From York (1190) to 1394
Date
1190CE
1190–1394
England expelled its Jews in 1290 and France in stages from 1306 to 1394, through a mix of religious hostility, economic pressure and the Crown's fiscal calculations.
Sourced narrative
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
10 statements
01York and the debts
In 1190, with the English king away on crusade, Jews were assaulted in many parts of England. At York they took shelter in the king's tower and ended in mass suicide, as many had done in Germany a century earlier during the First Crusade. Their assailants then burned every bond for debts to Jews that had been lodged in the town's cathedral.
As a result the king ordered every debt owed to Jews to be recorded in two copies, one kept in the royal treasury. This gave the crown first-hand knowledge of all its Jewish subjects' business and a chance to use the information against nobles in debt to Jewish creditors.
A ritual murder charge in the French town of Blois in 1171 led to the trial and execution of over 30 Jews.
02The king and the barons
The king could tax Jews at his discretion. In England a series of levies across the thirteenth century ruined much of English Jewry and cut its economic value to the Crown. In 1290, needing revenue from the landed nobility, Edward I seized the debts owed to Jews, let knights repay the treasury without the interest, got the immediate payment he wanted and yielded to religious and economic pressure to expel the Jews from the kingdom for good.
The English barons offered King Edward an urgently needed advance of 115,000 pounds in exchange for expelling the Jews and cancelling debts to them (debts the Crown would otherwise have claimed), and only he knew how good the deal was for the monarchy: just about 10,000 pounds of Jewish loans remained outstanding.
When the Black Death struck, Jewish life in most of France and in England was already over: in 1290 King Edward banished the Jews from England under pressure from the landed nobility, the chief debtors of Jewish moneylenders.
03France and the common factors
France was more tangled, since political authority was more fragmented. Philip IV's expulsion of the Jews in 1306 applied only to the royal lands of central France, around Paris, and later kings let some return, only to expel them again within a few years. The expulsion became final only in 1394, and even then some Jews lingered in the southeast until 1501, and the papal lands around Avignon never saw them permanently removed. Several factors drove the expulsions in England and France: growing Church hostility, popular anti-Jewish feeling and the Jews' central part in moneylending. Because Jews were viewed as the royal treasury's 'property', noblemen who defaulted lost their lands to the central crown. By squeezing taxes and irregular payments from the Jews, kings in effect taxed their Christian clients too, and the harder the crown exploited them, the more it eroded their capacity to keep serving the economy and the crown itself.
Context
In other European kingdoms too, rulers claimed the Jews as Crown 'property': Richard I of England (1189), Duke Frederick II of Austria (1244) and Boleslav of Poland (1264). A thirteenth-century Castilian legal compilation, the Libro de los fueros de Castilla, held that Jews belong to the king even when they stand under nobles, knights or monasteries. Royal protection could help Jews, but it bound them to a singular status that set them apart from the rest of society. Because townspeople linked them with royal power, attacking Jews became a way to show discontent with the Crown: in Girona in 1320 it was reported that some people, scorning royal authority, threw rocks and hurt Jews. Sole reliance on the Crown also left Jews open to unchecked exploitation.
§ 01Geography
Where it happened
§ 02Museum
Objects and images
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
Joseph Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending and Medieval Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Jews and the economy: moneylending · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212
Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Recent, detailed overview of the Jews of medieval Latin Europe · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 211
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
- 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
- 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
- 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 188; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 188inspect
- 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
- 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
- 09Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 188; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 188inspect
- 10Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 188; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 188inspect
- Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
- Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
- Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
- Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
- Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.