‘“To Give Counsel and to Consent”’: Why the King (Edward I) Expelled His Jews (in 1290)’, Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection Between Historical and and Rational Choice Institutionalism, ed. by Ira Katznelson and Barry Weingast, (Russell Sage Foundation, 2005), p. 119.

13 Mark Koyama, ‘The Political Economy of Expulsion: The Regulation of Jewish Moneylending in Medieval England’, Constitutional Political Economy, Vol. 21, no. 4, (new York: Springer, 2010), pp. 374–

406. Available at SSRn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1829078, p. 23.

14 Mark Koyama, et alia, ‘From the Persecuting to the Protective State? Jewish Expulsions and Weather Shocks from 1100 to 1800’ at http://allucgroup.iga.ucdavis.edu/conferences/historical-perspectives-on- political-elites-conf/papers/from-the-persecuting-to-the-protective-state-jewish-expulsions-and-weath-er-shocks-from-1100-to-1800 or http://noeldjohnson.net/noeldjohnson.net/Home_files/Jewish%20 Persecutions%209–213.pdf

15 Ibid. p 8.

16 King’s Jews, pp. 4–5

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in Europe, seen as ‘servi camerae regis’: they were the King’s Jews.¹⁷ To many they seemed to be protected and this became more emphasised in the early 1190s when Hubert Walter formalised how the Jews were to lend money and subsequently devised the archae system (a series of chests in which all Jewish financial transac-tions were registered), which was then implemented by an especially dedicated Jewish Exchequer.¹⁸ The special position was also emphasised by King John in 1203 when he railed at the citizens of London who had attacked the Jews, ‘If we have given our peace even to a dog it shall be inviolably preserved’.¹⁹ After local riots in the early thirteenth century citizens were appointed to protect the Jews in their towns.²⁰ This special position of the Jews in England was also referred to in the 1280s by the Welsh, who complained to Archbishop Peckham about their own status, ‘truly the Jews have their laws amongst the English, truly for them in their own land and their antecedents had immutable laws and custom’.²¹ The distinction was also made by Edward’s Chancellor, Robert Burnell, who knew the Jewish communities well and was the real power behind the government. In 1283 and 1285, taking the archae system, which applied to Jewish lending, as his model in the Statutes of Acton Burnell and the subsequent Statute of Merchants, Burnell, now set up repositories for Christian financial transactions to be reg-istered in. His legislation ended with exemption concerning the Jews which is telling ‘to whom this statute extendeth not’.²² Burnell knew only too well that the Jews had their own regulated mechanism for registering transactions.²³ He also knew that the Jewish community was a special case and that they were seen as agents of the Crown. Having established that the Jewish community was a very separate entity throughout its comparatively short history in medieval England

17 Anna S. Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300 – Jews in the service of Medieval Christendom, (London: Pearson, 2011), p. 91. Anna S. Abulafia, ‘notions of Jewish Service in Twelfth- and Thirteenth- Century England’ in Christians and Jews in Angevin England, ed. by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, Boydell & Brewer, 2013), pp. 204–221 (hereafter Christians and Jews in Angevin England). Solution pp. 54–55.

18 Robert C. Stacey, ‘The massacres of 1189–1190 and the Origins of the Jewish Exchequer, 1186–1226 in Christians and Jews in Angevin England, pp. 106–124. Robin R. Mundill, ‘The “Archa” System and its leg-acy after 1194’ in Christians and Jews in Angevin England, pp. 148–162. See diagram in King’s Jews, p. 45.

19 Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory To Written Record – England 1066–1307, (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), p. 69.

20 Calendar of Patent Rolls 1216–1225, p. 157. (Hereafter CPR).

21 Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Johnannis Peckham Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, ed. Charles T. Martin, (London: Rolls Series, 1882–5), 2, p. 454.

22 Solution, p. 122

23 Robin R. Mundill, ‘Christian and Jewish lending patterns and financial dealings’ in Credit and Debt in Medieval England c1180-c1350, eds nicholas J. Mayhew and Paul R. Schofield (Oxford: Oxbow 2002) pp. 52–53. Robin R. Mundill, ‘The “Archa” System and its legacy after 1194’ in Christians and Jews in Angevin England, pp. 148–162.

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it is now necessary to discuss the mechanics of how Edward I finally rid himself of his royal servants.

On 18 June 1290, whether by whim, or simply by applying a pre-mediated pro-tocol, instructions were issued to the sheriffs of England, which ordered them to seal the archae by the 28 June. On the same day, writs were also issued to the sher-iffs informing them that it had been decreed that all Jews were to leave England by 1 november. Following on from this on 18 July 1290 Edward I issued a firm order that the Jews were to be allowed to leave the country peaceably and entrusted his sheriffs to carry this out.²⁴ It seems likely that by late July the edict of Expulsion had been communicated to the Jewish community by the normal channel of be-ing read out in the synagogues. Expulsion was now common knowledge. In late July 1290 a royal safe conduct was issued to the bailiffs, barons and sailors of the Cinque Ports not to molest the Jews.²⁵ In late August 1290 at least one influential Jew, Bonamy of York, managed to secure a personal safe conduct for him and his son Josce and other York Jews for a ‘safe and speedy passage at moderate charges’.²⁶ Indeed, the York Jewish community were also given the protection of Archbishop John le Romeyn, who wrote to his diocese threatening with excommunication any that molested the Jews.²⁷ Other, more wealthy and influential Jewish financi-ers, who had Christian patrons, managed to procure special licences to sell their property before they too left.²⁸

It is particularly striking that despite the rumours of impending exodus some Jews still continued to lend money and go about their business.²⁹ There seemed to be little resistance from the Jewish community and few records of any major out-breaks of violence have survived. However one early fourteenth-century chronicle from Rochester in Kent does preserve an illustration which depicts a violent act committed on at least three Jews.³⁰ It seems that the Jewish communities, which had already been subjected to mass internal deportations, were now resigned to mass banishment. Only eleven years before in 1278–1279, many Jews were in-carcerated in the Tower of London and many were hanged on spurious accusa-tions of clipping the coin.³¹ Only three years before in the summer of 1287 many leading provincial Jews had been transported and imprisoned in the Tower of

24 See note 7 above. Solution, pp. 252–254.

25 CPR 1281–1301, p. 378.

26 Ibid p. 382

27 The Register of John Le Romeyn 1286–1296, ed. W. Brown, (Surtees Society, 1913), 123, p. 109.

28 CPR 1281–1301, pp. 379, 381.

29 At Devizes Solomon of Devizes registered a debt in the archa as late as 27 October. There is also evidence from Lincoln that Jews were still registering debts in August and September 1290. The national Archives (TnA), E/101/250/11 and E/101/250/12. Solution, p. 254.

30 King’s Jews, p. 157. British Library Ms Cotton nero D.II, f. 183^v Chronica Roffense.

31 Zefira E. Rokéah, ‘Money and the hangman in late 13th-century England: Jews, Christians and coin-age offences alleged and real (part I)’, Jewish Historical Studies, 31 (1990), pp. 83–109. Zefira E. Rokéah,

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London.³² It might even be that some Jewish families in 1290 now welcomed the chance to cross the Channel to France. Indeed as early as 1254, one of the Jewish community’s most senior Rabbis had approached Henry III’s brother, Richard of Cornwall and had begged him to allow the community to leave England. The reply then had been simple the King would not allow a mass departure of Jews and besides – where would they go?³³

The protection of the Crown for its Jewish subjects in 1290 seems to have held fairly good while they travelled to the ports of embarkation. Whilst some like the richer Jews of York made their own arrangements for themselves and their households; the vast majority gathered in London. Ralph of Sandwich, the Constable of the Tower of London, has left his accounts for July 1289-September 1301 which reveal the presence of one large group of Jews who must have been assembled and marshalled into the Tower of London in the late summer of 1290.

Some 1461 Jews, spent time within the confines of the Tower under his charge and finally 1335 paid 4d a head and 126 paid 2d a total of £23 6s 0d for transportation across the Channel in approximately 18–20 ships.³⁴

Certainly one shipment of Jewish exiles was the subject of a callous and hor-rific drowning at the very mouth of the Thames estuary when at Queenborough, one captain, Henry Adrian, landed his ship on a sandbank and told the Jewish refugees to disembark and then abandoned them to the perils of the tide tell-ing them to call on Moses to help them. He was later sentenced to two years in Sandwich prison for his crime.³⁵ This however was probably not the only example of foul play. A party of Jews departing from the norfolk coast also seem to have

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