יום ראשון, 6 בינואר 2019

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Jews and the Canons of St. Kilian in Twelfth-century W.rzburg
by
JOHN D. YOUNG, St. Augustine, FL, USA
Over the course of about a century, from around 1120 to around 1220, the canons of St. Kilian, caretakers of the Neum.nster church in W.rzburg (with its sacred grave and relics of the Franconian apostle St. Kilian) had frequent – one might even say constant – business dealings with the Jews of that same city.1 Most of these economic interactions involved land: the transfer of property, mostly in the city, from one party to another, either from the Jews to the canons, from the canons to the Jews, or from a third party to either the canons or the Jews with the other acting as another agent in the transaction. Put together, the sources detailing these land transactions approach the richness of, for instance, the Schreinskarten of the parish of St. Lawrence in Cologne, one of the key sources for Matthias Schmandt’s excellent study of the Cologne Jews.2
Despite thorough explorations by mostly German scholars on the spread of Jewish settlements throughout the Reich and on specific Jewish communities, most scholars have not looked at the economic interactions that accompanied settlement and development from the perspective of the Christian institutions
1 On the cult of St. Kilian, see Kilian: M.nch aus Irland – aller Franken Patron 689–1989: Katalog der Sonderausstellung zur 1300-Jahr-Feier des Kiliansmartyriums, 1989, and JOACHIM DIENEMANN, Der Kult des heiligen Kilian im 8. und 9. Jahrhundert. Beitr.ge zur geistigen und politischen Entwicklung der Karolingerzeit, 1955. On the Kilian cult in W.rzburg, see KNUT SCH.FERDIEK, Kilian von W.rzburg: Gestalt und Gestaltung eines Heiligen, in: Iconologia Sacra: Mythos, Bildkunst und Dichtung in der Religions- und Sozial­geschichte Alteuropas. Festschrift f.r Karl Hauck zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. HAGEN KELLER, NIKOLAUS STAUBACH (Arbeiten zur Fr.hmittelalterforschung 23), 1994, p. 313–340; ROLF SPRANDEL, Kilian und die Anf.nge des Bistums W.rzburg, in: W.rzburger Di.zesange­schichtsbl.tter 54 (1992), p. 5–17. 2 MATTHIAS SCHMANDT, Judei, cives et incole: Studien zur j.dischen Geschichte K.lns im Mittelalter (Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden A 11), 2002.
Concilium medii aevi 21 (2018) S. 79–90
involved in these interactions.3 The focus has been almost entirely (and understandably) on Jewish agency and Jewish motives, it seems with the assumption that Christian institutions simply intended to exploit a vulnerable yet wealthy minority and that most Christian townsmen resented the very presence of Jews in their cities.4 Instead of a vertical, hierarchical relation­ship, this article presents some of these interactions and the sometimes­longstanding relations or partnerships that developed out of them, as horizontal, as business between simultaneously privileged and vulnerable peers. Indeed, the economic interactions between the St. Kilian canons and the W.rzburg Jews – like the interactions between urban Jews and religious houses in other German communities – display the development of normativi­ty, of the growth of rules and standards that governed Jewish-Christian rela­tions and solidified the social, legal, and economic standing of both Jews and religious communities. Regional history thus serves both as a barometer for broader historical trends and as a check on the tendency to flatten complex, nuanced historical circumstances with convenient rubrics like “exploitation” or “persecution.”5
The normativity sought after and achieved by Jews and their Christian interlocutors during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in W.rzburg and other riverine towns of the Reich had three facets: physical proximity, shared legal privilege, and lucrative business partnerships. This article will discuss each of these facets but will reserve its most substantial discussion for the
3 On the history of Jewish settlements in the Middle Ages, see especially MICHAEL TOCH, Jewish Migrations to, within and from Medieval Germany, in: Le Migrazioni in Europa secc. XIII–XVIII: della “Wventicinquesima settimana di studi”, 3–8 maggio 1993, ed. SIMONETTA CA­VACIOCCHI (Pubblicazioni. Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica F. Datini, Prato 2/25), 1994, p. 639–652; MICHAEL TOCH, Die Juden im Mittelalterlichen Reich (Enzyklop.die deutscher Geschichte 44), 22003, p. 5–13. On the Jews of W.rzburg, see especially KARLHEINZ M.LLER, Die W.rzburger Judengemeinde im Mittelalter: von den Anf.ngen um 1100 bis zum Tod Julius Echters (1617) (Mainfr.nkische Studien 70), 2004. Other community studies in­clude SIEGFRIED WITTMER, J.disches Leben in Regensburg: vom fr.hen Mittelalter bis 1519, 2001, and ALFRED HAVERKAMP, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Trier, in: Kurtrierisches Jahr­buch 19 (1979), p. 5–57. RAINER LENG provides a brief summary of some of the transactions between W.rzburg Jews and clerical institutions in W.rzburg im 12. Jahrhundert (Das Bay­erische Jahrtausend 2), 2012, p. 69–72. 4 For an example of this tendency to assume exploitation and resentment, see the summary of eleventh-century Jewish privileges in ROBERT CHAZAN, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500 (Cambridge medieval textbooks), 2006, p. 171–174.  5 The “persecution” label has been especially durable since the publication of ROBERT IAN MOORE’s seminal The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 1987. Beholden to this same approach is the influential work by DOMINIQUE IOGNA-PRAT, Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la soci.t. chr.tienne face . l’h.r.sie, au juda.sme et . l’islam, 1000–1150, 1998.
As in other German cities along the Rhine, Main, and Danube rivers in the high Middle Ages, the Jews of W.rzburg lived in the town center, merely a hundred meters or so from the cathedral, next to which sat the Neum.nster. The origins of the Jewish community in W.rzburg date to around 1100 and probably consisted in the early years of migrants who fled the Rhineland cities in aftermath of the First Crusade massacres.6 In the first decades of the twelfth century, Jewish townsmen began to buy up urban real estate between the present-day main market and the Juliusspital, a neighborhood that abut­ted a marsh (presumably along the Main) called “Rigol.” The synagogue occu­pied the site of the present Marienkapelle, the church built in the fourteenth century after the Jews were expelled from the city in the midst of plague outbreaks.7 It seems no coincidence that the modern-day market square occupies the same part of the city as the medieval Jewish community, since the Jews contributed much to the growth of trade in W.rzburg. Evidence indicates that, among other things, Jews owned or obtained usufruct of some of the vineyards that dominate the hills of the city, the vineyards that should have led to the city being named Weinburg instead of W.rzburg, especially as there is no concrete evidence of major spice trade in the city.
At least until recent years, the general tendency for many scholars looking at medieval Jews has been to assume they lived on the margins of towns in un­healthy, unwanted locations. The editors of the first volume of the Germania Judaica, for instance, in writing about the Jews of twelfth-century W.rzburg, speculated with no real evidence that the area around the Rigol marsh, the
6 Though this explanation of the origins of the W.rzburg Jews is conjecture, it is supported somewhat by information from the gravestones of the medieval Jewish cemetery. The earliest gravestone documents the 1154 death of a daughter of the renowned Rabbi Eliezer b. Nathan (the “Raavan”), thought to have moved from Mainz after the 1096 massacres. See M.LLER, Die W.rzburger Judengemeinde (like note 3), p. 31, and KARLHEINZ M.LLER, W.rzburg: The World’s Largest Find from a Medieval Jewish Cemetery, in: The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002, ed. CHRISTOPH CLUSE, 2004, p. 379–387, here p. 383–384. 7 On the plague in W.rzburg, see STUART JENKS, The Black Death and W.rzburg: Michael de Leone’s Reaction in Context (PhD Dissertation, Yale University), 1976.
locus in many documents for Jewish settlement, “may have been unhealthy”.8 In truth, Jews settled in prominent areas of many German towns, in locations next to the major markets and close to the cathedrals, urban monasteries, and other important institutions. They were allowed and even encouraged to do so by city authorities. The most prominent example of such encouragement comes from the city of Speyer in the second half of the eleventh century, when Bishop R.diger Huozmann of Speyer issued privilege charter to Jews along with the explanation, “When I made a town out of the village of Speyer, I estimated that I would increase the honor of the place a thousand-fold if I should also gather the Jews there.”9 Speyer Jews were required to pay an an­nual tax, in exchange for which they were given special economic privileges that would, as Bishop R.diger saw it, allow them to bolster the economy of the town. While there are no surviving documents that indicate the bishop of W.rzburg or other prominent institutions or individuals actively recruited or incentivized the Jews to settle and trade in W.rzburg, their frequent involve­ment in business dealings with Jews suggests that their opinions paralleled those of R.diger of Speyer. The presence in twelfth- and thirteenth-century W.rzburg of Jews from many other German towns likewise suggests that the economic and social climate of the city was welcoming and productive for the Jews.10
Proximity – Jews living and trading a short walk from the Neum.nster – enabled the canons of St. Kilian to interact with them, even to come to trust them to manage the business affairs of the monastery. As was the case for urban monks or canons and Jewish neighborhoods in several other cities in the Reich, the canons of St. Kilian and the residents of other clerical houses (the canons of the cathedral chapter, the monks of the Abbey of St. Stephan, even perhaps the Cistercian nuns of Himmelspforten,11 and so forth) would
8 ISMAR ELBOGEN, ARON FREIMANN, CHAIM TYKOCINSKI (eds.), Germania Judaica 1: Von den .ltesten Zeiten bis 1238, 1934 (reprint 1963), p. 475. 9 Urkunden zur Geschichte der Stadt Speyer, ed. ALFRED HILGARD, 1885, p. 11, no. 11: cum ex Spirensi villa urbem facerem, putavi milies amplificare honorem loci nostri, si et iudeos colligerem. 10 Germania Judaica 1 (like note 8), p. 477, identifies Jews from Augsburg, Gr.nsfeld, Mainz, Nuremberg, Pleichfeld, Randesacker, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Rothenfels, Schwarzach, Schweinfurt, and Wertheim. Much of this evidence comes from the names of witnesses on documents from the period. 11 Several documents from the early fourteenth century describe agreements between the Jews of W.rzburg and the nuns of Himmelspforten. See HERMANN HOFFMAN (ed.), Urkunden­regesten zur Geschichte Zisterzienserinnenklosters Himmelspforten, 1231–1400 (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Bistums und Hochstifts W.rzburg 14, Regesta Herbipolen­sia 4), 1962, p. 166–167, 174–175, 186–187, nos. 143, 154, and 165.
While proximity provided the skeletal framework for the normativity of relations, the emerging legal structures of the high Middle Ages contributed much to the interior substance of that normativity. Both Jewish communities and religious institutions like monasteries (as well as towns themselves) came to enjoy and rely upon the privileges granted them by higher authorities – kings, emperors, and other nobles as well as popes, bishops, and other ecclesiastical officials. Ensconced in charters with dangling seals that often were kept safe in cartularies stored in community chests, privileges defined an individual’s or a community’s legal existence – and to a large extent its social and economic existence – in this period. Privileges included such com­ponents as guarantees of protection, entitlements to trade in certain goods, and immunities from taxation. Though sometimes equipped with an expira­tion date, they were usually reconfirmed with the passage of power from one ruler or official to the next over the generations.13
Although no specific privilege charter for the Jews of W.rzburg survives from the twelfth or thirteenth century, examples from the Rhineland cities and from the nearby city of Regensburg give us a sense of the kinds of privileges Jews of other communities would have brokered with their lords, whether the emperor, the bishop, or other secular or ecclesiastical authorities.14 Emperor
12 Regensburg is another very good example of this proximity. The Jewish quarter there lay on the ground occupied by the present-day Neupfarrplatz, the large square between the cathedral precinct to the north and the prominent monasteries on the southern side of the city, including St. Emmeram and the Schottenkloster St. Jacob. See Germania Judaica 1 (like note 8), p. 287. 13 On privilege in the high Middle Ages, see especially ALAIN BOUREAU, Privilege in Medieval Societies from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Centuries, or: How the Exception Proves the Rule, in: The Medieval World, ed. PETER LINEHAN, JANET L. NELSON, MARIOS COSTAMBEYS, 2nd ed., 2018, p. 720–733. 14 For privileges extended to Rhineland Jews, see, for example, the 1074 charter of Emperor Henry IV to the Jews of Worms in Die Urkunden Heinrichs IV. 1056–1076 (Monumenta Germaniae Historica Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae 6,1), ed. DIETRICH VON GLADISS and ALFRED GAWLIK, 1941, p. 341–343, no. 267; the 1090 charters of Henry IV to the Jews of Worms and Speyer in Die Urkunden Heinrichs IV. 1077–1106 (Monumenta Germaniae Historica Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae 6,2), ed. DIETRICH VON GLADISS, 1952, p. 546–549, nos. 411 and 412. For a summary of imperial charters to Jews, see FRIEDRICH LOTTER, The Scope and Effectiveness of Imperial Jewry Law in the High Middle Ages, in: Jewish History 4/1 (1989), p. 31–58.
Frederick II issued a general privilege to all the Jews of his realm in 1236, but Jews in the important cities of the Reich had already enjoyed a privileged legal, social, and economic existence for a century and half – perhaps longer – by that point.15
The privileges extended to Jews by various authorities were similar, at times almost identical, to those offered to monasteries and other religious institu­tions. Like the Jews, monks and other clerics lacked the means of protecting themselves and thus required protection from privilege-granting authorities. Like Jews, monasteries and other religious institutions needed to manage and extend their wealth in order to carry out their desired activities, so both communities sought economic privileges like market rights and taxation im­munities. Jewish communities and monastic houses also obtained privileges from multiple authorities simultaneously, in order to ensure their social and economic positions in the most comprehensive way.16 Of course, authorities granted privileges to monks and other clergy for different reasons than they offered privileges to Jews – to monasteries in exchange for prayers and other spiritual benefits, as well as for assistance in reform projects and church administration, and to Jews for sure taxation income and other economic benefits – but both communities enjoyed similar privileged status even if their obligations as privileged entities differed. Put simply, Jews and monks were privileged peers with little incentive to compete with one another legally (authorities did not necessarily have a limited number of privileges to hand out, after all) and lots of incentive to work together in order to press the mutual advantages of their privileged status. Indeed, monks, canons, and
15 The 1236 imperial charter for the Jews: Privilegium et sententia in favorem iudaeorum, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica Constitutiones et Acta Publica Imperatorum et Regum 2, ed. LUDWIG WEILAND, 1896, p. 274, no. 204. See the insightful interpretation of this charter and its context in DAVID ABULAFIA, The King and the Jews – the Jews in the Ruler’s Service, in: The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. CLUSE (like note 6), p. 43–53. 16 For one example, the Benedictine monastery of Reinhausen, near G.ttingen, obtained privileges from the Archbishop of Mainz, the German emperor, the duke of Bavaria, and the pope between the early twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. See Urkundenbuch des Klosters Reinhausen, ed. MANFRED HAMANN (Ver.ffentlichungen der Historischen Kommis­sion f.r Niedersachsen und Bremen 37, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Nieder­sachsens im Mittelalter 14, G.ttingen-Grubenhagener Urkundenbuch 3), 1991, p. 28–43, nos. 3, 6, 12, and 18. Monastic charters like these may be used as a means to track shifting loyalties and hedging political calculations among the various communities of Germany in this era of competition between the emperors and popes. It is notable that the 1207 papal charter to Reinhausen, for instance, was issued during a time of imperial weakness, when the Welf and the Staufen families were competing for the imperial throne. Pope Innocent III and his thirteenth-century successors often issued privilege charters in an attempt to lay claim to institutions or entities that were formerly tied closely to the emperors.
Mutual interest in using their privileges to enrich themselves and enhance their well-being led monks and Jews to form business partnerships in many of the cities of the Reich during the high Middle Ages. Such partnerships focused on two overlapping concerns: land and money. Monasteries, bishoprics, ca­thedral chapters, and other religious communities often controlled large land­holdings, most often by receiving them as gifts (either accompanying the entrance of the children of the nobility or given shortly before a noble’s death as grants ad succurendum).17 While some clergy probably proved to be effec­tive managers and exploiters of their communities’ possessions, many clergy had neither the time nor the inclination to do what was necessary to secure an income from landholdings. Just as Jews were becoming the go-to figures for finance and long-distance trade in the emerging European economy, Jews also achieved a reputation for effective property management in this period. Both clerical institutions and townspeople came to rely on the Jews for their real estate concerns. This is the economic activity most in evidence in the W.rzburg documents.
The earliest source detailing property transactions between the W.rzburg Jews and the canons of St. Kilian comes from 1119.18 In that year, the widow of a Christian burgher named Wicmann returned to the canons a property in W.rzburg that she (and presumably her husband) had managed. Upon handing over the property, she advised the canons to give its management over to a Jew named Jacob and his wife Gute, as she had done.19 Though the
17 The staggering scope of some monastic landholdings can be seen in the detailed Schen­kungsb.cher kept by prominent houses in this period. See, for instance, Schenkungsbuch des Klosters St. Emmeramm zu Regensburg, ed. FRANZ MICHAEL WITTMANN (Quellen und Er.rter­ungen zur bayerischen und deutschen Geschichte 1), 1856, p. 1–146. 18 JULIUS ARONIUS (ed.), Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im fr.nkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273, 1902 (reprint 1970), p. 100, no.  217; Regesta sive rerum Boicarum autographa ad annum usque 1300 1, ed. KARL HEINRICH DE LANG, 1822, p. 117.  19 The record does not say specifically that Jacob and Gute resided in W.rzburg, but the association with the town may provide the earliest documented evidence of a Jewish commu­nity in the city. The earliest accepted account of Jewish settlement in W.rzburg is the record of the 1147 massacre of 22 Jews – probably a result of the fervor created by the Second Crusade but also the earliest documented murder accusation against Jews on the continent. See the Annales Herbipolenses, in: Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores 16, ed. GEORG HEINRICH PERTZ, 1859, p. 1–14, here p. 3–4. See also the Hebrew account of Ephraim of Bonn,
document does not stipulate the exact terms of the sub-contract, one may assume the profit she received due to the effective oversight of her Jewish managers was significantly higher than the value of the half vessel of wine that she was required to pay the canons annually in exchange for holding the land in the first place. It seems that she had promised Jacob and Gute that they would hold and manage the property “by hereditary right,” so her insist­ence that the canons maintain the arrangement may have arisen from her effort to follow through on her promises.20 The deacon of Neum.nster appears to have met with the Jewish couple and determined to follow the widow’s recommendation, for he gladly agreed to grant the property to the Jews “by the same [hereditary] right.” The Jews were required to make an annual payment to the monastery each autumn, based on the annually-assessed value of the property.21 In other words, if the Jews improved the value of the property, as they were expected to do, the monastery would receive a higher payment. It is thus not hard to understand why the canons were delighted with the arrangement. It freed them from the obligation of managing the property directly and promised a growth in the income they would receive from the land.
It is uncertain if the property management relationship between the St. Kilian canons and the Jews of W.rzburg was the original idea of the widow Wic­mann, but it is certain that the canons quickly embraced the beneficial partnership achieved by her suggestion. By the late twelfth century, this type of arrangement had become the norm, the solution to the canons’ need for effective property management. Indeed, between 1180 and 1212, there were at least ten separate property transactions between the canons and the Jews, the volume alone of which suggests that the two parties trusted and respected each other to an extraordinary degree.22 None of the records of these trans­actions are entirely straightforward; that is, they do more than simply indicate
Sefer Zekirah, or the Book of Remembrance,” in: The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades, ed. and trans. SHLOMO EIDELBERG, 1977, p. 121
133. The Hebrew edition of this text is A.M. HABERMAN, Sefer Zekirah: Selihot ve-Kinot le-Rabbi Efraim b’’r Ya’akov, 1970. 20 ARONIUS, Regesten (like note 18), p. 100, no. 217: resignaverunt et cuidam Iudeo nomine Iacobo, fratri Samsonis et Natan, et illius uxori hereditario iure. 21 ARONIUS, Regesten (like note 18), p. 100, no. 217: Nos itaque piis eorum peticionibus annuentes prememorato Iudeo Iacobo et eius uxori nomine Gute et eorum heredibus, quos ipsi insimul genuerint, pro oblatione pretaxata annuatim in autumno solvenda, prescriptas duas areas et domum per manus decani nostri domini Hermanni ipso iure, quomodo ipsi possederunt, concessimus. 22 ARONIUS, Regesten (like note 18), p. 133–136, 142–144, 146–148, and 170, nos. 312–313, 315, 317–318, 320, 324, 326, 329, and 383.
that Jew X sold Property Y to the Neum.nster, or vice-versa. On the contrary, these valuable sources seem to depict a well-established and mutually beneficial business partnership between the city’s Jews, the house of canons, and often other townspeople.
The complexity and depth of this business relationship can be seen, for example, in the record of an 1180 transaction. Samuel, a Jew from Rothen­burg with ties to W.rzburg, purchased a piece of real estate from Count Ekehard, the son of Billung the Schultheiss. The plot in question was located next to the residence of Billung himself and was thus in a very prominent place in W.rzburg. The major stipulation of this land deal was that Samuel, the Jew, would “deliver the property, together with the buildings, to the altar of the precious martyr Kilian and the appointed delegate of his order.”23 This meant, essentially, that Samuel was required to become a vassal of the mon­astery, in exchange for being granted full control of the property in question. As a mark of his commitment to the abbey (and probably to give Ekehard and Billung the satisfaction of having made an indirect grant to the monastery, thus qualifying him for the salvation that came with such), Samuel was to furnish “eight pounds of wax annually on the feast of Saint Kilian.”24 Other­wise, Samuel exercised usufruct over the property, to live in it or pass it on to someone else, to erect new buildings or tear down old ones, as he pleased. The canons, of course, received a substance essential to the pursuit of their vocation: wax for the liturgical candles used during the feast day services for their patron saint.
Samuel was not the only Jew to have such a close relationship with the brothers of St. Kilian. In fact, the Neum.nster seems to have purposely sought out such relationships with Jews, and the obligations sometimes ran the oppo­site direction. In 1184, for instance, the canons participated in multiple property deals with the Jewish couple Vivis and Sarah; these were accom­plished through a third-party agent (fideicommissarius), perhaps the twelfth-century equivalent of a realtor. First, the couple entrusted (delegasse) a six-acre vineyard to the monastery (again not surprising, given the prominence of the city’s vineyards). In return, the abbey promised to pay them a measure of wheat annually on the feast day of Saint Michael. The source proclaims that the Jews sought this transaction with the monastery “in the hope of protection
23 Monumenta Boica 37, 1864, p. 111, no. 126: eandem aream simul cum aedificiis … ad altare
preciosi martiris Kyliani et sociorum eius legitime delegatam contradidit.
24 Monumenta Boica 37 (like note 23), p. 11, no. 126: in festo sancti Kyliani VIII nummatas
cerae annis singulis persolvat.

and favor.”25 In other words, they sought a privilege from the monks, the terms of which included the common guarantee of physical protection. The canons, it appears, were willing to take on the direct management of this property because, again, it supplied a substance vital to their vocation: wine for the sacraments and perhaps also to sell for profit.
Later the same year, the same couple, working through their agent as before, bestowed their personal residence on the abbey, again “in the hope of protec­tion and favor”, then received it back as a kind of fief or benefice, in exchange for an annual payment of two pounds of wax and the promise that they could sell the property in case of hardship.26 It seems important to point out that it was preferable for the Jews to manage their own residence as a benefice from the canons, rather than to own it outright. This agreement illustrates the level to which the Jews and the canons were integrated into the all-important social networks of the day, with the land grants, ritual gestures, and promises of protection that solidified such relationships. Property became an important way to establish social ties with powerful entities who could protect and sponsor them, just as it was for many others throughout the social and political landscape. Both communities were thus remarkably integrated into the larger polity: economically, politically, and socially.
The canons of St. Kilian were not the only ecclesiastical entity in W.rzburg who carried on a longstanding business partnership with the Jews. The bishop and cathedral chapter, as well as several monasteries in the city and surrounding region, turned repeatedly to the Jews for help with trade and property management.27 Bishop Otto in the early thirteenth century, for in­stance, appointed a Jew to serve as the master of his mint, an important position to be sure in this era of growing currency exchange and standardiza­tion.28 Nor was W.rzburg the only city that featured such business partner­ships; they can also be found in evidence from Cologne, Regensburg, Nuremberg, and other German cities.29 Indeed, partnerships between clerical institutions and Jews, particularly in the realms of real estate speculation and property management, were one of the defining features of Jewish life – and
25 Monumenta Boica 37 (like note 23), p. 124–125, no. 135: spe defensionis et gratiae. The
monastery received other properties from Jews for the same stated reason. See, for instance,
Regesta sive rerum Boicarum 1 (like note 18), p. 355.
26 Monumenta Boica 37 (like note 23), p. 125–126, no. 136.
27 See Monumenta Boica 37 (like note 23), p. 96, 153, 171, nos. 113, 156, 170; ARONIUS,
Regesten (like note 18), p. 161, 172–173, nos. 362, 388.
28 ARONIUS, Regesten (like note 18), p. 188–189, no. 425.
29 See, for example, ARONIUS, Regesten (like note 18), p. 98, 131–132, 168–170, nos. 213, 308,

381.
I realize that one might counter my argument by pointing out that monastic and other clerical writers of this period had little that was positive to say about Jews, that they both repeated and extended the anti-Jewish tropes that were formulated by Saint Paul and the church fathers. Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, and others wrote fairly extensively on the Jews and, with a few exceptions, little of it is commendatory or suggestive of the amicable relations that appear to be the norm in charters and trade documents. One might also counter my depiction of peaceful, normative relations in W.rzburg by drawing reference to the massacre of Jews in in that city in 1147 (the first documented murder charge against Jews on the conti­nent) and the much larger and more destructive pogroms in Franconia at the end of the thirteenth century. I would respond to that charge by pointing out that theological conversations existed largely in a closed space, that these authors were “thinking with” Jews as a way of understanding their own lives and vocations rather than thinking about actual Jews with whom they might have had actual relationships.30 But that response, I think, does not go far enough to account for all phenomena, nor does it explain why tensions boiled over so violently in 1147 and 1298. So, I suggest a fourth pillar of normativity: that the Jews had a symbolic function in the high medieval Reich, similar to the function attributed to the Jews in fourteenth century Spain by David Nirenberg.31 Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness was certainly part of this, as evidenced by Bernard of Clairvaux preaching against Radulf just before the Second Crusade, but it was not the whole of it.32 Jews were symbols of the fallen world, a world where such things as property management and monetary loans were necessary if undesirable, a world that would be replaced when the Jews converted to Christianity and the second coming of Christ offered a return to paradise. This symbolic function was ritualized and
30 On this line of argument, see especially the seminal work by DAVID NIRENBERG, Anti-
Judaism: The Western Tradition, 2013.
31 See DAVID NIRENBERG, Communities of Violence, Persecution of Minorities in the Middle
Ages, 1996.
32 See Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistolae nos. 363 and 365, in: Sancti Bernardi Opera 1, ed.
JACQUES MABILLION, 1719, p. 329–330, 332. On Bernard and the Jews, see DAVID BERGER, The
Attitude of St. Bernard of Clairvaux toward the Jews, in: Proceedings of the American
Academy for Jewish Research 40 (1972), p. 89–108.

normative, yet it could also contribute to the breakdown of relations and even to atrocity when combined with growing indebtedness and the resentment of the Jews’ special relationship with unpopular emperors: the combination that seems to account for the Rintfleisch massacres of 1298. Still, I also think the breakdown of normativity demonstrates its very existence; the exception proves the rule.
Prof. Dr. John D. Young, Flagler Collage Department Humanities, School of Humanities and Sciences 74 King Street St. Augustine, FL 32084 jyoung1@flagler.edu


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Edited by James Moore and John Smith
Testimonies ofthe City Identity, Community and Change in a Contemporary Urban World
Edited by Richard Rodger and Joanna Herbert
Public Health and Municipal Policy Making Britain and Sweden, 1900-1940
Marjaana Niemi
Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid
The Consumption ofHealth and Welfare in Britain, c.155 0-1950
Edited by Anne Borsay and Peter Shapely

The City and the Senses Urban Culture Since 1500
Edited by Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward
D
Segregation -Integration
-Assimilation

Religious and Ethnic Groups in the Medieval Towns of
Central and Eastern Europe

Edited by
DEREKKEENE
Institute ofHistorical Research, London, UK
BALAZSNAGY
Central European University and Eolvos Lorimd University,
Budapest, Hungary

KATALIN SZENDE
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary


ASHGATE



]
1
I
vi 9
10
11
12
r-J 13
Index
SEGREGATION -INTEGRATION -ASSIMILATION 
Minorities and Foreigners in Bulgarian Medieval Towns in the Twelfth to Fourteenth Centuries: Literary and Archaeological Fragments Kazimir Popkonstantinov and Rossina Kostova  135 
Nobiles, Cives et Popolari: Four Towns under the Rule of Carlo I Tocco (c. 1375-1429) Nada Zecevic  153 
The Towns of Medieval Hungary in the Reports of Contemporary Travellers Balazs Nagy  169 
Crown, Gown and Town: Zones of Royal, Ecclesiastical and Civic Interaction in Medieval Buda and Visegrad J6zsefLaszlovszky  179 
Integration through Language: The Multilingual Character of Late Medieval Hungarian Towns Katalin Szende  205 
The Visual I~e of the 'Other' in Late Medieval Urban Space: Patterns andConstructions Gerhard Jaritz  235 
251 


3.l
3.2
3.3
5.1
6.l
6.2
7.l
7.2
7.3
9.l
9.2 9.3(a)
9.3(b)
12.1
12.2

List of Figures

Riga in c.1300 (map prepared by the author)  39 
Late medieval Tallinn (map prepared by the author)  43 
Late medieval Tartu (map prepared by the author)  45 
Major settlements and routes in late medieval Hungary (after: 
The Role of Magic in the Past: Learned and popular magic, 
popular beliefs and diversity ofattitudes, ed. Blanka Szeghyova. 
Bratislava: Pro Historia, 2005, 109)  88 
Buda, parish boundaries and house ownership in the castrum in 
the fourteenth century (map prepared by the author)  95 
Buda, parish boundaries and house ownership in the castrum in 
the sixteenth century (map prepared by the author)  96 
Late Medieval inland towns in present-day Slovenia (Anton 
Melik Geographical Institute)  102 
Percentage ofsurnames in selected towns ofpresent-day Slovenia 
(graph prepared by the author)  108 
Percentage of Slovene first names in selected towns of present­
day Slovenia (graph prepared by the author)  109 
Town plan of medieval Turnovo (after Mirko Robov, 
'DopUlnitelnata ukrepitelna sistema na srednovekovnija grad 
Tiirnov', Arheologija 4 (1988), obr. 1)  138 
Town plan of PIovdi v (drawn by Svetozar Bojadzhiev)  143 
Cyrillic inscription from Preslav, twelfth century (after Kazimir 
Popkonstantinov, Otto Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische Inschriften, 
vol. 2,104-5 and 130-31)  151 
Cyrillic inscription from Shumen, thirteenth century (after 
Kazimir Popkonstantinov, Otto Kronsteiner, Altbulgarische 
Inschriften, vol. 2, 104-5 and 130-31)  151 
Visegrad. Settlement structure in the Angevin period (map 
prepared by Orsolya Meszaros, Visegrad keso kozepkori varos 
tortenete es helyrajza. [The history and topography of late 
medieval Visegrad]. PhD dissertation, University of Debrecen, 
2008, Figure 32)  182 
Visegrad. Buildings in the area of the royal palace during 
the Angevin period (map prepared by Orsolya Meszaros). 
'Topography of 14th Century Visegrad, the Royal Residential 
Town of Hungary', Archeologia Medievale (Cultura materiale, 
Insediamenti, Territorio) 34 (2007), p. 189)  184 

SEGREGATION -INTEGRATION -ASSIMILATIONviii

12.3     Excavated remains of the royal palace and the Franciscan friary at Visegrad. The superimposing features represent building phases from the early fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century (Gergely Buzas) 186
12.4(a-d) Visegrad. Buildings in the royal palace area, a: first half of the
fourteenth century; b: middle ofthe fourteenth century; c: second 
half of the fourteenth century; d: end of the fourteenth century 
(Gergely Buzas)  188 
12.5  Visegrad. The royal palace complex and the Franciscan friary in 
the first half ofthe fifteenth century (Gergely Buzas)  191 
12.6  Buda. Houses and wells from the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries unearthed in the western row ofhouses ofthe medieval 
Jewish Street (to date Szt. Gy6rgy utca) (Zsuzsanna Kuczogi's 
drawing, in Vegh 2006, Fig. 11, p. 146).  196 
12.7  Buda castle district in the late Middle Ages. (Zsuzsanna 
Kuczogi's drawing, in Vegh 2003, p. 28)  198 
14.1  Beggars as representatives of urban 'otherness'. Works of 
Charity: Feeding the Poor (detail); wall painting, 1420/30, 
Brixen (Bressanone, South Tyrol), cathedral, cloister arcade. 
(Photo: Institut fur Realienkunde, Krems)  237 
14.2  Christ as the pauper to be fed. Works of Charity: Feeding the 
Poor, represented by Christ; wall painting, end of the fourteenth 
century, Levoca (Locse, Slovakia), parish church. (Photo: Institut 
flir Realienkunde, Krems)  238 
14.3  Representatives of worldly and vain joys. St Vitus Abdicates 
Vain, Worldly Joys (detail); panel painting, 1510120, K6lderer­
workshop, Innsbruck (Tyrol), Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum. 
(Photo: Institut fur Realienkunde, Krems)  239 
14.4  Burning the vanities. Bonfire of the Vanities at the occasion 
of St John Capistrano's sermon at Bamberg's cathedral square 
(detail); panel painting, c.1470, Bamberg, Staatsgalerie. (Photo: 
Institut fur Realienkunde, Krems)  240 
14.5  Worldly joys leading to forgetfulness of gratitude towards God. 
Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik, German edition (Nuremberg, 
1493; reprint Griinwald bei Munchen: Konrad K6lbl, 1975), fo1. 
CCXVII. (Photo: Institut flir Realienkunde, Krems)  241 
14.6  The conjoined twins from Esslingen. Hartmann Schedel, 
Weltchronik, German edition (Nuremberg, 1493; reprint 
Griinwald bei Miinchen: Konrad K6lbl, 1975), fo1. CCXVII. 
(Photo: Institut fur Realienkunde, Krems)  242 
14.7  Heretics as representatives of 'otherness'. Disputation 
of St Dominic with the Heretics; panel painting, c.1490, 
Klosterneuburg (Lower Austria), Stiftsgalerie. (Photo: Institut 
flir Realienkunde, Krems)  243 
] 

s


LIST OF FIGURES  ix 
14.8  The  murderers  of St  Thiemo.  Decapitation  of St  Thiemo 
(detail); panel painting, 'Meister der Heiligenmartyrien', end of 
the fifteenth century, Vienna, Osterreichische Galerie. (Photo: 
Institut flir Realienkunde, Krems)  244 
14.9  The'oriental' murderers ofSt Thomas Becket. Decapitation ofSt 
Thomas Becket (detail: the oriental murderers); panel painting, 
Michael  Pacher,  1460/65,  Graz  (Styria),  Landesmuseum 
Joanneum. (Photo: Institut flir Realienkunde, Krems)  246 
14.10  Landsknechts as murderers of St John the Baptist. Torturer of 
St John the Baptist as Landsknecht: Decapitation of St John the 
Baptist (detail); panel painting, 1520, Levoca (Locse, Slovakia), 
parish church. (Photo: Institut flir Realienkunde, Krems)  248 

editors to acknowledge financial sponsorship for the workshop from the Conference and Research Fund ofCentral European University, as well as from the leadership and the Medieval Department of the Budapest History Museum and the Cultural Committee of the Budapest City Council. We are also grateful to the Publication Fund of the University of London, for its support towards the publication costs, which enabled us to engage Frank Schaer, a dedicated medievalist, to improve the clarity and fluency of the contributions. We would also like to express our gratitude to Richard Rodger (University of Edinburgh), who was helpful both in disseminating news concerning the workshop and in accepting the volume in the Historical Urban Studies series. Finally, we thank the editors ofAshgate Publishing for turning our manuscript into a handsome publication.
The Editors

Appendix
List ofPapers Presented at the Workshop Published in Other Volumes or Journals
lan Blanchard, 'Foreign Merchants in Early Modem Towns and International Market Intelligence Systems', Annual ofMedieval Studies at CEU 10 (2004): pp. 175-80.
Emily Gottreich, 'On the Origins of the Mellah of Marrakesh', International Journal ofMiddle East Studies 35 (2003): pp. 287-305. Judit Majorossy, "'unsere arme lewte" ... Hospitals and the Poor in Late Medieval Bratislava', Chronica [Szeged] 4 (2004): pp. 41-56. M6nika Mezei, 'Jews in Early Medieval Towns as Described by Gregory ofTours ' , Chronica [Szeged] 5 (2005): pp. 15-25.
Maria Pakucs Willcocks, 'The "Greek" Merchants in the Saxon Transylvanian Towns in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modem Times,' Historical Yearbook ofthe "Nicolae Iorga" History Institute ofthe Romanian Academy 2 (2005), 107-116.
Edna Ruth Yahil, 'Urban Identity, Guilds and Justice in Late Medieval Saint Germain des Pres', Annual ofMedieval Studies at CEU 10 (2004): pp. 163­
74.
CHAPTER ONE



Introduction: 'r"!'
) ~. 0>0 fr:>J /" If ....rfJ 11'1'::-'

Segregation, Zoning and Assimilation in
c <' \'i",n ',f I r>


Medieval Towns
DerekKeene

Of all types of settlement, it is the town or city where one is most likely to encounter a stranger or foreigner, Such a person will often have originated from afar and be distinguished by language, physical appearance, dress, beliefs or practices, characteristics covered by the slippery modem terms 'ethnicity' or 'cultural identity'. The largest, wealthiest, and most powerful or attractive towns tend to contain the greatest number, variety and proportion of strangers in their populations, Among the global metropolises of the modem world a mark of distinction is the number of languages in everyday use -well over one hundred in the cases of London or New York. Much the same was true of the towns and cities 0S:Flfl~.val Europe, though on a lesser scale and within di~erent s~cial,a~d political cC1h~rfB.nts, In western Europe notable examples of ethnIC and lmgmstIc diversity, accompanied by a striking degree of openness towards strangers, were Venice, Bruges and Antwerp, cases which indicate that port cities, or inland centres likewise engaged in facilitating commercial exchange over long distances, were especially likely to attract varied populations, ifonly of short-term residents, Among the towns ofcentral and eastern Europe covered in this volume, Prague was such a place in the tenth century, while at a later date Dubrovnik resembled Venice and Lviv came to be compared with that commercial metropolis on account of the diversity of its population and the many languages spoken there (Chapters 4, 11), The attractions of such places are clear: they offered opportunities for business in which it seemed to be possible to make substantial profit, as well as employment in more secure or routine occupations such as those of labourer, craftsman or notary. Towns that were sites of rule offer similar though less varied opportunities by providing for the needs ofthe elite, as well as ofthose attracted to the place by the desire to seek political advantage, justice or protection. In the west, London and Paris, and towards the east Prague, Esztergom and Buda (Chapters 6, 11, 12, 13) occupied such positions, in addition to important roles as centres ofcommerce and exchange. For Christians in western and central Europe, and for many elsewhere, Rome was the key. site of authority and devotion and attracted many different cultural groups, some of which maintained a more or less continuous presence in the city. Pilgrimage to Rome and other cult centres (Chapter 2), and the commerce
SEGREGATION -INTEGRATION -ASSIMILATION

which often accompanied it, was an important stimulus to the movement ofpeople and to the visible presence of strangers in many towns. I An ancestor of one of the German commercial families in thirteenth-century London was said first to have come to England with his wife to visit the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury and then to have established himself in London, where Thomas had been born and where the couple themselves finally managed to conceive a child.2 In central Europe itinerant Irish monks were a stimulus to many urban monastic foundations (Chapter 2), while university cities such as Prague and Krak6w attracted students and scholars from far away.
As sites to which people migrated, medieval towns operated within distinctive demographic and economic structures. On account oftheir sanitary conditions they generally relied on immigration to increase or even to maintain their populations. A well-populated countryside could support substantial towns, but at the same time urban demand could promote rural productivity, specialization and demographic growth. A rapidly growing town absorbed the 'natural increase' of population in its immediate territory and so drew in immigrants from further afield. Famines enlarged the popUlation ofestablished towns, as people from the countryside moved in to seek the marginal opportunities and charitable assistance available there. When food and other materials became scarce, towns used their wealth to draw in supplies from farther afield and in that way inflicted shortages on the surrounding territory. Demographic pressure on landed resources and falling prices of labour could encourage migration to towns, especially when those who controlled the land spent their rising incomes there. The relationship between medieval towns and their hinterlands was complex, involving multiple sets of reciprocal relationships of regional and trans-regional character. Within the immediate hinterland people moved in and out on an almost daily basis in the course of marketing and craft production. Immigrants flowed in over greater distances. Many did not stay long. Others settled, but maintained regular contacts with relatives and others in the regions from which they originated, sometimes over several generations. This was a particular characteristic of mercantile families. Merchants from the town visited lesser towns and markets in the hinterland and sometimes set up residence there so as more easily to tap into local resources. Conversely, monarchs ,d other lords encouraged people from abroad, particularly those with skills and pita, 0 settle on their land and in their towns, especially in remote or marginal distlic s, so as to increase the economic value and strategic resources of their territory. All of these forces promoted the cultural and linguistic diversity of towns, not least in central
I Michae1 McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300-900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20001), pp. 621, 678-81 and passim; Margaret Harvey, The English in Rome, 1362-1420: portrait of an expatriate community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
2
Joseph P. Huffman, Family, Commerce, and Religion in London and Cologne:

Anglo-German emigrants, c.1 000-c.1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp. 189-95.
]
c: .
.... '

INTRODUCTION

and eastern Europe. Surnames derived from place-names in some contexts can denote the extent of the economic, migratory and cultural hinterland of a town although on their own they cannot reveal the nature of the contacts involved. Measured in this way, the hinterland of London about 1300 extended across the whole of England, overlapping those of major provincial towns, and included many places overseas.3 Likewise, those who took up the citizenship of Venice during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tended to come from a distance: more originated from Tuscany than the Veneto, with Lombardy in third place, while with the acquisition of the terra firma, those who were citizens of the subject towns were also admitted.4 Here, as elsewhere in Europe, especially in Italy, it was not uncommon for wealthy individuals to be citizens of more than one town.
Cultural exchange, cultural levelling, assimilation and integration are often features of the urban environmentS Thus it is likely that London was a key force in driving the inter-regional exchanges that promoted levelling in late medieval English, while in a similar fashion the city's administrative and commercial practices came to be widely adopted by other towns. This process, working through a dense network of contacts and exchange, resembled that of market integration, but political and institutional structures were also important. London's widespread influence, for example, was facilitated by its situation within an extensive territory over which the authority of the monarch was relatively strong. Moreover, the king could override the interests of towns as communal bodies in favour of minority groups, such as Jews and foreign merchants, whose services he required. In modelling processes of linguistic change and assimilation, in ways which are helpful for understanding urban societies more generally, historical sociolinguists have made effective use of the sociological distinction between groups characterized by strong or by weak ties.6 This is particularly applicable to towns, both to their communal governance and to societies and groups within
3 Derek Keene, 'Metropolitan values: migration, mobility and cultural norms, London 1100-l700' in Laura Wright (ed.), The Development of Standard English 1300-1800: Theories, Descriptions, Coriflicts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 93-114, esp. Figure 6.7; Peter McClure, 'Patterns of migration in the late Middle Ages: the evidence of English place-name surnames' , Economic History Review, 2nd series 32 (1979): pp. 167-82.
4 Reinhold C. Mueller, 'Venetia facti privi/egio: les etrangers naturalises aVenise entre XIV et XVI" siecle' in: Jacques Bottin and Donatella Calabi (eds), Les Etrangers dans la Ville: minorites et espace urbain du bas Moyen Age /'epoque moderen (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1999), pp. 171-81.
S For topics addressed in this paragraph, see Derek Keene, 'Cities and cultural exchange', in Donatella Calabi and Stephen Turk Christensen (eds), Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, volume JI, Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3-27.
6 Mark Granovetter, 'The strength of weak ties', American Journal ofSociology 78 (1973), pp. 1360-80; Mark Granovetter, 'The strength of weak ties revisited', Sociological Theory, (1983), pp. 201-33; Leslie Milroy, Language and Social Networks (Oxford: Basil
them. Groups with strong internal ties, arising from strong collective interest (sometimes in response to external threats) and highly institutionalized systems of control, would tend to resist external influences and maintain barriers between groups. Those with weak ties might combine a sufficient degree of cohesion with an openness to outsiders that would facilitate bridge-building between networks, innovation and assimilation. In practice, the balance could be very fine and local circumstances important for determining the outcome. In the Middle Ages it seems that poor immigrants and those with a cultural and linguistic identity which contrasted least with that of the host city, 'Flemings' or 'Dutch' in medieval and early modem London for example, were absorbed most rapidly into the general population, while wealthier, often mercantile, groups, whether Jewish, German, French, Gascon or Italian, who had their own institutions and often a strong collective interest in the right to trade, maintained a distinct identity, expressed in language, dress and domestic customs, over the entire period of their residence in London, sometimes over many generations. Such people could also serve as cultural models for indigenous citizens, especially if they were not separated by religion. Some ofthem clearly served as 'cultural brokers' between minorities and the host society. Modem studies reveal some of the complexities of assimilation, even among poorer groups. In immigrant families first-generation males might conform to indigenous dress and practices, at least in public, while their wives are more conservative and separate from the host society. The second generation may more publicly express their ethnic identity, while at the same time unconsciously adopting indigenous practices or even those of other immigrant groupS.7 It is only rarely that the evidence for medieval towns enables us to capture such subtleties.
There was a widespread feeling among townspeople that they differed fundamentally from their rural neighbours, even when they were ethnically and linguistically similar to them and above all in their customs and laws. Those customs reflected the sanitary and social problems that arose from the density of urban habitation and the need to develop rules and protective frameworks to foster commerce. Particular points at issue here concerned the desire oftownsmen to preserve their interests in distributive trade against infringement by outsiders, whether local rustics or merchants from afar. Protecting the market and the profit, both private and public, to be derived from it, was an essential concern. Likewise, and especially in the absence ofstrong external authority, towns often felt compelled to tighten and extend their control over the territory outside, to protect trade, to secure supplies and to establish defensible frontiers. Dante, who had clear ideas concerning authority and governance, attributed the moral decline of Florence to immigration from the contado -the surrounding dependent territory -arguing that this would have been avoided had the boundary remained closer to the city and

Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1987), pp. 199-204. Granovetter's work is widely cited in network and management theory. 7 See Gerd Baumann, Contesting Culture: discourses of identity in multi-ethnic London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

INTRODUCTION
naming places no more than 30 km distant from the city as sources of corruption.8 Similar ideas underlay the notion that citizenship be restricted not just to the 'best' or most 'law-worthy' individuals or to the merchants of a town, but to those of standing by virtue of property ownership, long residence and ancestry, thereby excluding labourers, artisans, recent immigrants, and foreigners. Citizenship, or degrees of it, was often a bone of contention. With regard to admitting foreigners from overseas as citizens of London, for example, successive civic regimes adopted different policies and at times the monarch favoured admitting foreigners against the views of the citizens.9
In many parts of Europe and Asia newcomers and strangers, whatever their origins and status, adopted similar strategies of arrival and survival in towns and were often treated in similar ways by state or civic authorities. For many, some form of chain migration was doubtless the rule, involving advance knowledge of the journey and of where to find lodging on arrival, very often with compatriots or other groups likely to facilitate socialization. Long-range family and business networks could be important here, especially for merchants, a group characterized by strong ties. For artisans and labourers informal arrangements of this sort in social environment predominantly characterized by weak ties were significant, and economies of providing cheap lodging and other services for new arrivals became embedded in certain parts of town. An example is the eastern suburb of the City of London, which, like Manhattan's Lower East Side, accommodated successive waves of poor immigrants from different parts of the world over a long period and at the same time acquired a distinctive cluster of occupations that either provided for their needs or could easily be entered by newcomers, a characteristic that persisted through continual changes in the population.lo In this case the city wall had no significance as a defining or excluding feature and the pattern of settlement was determined essentially by the low value of land in this peripheral zone.
Foreign merchants, by contrast, usually gravitated to more central high-value sites, where their local counterparts and the principal markets were to be found. Nevertheless, like the poorer immigrants, they too probably depended on local networks of contacts that would facilitate their arrival and accommodation. The
Paradiso, cantos 15-16; cf. Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), pp. 54-5.
9 For partial and not entirely accurate accounts, see Gwyn A. Williams, Medieval London: from Commune to Capital (London: The Athlone Press, 1963), pp. 253-4 and Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200­1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 39.
10 James L. Bolton, 'The alien population of London in the fifteenth century: a reappraisal', in James L. Bolton (ed.), The Alien Communities ofLondon in the Fifteenth Century: the Subsidy Rolls of1440 & 1483-4 (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1998), pp. 1-46; Lien Bich Luu, Immigrants and the Industries ofLondon, 1500-1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2005), pp. 87-140.
streets known as Wahlgasse and Wahlengasse in Cologne and Regensburg (Chapter 2), respectively, denoted clusters of foreign merchants close to the principal markets and the river frontages of those cities, while in Cologne another street of the same name in the sparsely settled periphery of the city suggests the presence of a poorer group of foreigners. 11 There was a similar district on London's river frontage, on either side of the Walbrook, a stream whose name, first recorded by about 1100, probably denoted the presence of foreigners. 12 Merchants of Rouen, had special rights there on the waterfront, perhaps by the mid eleventh century, while in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries monarchs confirmed the merchants of Cologne in possession of their guildhall nearby, where other Germans joined them as neighbours, the group eventually establishing the enclosed cluster of houses known as London's Steelyard. In the same neighbourhood during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries foreigners, including those from southern Europe, provided lodgings for their countrymen. In both London and Regensburg, high-status officials supervised the foreign traders.13 By extending privileges to foreigners, including exclusive rights over territory within the town, monarchs promoted and regulated trade and served their own interests in the acquisition of imported high-status goods and financial services, sometimes contrary to the interests of local traders. In this they followed practices derived from the ancient world, which in the Middle Ages were expressed in the privileged sites known as fondaci, prevalent in the Mediterranean region, Constantinople and the Black Sea. Germans extended the practice in northern regions, by founding kontoren and acquiring comparable privileges from local rulers at Bergen, Baltic ports, Novgorod and inland trading sites in central Europe. 14 At various times Chinese, Japanese and other oriental rulers followed similar policies, which for them, as
11 For the location of these streets, see Deutscher Stiidtatlas, Regensburg (Lieferung I nr. 8,1973) and Koln (Lieferung II, 1979), ed. H. Stoob. Hermann Keussen, Topographie der Stadt Koln im Mittelalter, 2 vols plus folder of plans (Bonn: P. Hausteins Verlag, 1910), i, pp. 58-9, ii, pp. 229-30.
12 Eilert Ekwall, Street-Names 0/the City o/London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 193-4. The suggestion that the wal-element in the name Walbrook denotes 'foreigners' rather than 'Britons' is my own.
13 Derek Keene, 'Du seuil de la Cite a la formation d'une economie morale: I'environnement hanseatique aLondres, entre XIIe et XVIIe siecle' in: Bottin and Calabi (eds), Les Ittrangers, pp. 409-24; for the Regensburg official, see J. Widemann (ed.), Regensburger Urkundenbuch I (Munich: Konigliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Monumenta Boica, 53,1910), nos. 63, 69,81,86.
14 Donatella Calabi and Derek Keene, 'Merchants' lodgings and cultural exchange' in Calabi and Christensen (eds), Cities and Cultural Exchange, pp. 315-48. See also: Jorgen Bracker (ed.), Die Hanse: Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos. Eine Austellung des Museums fUr Hamburgische Geschichte in Verbindung mit der Vereins-und Westbank, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Museum/ar Hamburgische Geschichte, 1989), with revised texts reprinted in JOrgen Bracker, Volker Henn and Rainer Postel (eds), Die Hanse: Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos (Liibeck: Schmidt-Romhild, 1998); Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger
INTRODUCTION

ometimes for their European counterparts, were also a means of containing the ~oreigners and emphasizing their subordinate status.15
Only a minority of foreign merchants occupied such communally owned establishments. Across Europe Italians, the richest ofmercantile groups, generally inhabited private houses, often held on behalf of family enterprises or business consortia. The way of life associated with these establishments was not much different from that ofthe formal enclaves and involved a degree ofsocial segregation from the host city. Most ofthe merchants living there were young unmarried men, subject to a degree of regulation by their elders which, however, failed to prevent them forming liaisons with and fathering children on local women. Sometimes these households were perceived as a more general threat to the women ofthe city, both married and unmarried. The career cycle of many of these young merchants involved returning after a few years to their home cities, where they made strategic marriages and pursued politics. Some older merchants resided with their families for much longer periods away from home, serving as intermediaries with the local authorities and providing continuity in business. Such groups developed forms of adjudication independent of the local courts, as at the Steelyard in London and in the Italian consular houses that became part of the landscape of Bruges. Despite not having consuls of their own, the London Italians (ruled by consuls in Bruges), nevertheless made their mark on London's cultural landscape. The early name for Lombard Street evolved so that it came to reflect the clustering of Italian houses there. Their practice of socialization in the street and in suburban gardens became a feature of the neighbourhood, where they assembled and worshipped at a local friary (as they did in Bruges), chapel and parish church. Several of their religious cults and practices of socialization, as well as tastes in literature, philosophy and dress became established among Londoners. Despite their more enduring presence, the Germans, who followed similar practices, were less obviously influential. This perhaps reflected their linguistic and other similarities to the English, as well as their lack of resources by comparison with the Italians.
Across Europe as a whole foreign groups in towns followed similar strategies, living in close proximity, imposing their identity on public spaces such as streets or squares, assembling and worshipping in churches which they adopted as their own, forming fraternities and craft guilds for mutual protection and support and sometimes developing formal judicial and regulatory institutions. This was especially the case with merchants and scholars, but much less so with craftsmen and labourers. Non-Christian and to a lesser extent non£,atholic groups were often treat~d diff~renify:-aes~~~lth. !his is mo~t aW~iint ~lk~~ase of Jews, whose speCIal status was often emphaSIzed by theIr dIrect subjection to regal or quasi-regal authority rather than to that ofthe community oftownsmen. Occasions
in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15 Derek Keene, 'Cities and Empires', Journal 0/ Urban History 32.1 (2005): pp. 8-21.
"'--'rk tJi ,

when Jews were admitted to local guilds of merchants were rare, if not unique.16 Yet in many respects Jews resembled other ethnic or mercantile minorities, at least until the establishment of ghettoes in the sixteenth century.17 They lived together in certain districts close to their places of worship and other facilities, sometimes distinguished by place-names such as 'Jewry' or vicus Judeorum, but not to the exclusion of Christian residents, despite periodic attempts by the church to segregate the two. Often these neighbourhoods were close to the principal areas of commerce, as in London, Winchester, Paris, Rouen or Cologne, or to a royal castle that could offer protection from popular suspicion or attack (cf. Chapter 12). The presence ofJews could also be a source ofwealth and prestige for a town. In 1084 the bishop of Speyer, desiring to add to the honour of his villa of Speyer and to make it an urbs, gathered Jews there and settled them outside the area inhabited by the other citizens. He gave them economic privileges and jurisdiction over their own affairs, while to protect them from the common herd he surrounded them with a wall. 18 This did not preserve them from attack at the time of the First Crusade and they quickly moved the focus of their community to within the defended area of the city, close to the centre of trade, where despite continuing persecution they remained until the fifteenth century. In establishing the ghetto, the Venetians devised an institution that appears to have been welcomed by Jews, enabling them to pursue their way of life in a protected environment. Some decades later Venice displayed a similar attitude towards the resident Turks, whom they had good reason to treat well, recognizing that their fondaco should meet the Turks' high standards of cleanliness and protect them from the moral risks of the everyday Venetian environment.19 In their colonies, however, the Venetians adopted contrary policies. Thus in Crete, following their acquisition of the island in 1204, they reordered the spaces ofthe principal towns, imposing characteristically Venetian and Latin­Christian monuments on the centres and marginalizing Orthodox Christians and their churches to the peripheries.20 Similarly, following the Norman conquest of

16 Michael Adler, 'Benedict the Gildsman of Winchester', The Jewish Historical Society ofEngland: Miscellanies 4 (1941): pp. 1-8. 17 Donatella Calabi, 'La cite desjuifs en Italie entre XVe et XVIe siecle' in Bottin and Calabi (eds), Les Etrangers, pp. 25--40. 18 Alfred Hildgard, Urkunden zur Geschichte der Stadt Speyer (Strassburg: Karl J. Triibner, 1885), no. 1l.
19 Donatella Calabi, Dorothea Nolde and Roni Weinstein, 'The "city of Jews" in Europe: conservation and transmission of Jewish culture' in Calabi and Christensen (eds), Cities and Cultural Exchange, pp. 87-113; Calabi and Derek Keene, 'Merchants' lodgings and cultural exchange'.
20 Maria Georgopoulou, Venice sMediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
INTRODUCTION
"1 the centres ofthe major towns were Christianized, while Muslims and their

SICI y, ., f h b b 21
ues became charactenstIc 0 t e su ur s.

mosq ., h 1 1" 1 1" d
AcrosS Europe and the MedIterranean regIOn as a woe po ItIca , re IgIOUS an ethnic distinctions, in association with economic and demographic factors such.as land values, commercial opportunities and the structure o~labour and.co.mn:odI~
had a major influence on patterns of segregatIon and aSSImIlatIon III

markets , t ns in which it is possible to identify features common to the whole area. In c~:trai and eastern Europe, however, the historical characteristics of the region accounted for some distinctive features. Among those characteristics, were the relative sparsity of population and the limited degree of commercialization and monetization. One expression of this was the relative absence of the offices of Italian financiers, active in north western Europe since the twelfth century (cf. Chapter2), from the eastern parts ofGermany and further east (other than in Prague under the Luxemburg dynasty), even after the large-scale exploitation of precious metals there during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That exploitation, however, did tie the region more closely to commercialized territories lying to the south and west and stimulated urban growth, not least to meet the needs ,of newly wealthy rulers. Moreover, even if Italians were reluctant to set up banking houses in Central and Eastern Europe, as individuals or as representatives of enterprises based in Italy they offered administrative, financial, military and artistic skills, notably in Hungary (Chapters 5, 12, 13) and Krak6w.22 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the eastern areas also attracted settlers and craftsmen from more densely populated areas of Europe. They included Romance speakers (Gallici, Latini, ItaUci) apparently from Lombardy, Lorraine and Flanders, who were welcomed by local rulers and contributed to urban growth, often as elements that played an important role in the formation of'a town from its very beginning. The Latini probably included Italian merchants, at least in Regensburg, which in the twelfth century was an important centre for trade via Venice. From the later twelfth century onwards Germans and Saxons succeeded the Romance speakers as settlers, certainly in eastern areas, and they became increasingly prominent after the Mongol invasions (Chapters 2, 5, 6, 7). The intermixture of incoming and indigenous populations in towns was complex and varied locally, but was marked by a greater degree of internal difference than was generally the case in western Europe, and by a stronger contrast on ethnic lines between commercial town centres, which tended to be dominated by Germans, and the
21 Ronald J. C. Broadhurst (trans!.), The Travels ofIbn Jubayr (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), pp. 340-50.
22 Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 252-5,267-73,282,342,394; see also Derek Keene, 'England and Poland: medieval metropolises compared', in Richard Unger and Jakub Basista (eds), Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), pp. 147-63. See also David Gaimster, German Stoneware 1200-1900: Archaeology and Cultural History (London: British Museum Press, 1997).
SEGREGATION -INTEGRATION -ASSIMILATION
indigenous Slavic or Hungarian populations ofthe suburbs and countryside. Such arrangements bear comparison with those of English towns in Ireland or parts of Wales, regions that were likewise peripheral in relation to the main European centres of commerce and power. While the names of streets and districts indicate neighbourhoods associated with ethnic groups (Chapters 3, 4, 5), they do not necessarily indicate segregation, for personal names, linguistic borrowing and the need to be familiar with several languages for the purposes of administration, commerce and preaching indicate significant degrees of convergence between populations and cultures, if not assimilation (Chapters 3, 7, 13). Material culture reflected these developments. Thus in the 'Russian' district of Tartu German artefacts superseded those of Russian type, although the latter continued in use for some everyday purposes (Chapter 3). The general acceptance of Hanseatic­style artefacts by the Slavic populations of the southern Baltic area is striking, but even more so is the resistance to them in Novgorod, where their use appears to have been confined to the Peterhof, the German trading enclave established in the twelfth century, a firm statement ofRussian identity and control in this seat of
Russian princely authority.23
Lying between developing consumer markets in western Europe and networks ofexchange in the Levant and the Black Sea which handled products from Africa India and Asia, central and eastern Europe was traversed by land and river tradin~
routes which connected the two zones, via intermediate centres such as Lviv (probably preceded by Halych), Krak6w,24 Prague, Regensburg, Nuremberg, Mainz and Cologne. In the earlier medieval period Jewish and Muslim merchants ~ndc?ntacts with Kiev were important in this trade, a pattern altered by the Mongol mvaSIOns. Subsequently, Jews continued to play a significant role, now also being welcomed after their expUlsion from western Europe; they were joined by Armenians, who though established in Plovdiv by the twelfth century later spread more widely (Chapters 4, 5, 7, 9, 11). German groups in eastern Europe became active participants in this trans-European trade, while at the same maintaining their distinctive identity and close contacts with the core German areas to the west and north (Chapters 6, 7). In 1224, for example, the Cologne pfennig was used as a monetary standard in Transylvania, while later Nuremberg merchants and capital
23 David Gaimster, 'The Baltic ceramic market 1200-1600: measuring Hanseatic cultural transfer and resistance', in Hennan Roodenburg (ed.), Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, volume TV, Forging European Identities, 1400-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 30-58.

24 Paul W. Knoll. 'The urban development of medieval Poland, with particular reference to Krak6w' in Barilla Krekic (ed.), Urban Society ofEastern Europe in Premodern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 63-136; Francis W. Carter. Trade and Urban Development in Poland: an Economic Geography of Cracow, from its Origins to 1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
INTRODUCTION

and the route down the Vistula to the Baltic became ever more significant.25 The importance of this oriental trade for the self-identity of the Germans is apparent from the numbers ofAnatolian carpets preserved not only in major centres such as Bra~ov but also in the churches ofmany lesser fortified towns in Transylvania.26
Most of the towns discussed in this volume had mixed populations arising from migration and trade. The presence of ethnic groups was often expressed in the names of streets, indicating the formation of networks of mutual support, although as elsewhere in Europe this tendency to cluster seems rarely to have lead to the exclusive occupation of neighbourhoods or quarters by single groups and often may have been determined as much by economic as ethnic interests. Patterns of intermixture varied greatly from town to town, even within a single region, and also changed over time. Nevertheless, north ofBulgaria and away from the Adriatic there was a tendency for the German mercantile influence to increase, so that towns acquired a predominantly German character, by contrast with the overwhelmingly Slavic or Hungarian populations of the countryside or the suburbs. Nevertheless, the latter groups were also to be found in the centre oftowns, in some regions along with Romanians and Cumans, while German settlers were by no means confined to the towns. Ethnic differences were sometimes associated w ith occupational ones and the names of guilds names often included an ethnic element, which in Buda could refer to the majority of their members, as with the German butchers, or to the distinctive character ofthe production process, as with the Hungarian tailors or the German tanners. In southern Hungary Romanians and Cumans, still far from sedentary in the thirteenth century, subsequently remained excluded from urban privileges and were often associated with the rearing of livestock. Inevitably, such towns were characterized by the use of several languages and probably by the widespread employment of mixed language for commercial purposes. Elites sometimes crossed linguistic divides, using languages other than their own for admi~~nor preaching (Chapters 2-7,13).
~el~i,9n'often a~:mted for th5;..grsatest degree of segregation. Most clearly r outside-the Christian community were the Jews. Protected and encouraged by tJf
25 Maria Pakucs-Willcocks, Sibiu-Hermannstadt: Oriental trade in sixteenth-century Transylvania (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: B6hlau, 2007), passim; for the pfennig standard at Sibiu, see Franz Zimmermann and Carl Wemer (eds), Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Deutschen in Siebenbiirgen, 3 vols (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007; reprint of Hermannstadt edition of 1892-1902), I, no. 43; for the influence of the Cologne pfennig, see Spufford, Money, p. 192, and for Nuremberg, Carter, Trade and Urban Development and Peter Spufford, Power and Profit: the Merchant in Medieval Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), pp. 390-95.
26 The surviving examples are usually dated to the seventeenth century, but this type of carpet was widespread in Europe by 1500 and produced over a long period: Gordon Campbell (ed.), The Grove Encyclopaedia ofDecorative Arts, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), i, pp. 189-90; cf. Pakucs-Willcocks, Sibiu-Hermannstadt, pp. 96-7, lOS-IS.
SEGREGATION -INTEGRATION -ASSIMILATION
kings, they were often independent~~the urban jurisdiction and excluded from participation in retail trade, as a(~viv, . hi le the district in which they settled was often close to the seat of royal au onty, as at first in Buda (Chapters 4, 12). Armenians, though Christian, occupied a similar positiont;Je-ws: they had their )
h· d'" I rt;. .....;:;. :)

own pacesI 0 f wors lp, a lstmctlve angllage -aJ:\d were regarded as heretics. In Ohrid and elsewhere in Bulgaria the "Armenians) were spatially segregated "~ and attempts were made to convert and assimilate them (Chapter 9). In Lviv \ \,'f\\'l ~e~ians encountered con~iderable hostility from the urban elite which limited , T'!'\ theIr nghts to trade, but theIr customs, freedom to worship and autonomy were ::;""'"_'fi) guar<;Rt..e~A .by the crown. The Lviv authorities likewise attempted to marginalize '" the'9rth.£.dox,"lindigenous Ruthenians (Chapter 4). The short-lived Tocco regime in Epirus f6ilowed a colonizing policy which resembled that of the Venetians in Crete, drawing legitimacy from a Byzantine title, but shifting the capital and
it' maintaining a distance from its Orthodox subjects by following the court customs ..JrL~dreligion ofNaples (Chapter 10).
In much of Central Europe ideas of citizenship derived from those extended to foreign 'guests' (hospites), immigrants or merchants from western and southern Europe. The rights granted to the'Latins' of Szekesfehervar in the early thirteenth century became a model for Hungarian royal charters to other towns, and the tenn 'guest', which could also denote internal migrants, was extended to cover others who shared the same privileges, although eventually the tenn 'citizen' (civis) came to be preferred to that of 'guest' (hospes). The increasing presence of Gennans and their engagement in commerce made the customs of Gennan towns increasingly influential in the regulations of urban affairs (Chapter 5). Nevertheless, Gennan town law could co-exist with other laws. At Lviv, for example, four ethnic groups were allowed to use their own laws, but the Magdeburg law granted to the'citizens' (largely Gennans and Poles) had a superior status (Chapter 4). At Krak6w for more than half a century after the general adoption of Gennan customs, non-Gennans were excluded from citizenship. During the fourteenth century in Krak6w itself the popUlation was mixed, including Jews and Hungarians as well as Gennans, while in the adjoining, and in effect suburban, towns of Kazimierz and Kleparz only Poles dwelled. Krak6w's trade guilds came increasingly to admit Poles and in the fifteenth century many of the town's Jews moved to Kazimierz.27 Similar patterns prevailed in some Hungarian towns, but overall the degree to which town governments admitted all corners or attempted to keep non-Gennans out varied widely and seems not strictly to have correlated either with the prevalence of Gennans among the population of the region or with the isolation of a Gennan

town within a non-Gennan territory, while in some towns, including Buda and Zagreb, principles of parity came to be followed in the make up of town councils (Chapters 2, 4-6, 13).
27 Carter, Trade and Urban Development; Philippe Dollinger, La Hanse (XIIe-XVIIe siixles) (Paris: Aubier, 1964), p. 158.
INTRODUCTION
The case of Dubrovnik (Chapter 8) illustrates the complex issues that had

bearing on citizenship in a commercial city isolated within an ethnically and a lturally different hinterland with which it had close trading relations. In this c~d other respects it resembled Venice, despite the enmity between the two cities. ~ubrovnik provides a good example of the degrees of 'liberty', citizenship or
rotection which might be enjoyed by the residents of a town, a feature common fhroughout Europe but especially notable in central and eastern areas marked by the intennixture of ethnically ~istinct populations. It also e~~mpl.ified the common characteristic of a progreSSIve closure, or at least of defimtIOn, m access to citizenship and office holding.28 As a commercial city its inhabitants used several languages, and it welcomed and protected foreigners who quickly adapted to its way of life. At the same time it erected barriers against outsiders from the hinterland, as Slavs, as members of the Orthodox Church or as heretics, yet it did not cease to trade with them. Even more acutely than in Venice, political and strategic interests nevertheless dictated that the Turks, who came to control the surrounding territory, be treated as special guests.
These essays deal with a number of themes concerning social and political inclusion and exclusion that were common to towns throughout medieval T Europe. The themes themselves reflect the contrasts, and at the same time the interdependence, between urban and nrral ways of life; the significance for status and privilege of engagement in different types of commercial activity, !from local and retail to long-distance and wholesale; the role ofreligion, and to a lesser extent of language, as cultural and political marker~erewlonshipbetween towns and states or other fonns of territorial rule. Everywhere, there was considerable local variation in how these general principles worked out in practice. By addressing the subject in regions where patterns of settlement, commerce, and engagement with peoples outside Europe were over a long period often in sharp contrast to those of western regions, and thereby prompting comparison and contrast, these essays contribute to a wider understanding of the ever-continuing phenomenon of the reception of strangers in towns .
. ~!
}

28 For a discussion of these issues in England, set within a wider field of reference, see Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History ofEnglish Medieval Towns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 119-26, 171-7.

3333

Cities, Texts and Social Networks,

400-1500

Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space

Edited by
CAROLINE GOODSON
Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
' .
ANNE E. LESTER
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
CAROL SYMES
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA


ASHGATE


I
l/
© Caroline Goodson, Anne£. Lester and Carol Symes and the contributors 2010

AH rights reserved, No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Caroline Goodson, Anne E. lester and Carol Symes have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by AshgatePublishingLimited0'-{Q J\ Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East ' Suite 420 Union Road 101 CherryStreet Farnham Burlington
Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA
www.ashgate.com
8R1TJSH LiBRARY CATALOGUlNG rN P'JB!JCATION DATA

Cities, Texts, and Social Networks, 400~ 1500: Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space.
1. Cities and towns, Medieval 2.Urbanecology (Sociology) -History--To 1500,
3. Cityandtownlife -History-To 1500.
I. Goodson. Caroline. JI, Lester. Anne Elisabeth. 1974-,m,Symes. Carol.
307.7'6'o902-dc22

LIBRAJ'fi Of CcNGR£SS CATA!.c<;-JNG-!N-Pm1.ucATJON
DATA
Goodson, Caroline. Cities, Texts, and Social Networks, 400-1500: Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space/ Caroline Goodson, Anne E, Lester, and Carol Symes.

p. cm, L Cities and towns, Medieval. 2, City and town life History To 1500. 3, Cities and towns, ~edieval -History--Sources, 4, City and town life HlstOry -To 1500 -Sources.5, Social networks -History -To 1500. 6. Space perception -History ­To 1500, 7. Religion and sociology -History -To 1500, 8. Charities -History ­To 1500. 9. Public institutions -History-To 1500. 10, Human ecology-History­To 1500, I. Lester,AnneElisabeth, 1974-. II. Symes, Carol. Ill. Title. HT115,G6665 2op9
307.76--dc22 ' 2009043769
ISBN 9780754667230 (hbk) Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, ComwaII


Contents
vfi
List of Illustrations
xi ListofContribators XV.-­Preface
1 Introduction
1 Ca1olineGoodson,Anne£. Lester and Carol Symes
PART I: CONSTRUCTING AND RESTRUCTURlNG
Writing and Restoration in Rorr_ie: Inscriptions, Statues
2          21
and the Late Antique Preservation ofBuddmgs
GregorKalas
3          How tofound an Islamic City 45 HughKennedy
Metropolitan Architecture, Demographics and the
4          65
Urban Identity of Paris in the Thirteenth Century
Meredith Cohen
PART 2:TOPOGRAPHIES ASTEXTS
103The Meaning of Topography in umayyad Cordoba
5
Ann Christys

crafting a Charitable Landscape: Urban Topographies in charters

6          125
and Testaments from Medieval Champagne
Anne£. Lester
Anger andSpectacle in Late Medieval Rome: Gauging Emotion in Urba;:9
7
Topography .
Joiille Rollo-Koster and Alizah Ho/stem

PART 3: cmZENS AND SAINTS
Local Sanctity and Civic Typology in Early Medieval Pavia:

s           177
TheExample of the cult of AbbotMaiolus of Cluny
Scott G. Bruce


vi          Cities,TextsandSocial Networks, 400-1500
9          Cities and Their Saints in England, circa 1150· 1300: The De~el~pment of BourgeoL, Values in the cults of Samt Wilham of York and Saint Kenelm of Winchcombe
Sarah Rees Jones
10        The Myth of Urban Unity: Religion and Social Performance m Late Medieval Braunschweig
Fram-JosefArlinghaus
PART 4: AGENCY AND AUTHORITY
11        City as Charter: Charily and the Lordship of English Towns
1170-1250 Sethina Watson  ' 
12  'The Best.Place in the World': Imaging Urban Prisons in Late Medieval Italy G. Geitner 
13  Out in the Open, in Arras: Sightlines, Soundscapes and the Shaping of a Medieval Public Sphere 

CarolSymes
Bibliography Index

193
215
235
263
279
303 347

List of Illustrations

Map of Sites Discussed (based on A. Jarvis, H.I. Reuter,
O.l
A, Nelson, E. Guevara, 2008, Hole-filled seamless SRTM data V 4, International Centre for Tropical Agriculture
ii
(CIAT),available from http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org)
Rome, Plan of the Roman Forum in circa 405 CE

2.1
25
(drawing by Andrew Ruff),
Rome, Statue Base of Constantius II in the Roman Forum

2.2
27
(photo: author)
Rome, Statue Base of Stilicho in the Roman forum

2.3       28
(photo: Fototeca Unione, American Academy in Rome) Rome, Portico of the Harmonized Gods in the Roman Forum
2.4
(photo: Fototeca Unione, American Academy in Rome) 33
38
Rome, Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum (photo: author)
2.5
Rome, Temple of Saturn, detail of inverted frieze
2.6
39(photo: Fototeca Unione, American Academy in Rome)
69
Plan of the Walls of Philip Augustus (Map:© Parigramme, Paris)
4.1       Paris, Notre-Dame, south tower, circa 1230-40 (photo: author) 76
4,2 Ste-Chapelle, exterior elevation from South, circa 1239-48
4.3 (photo: David Bordes © CMN, Paris) 77
4.4.      Capital from the archaeological site at St-Symphorien, first half of the thirteenth century (photo:© Musee Carnavalet) 79 Capital from archaeological site of the Hc\tel Dieu, second
4.5
half of the thirteenth century (photo:© Musee Carnavalet) 79 Ste-Chapelle, exterior upper chapel capital, circa 1239-48 4.6

80
(photo: author)
4.7       St-Pierre-aux-Boeufs, engraving, end of the eighteenth century 81(photo: Musee de Notre-Dame, © C. Delpancq)

4.8       St-Pierre-aux-Boeufs, portal embrasure, circa 1230 (in situ at 82St-Severin) (photo: author)

4.9       Lady Chapel, St-Germain-des-Pres, portal embrasure, circa 1240
(located at the Musee national du Moyen-Age, Thermes


83de Cluny) (photo: author)
4.10     Cloister of the College of Cluny, engraving, nineteenth century
(photo: © Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Estampes


87
Va 260 j fol)

88St-Severin, thirteenth-century bays (photo: author) 4.11
Chapel of the college of cluny, drawing by A.F.Pernot, 1824
4.12

89(photo:© Musee carnavalet)
1,1
Chapter 6
Crafting a Charitable Landscape: Urban Topographies in Charters and Testaments from Medieval Champagne
Anne E. Lester
The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at the time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
Marcel Proust, 'Place-Names, The Name'1

In January 1255 Peter 'called the Jew of Bar-sur-Aube, sound of mind, drew up his will.'' As Peter enumerated his goods and properties and had a scribe commit them to the parchment page, he recreated a long familiar landscape of personal possession and charity, which he inhabited in his memory and which he crystallized into a descriptive text. Although Peter mentioned numerous friends and relatives on whom he bestowed property, rents, cash and objects, all of these references were situated within the local topography of his experience ofBar-sur­Aube and the region of Champagne. His testament provides a verbal description of the urban space of one of Champagne's fair towns and the charitable landscape that Peter and his contemporaries had conceptualized and knew well. In this way, places, inside and outside the town, and spaces, charitable or profitable, function as the organizing framework in which both people and property take on meaning. As he composed, Peter walked his landed possessions, from those places where he collected rents and held vineyards, to the hospices of the poor and the house of lepers. Through his will, we are privy to his construction and experience of space as we walk with him, through his memory and perception
1

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised D.J. Enright (New York, 1998), vol. 1 Swann's Way, p. 606.
2

'Petrus,dictusJudeusde Barro super Albam, ...compos men tis mee,condidi testamentum meum'. Peter's will is one of several testaments found within the archives of Clairvaux, now housed in the Archives departementales de l'Aube [hereafter AD Aube], 3 H 336 Oanuary 1255). For an edition of the text, see Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, 'Etudes Historique', Revue des sociitis savants, 2nd series, 1 (1859): 33-48, at 45-8.
[Cl'
! ·",
''1
l
I,;
126      Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500

i
'
1
I',,1
i.1 1·.1'·,,··
i';1·1 ·.Ii:
,,
+ '

W ..." _,,"W ..,_ .. ,_ .. W,,_ ..,_ .. ­
river and canals             100 200 300 metres
fortifications

i11t.11!
1
11i1..
1
1,·, ,1
1-,I '!, ! II Fig. 6.1 Map ofBar-sur-Aube (based on Elizabeth Chapin, Lesvillesde foires
de Champagne: Des origines au debut du XIVe siecle (Paris, 1937), pl.

i:,1·,, '·
l'I
III). Scale 1: 10,000.

Iii ,
':;
of his neighbourhood (vico)and its familiar streets and surroundings.' Likewise,
as he dispenses alms in the second half of his testament, the reader progresses
with Peter through a landscape of charity that rings the town of Bar-sur-Aube

llli
!ii          and then radiates outward to the North and South.'
+          3 I have taken vicus to mean 'neighbourhood' in documents from Champagne, although many scholars translate it as 'street'. Either would be acceptable, but there are a
'Ii
!I          number of descriptive and relational markers in these texts that reflect more clearly the idea of a neighbourhood or area within a town.
4 Peter was part of a circle of burghers in Bar-sur-Aube who routinely served as witnesses for donations charters. In these texts he is referred to under a several different appellations: 'petrus cognom[en]tus iudei' (AD Aube, 3 H 10, 1216); 'petrus clericus Barri cognom[en]tusjudeus'(ADAube,3 H 9, 1218; also3 H 10, 1219, 1221, and 1222); and 'Petrus cognom[en]tusiudeus de Barro sup[er] Alba[m] et]aq[ue]ta uxorsua; when he and his wife gave two pieces of vineyards to the portaor gate of clairvaux to provide for the poor (AD Aube, 3 H 10, 1239). My assumption is that Peter was a Jewish convert to Christianity. In his will, he mentions his father, Abraham, but mentions no children and bequeaths most of his goods, rents and properties to members of his wife's family, (whom he refers to as his nepos and neptis).Concerning Jewish converts to Christianity from Champagne, see Emily Taitz, The Jews of Medieval France: The Community of Champagne (Westport, Conn., 1994); William
AnneE.Lester

Peter begins his geographical progress from inside the town walls of Bar­sur-Aube (fig. 6.1), giving to his nephews vineyards and part of his house in the neighbourhood of the parish of Ste-Magdalene near the gate that led to the town of Brienne. To his female relatives, he bestows properties closer to the centre of town: gardens near the hostel owed by the monks of Clairvaux, and rents from nearby properties. From here, Peter moves to the southern limit of Bar, where the town is bound by the river Aube. From the lands he holds here, he gives fields and newly-planted vineyards to the domus Dei,or hospital, of St-Esprit and to the Cistercian nuns ofVal-des-Vignes. 5 To the lepers ofBar-sur-Aube, he gives lands along the same road, leading west from the town; to the canons of Belroy and the monks of Clairvaux more vineyards in the same area are given for making wine to celebrate the mass.6 Peter then bestows money in cash from the rents he possesses beyond the bridge, which he gives to relatives, and to the lepers and the deans of Bar and Chaumont. At this point, Peter starts his perambulation again, this time giving alms to the religious and charitable foundations in the town. He walks a circuit roughly from west to east, giving annual rents to the canons of St-Maclou for the celebration of an anniversary mass in his name; 40 solidifor the construction of his parish church of Ste-Magdalene, 40 solidifor the priest there, 10 solidifor his chaplain, 5 solidifor his clerk; 20 solidito the monks of St-Pierre as a pittance, 10 solidifor the dean; 5 solidi for the chaplain; 3 solidi
Chester Jordan, 'Adolescence and Conversion in the Middle Ages: A Research Agenda; in Michael A. Singer and John Van Engen (eds),Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, (Notre Dame, 2001), pp. 77-93; Joseph Shatzmiller, 'Jewish Converts to Christianity in Medieval Europe: 1200-1500,' in Michael Goodich, Sophia Menache and Sylvia Schein (eds), Cross Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period: Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (New York, 1995), pp. 297-318; and Chaviva Levin,Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Northern Europe Encountered and Imagined, 1100-1300 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2006).
5 On the emergence of hospitals dedicated to the Holy Spirit or St-Esprit in Champagne, see Herni d'Arbois de Jubainville, 'Etudes sur les documents anterieurs a l'annee 1285, conserves dans les archives des quatres petits hOpitaux de la ville de Troyes',
Memoires de la Sociite acadimique d'agriculture, des sciences, arts et belles-lettres du dipartement de!'Aube [hereafter MSA],21 (1857): 49-116, at 65-6. The hospital of the Holy Spirit is first mentioned in Troyes in 1203. In his study ofBar-sur-Aube, Arbois de Jubainville notes that a hospital of the Holy Spirit is first mentioned in 1264, 'in vico Brene, ante domum hospitalis Sancti Spiritus.' Peter's mention of the hospital in 1225, in the same neighboU:rhood, suggests that the hospital had been in place even earlier. See Henri d' Arbo is de Jubainville, Histoire de Bar-sur-Aube sous les comtes de Champagne, 1077-1284(Paris, 1859), pp. 84-5.
6 Belroy (Bello Regis) was a priory of canons of the order ofVal-des-Ecoliers, founded in 1217 near the castle of Bligny in the lordship of Chacenay, not far from Bar-sur-Aube. On Belroy, see Charles Lalore, 'Notice sur le prieure de Belroy (Aube)', MSA,24 (1887): 169-96; Arthur Daguin, 'Charles du prieure de Belroy (Aube)', MSA,24 (1887): 163-8. Peter and his wife Jaquette gave the canons of Belroy several vines in various locations in a donation of February 1237.
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"'
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Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500
128
for the clerk; 20 solidifor the church of St-Maclou; likewise, 40 solidifor work on the hospital of St-Nicholas of Bar, 20 solidifor the nuns there; 10 solidifor the converted women in the same hospital; 20 solidito the poor of the Holy Spirit.'
eplscop;,I
estate
Fig.6.2   Map of Troyes (based on Elizabeth Chapin, Les villes de foires de Champagne: Desoriginesau debut du XIVe siecle (Paris, 1937), pl. II. Scale 1 : 25,000.
Peter then leaves the walls of Bar-sur-Aube and gives the traditional sum of 20 solidi to a host of foundations that open out from his home town in concentric circles: to the monks of parish of St-Germaine just beyond the southern gate of Bar-sur-Aube; to the nuns of Ormont;" to the Franciscan and Dominican friars living at the farthest reach of his topographical imaginary in Langres, Dijon, Chateauvillain and Troyes; as well as 20 solidifor work on the church of St-Martin in Paris (fig. 6.3). Not surprisingly, the town most familiar to Peter beyond Bar­sur-Aube was the neighbouring fair town and comital capital of Troyes {fig. 6.2) Here, in the conceptual landscape of his testament, he walks again through the well-known urban space, from periphery to centre, giving in turn to the

Cistercian nuns ofNotre-Dame-des-Pr€s outside Troyes and the Cistercian nuns
7
For the locations of these hospitals and churches within and outside Bar-sur-Aube, see Arbo is de Jubainville, Histoire de Bar-sur-Aube.
8
Forthe foundation histories of the Cistercian nunneries mentioned in Peter's will (Val-des-Vignes, Ormont, Notre-Dame-des-Pres and La-Pi€t€ of Ramerupt), see the detailed inventory compiled byAnne Bondeelle-Souchier, 'Les moniales cisterciennes et leur livres manuscrits dans la France d'ancien regime', Cfteaux,45 (1994): 193-337.
Anne E. Lester
of La Piete, and to each of the hospitals and domus Dei inside the wall of Troyes, at St-Esprit, St-Abraham, St-Nicholas and the H6tel-Dieu in the count's palace.'
Peter's will is exemplary of the kinds of texts that were drawn up beginning in the early decades of the thirteenth century, texts that articulated and shaped the urban spaces of the towns of Champagne. Peter's landed possessions, his house in Bar and his urban gardens fill out the landscape of the once-thriving fair town just as his charitable bequests allow us to populate the urban and suburban space with its hospitals, poor women and lepers. These charitable locations, as Peter's will makes clear, were a vivid part of the experience of urban life and death. Through his bequests, Peter, like many of his contemporaries, supported these charities and cared for the poor and sick, but also paid for the construction of the houses and hospitals that formed the fabric of the town. His donations for the construction of his parish church, of St-Maclou, and the hospital of St-Nicholas literally built his urban world. Unlike foundation documents that record the creation of hospitals, nunneries and leper houses on the part of secular lords and bishops, charters and testaments drawn up by laymen make clear that urban residents were active participants in the production of their urban landscapes, not mere consumers or beneficiaries, and that they considered carefully where and how to build and augment a hospital or hospice, townhouse, or market place." It was important to men and women alike -particularly as they considered their final ends -to support spaces that sanctified their cities and towns, that offered care for people within their midst, and that articulated the communal experience of the town as a social body, for such spaces symbolized and provided for, and in effect generated, the urban community. u
The charters and testaments that men and women in Champagne drew up over the course of the thirteenth century, when read as descriptive texts, reveal the production and experience of urban space in evocative and telling ways. Typically scholars have analysed these documents of practice for the relationships they encode and for the social networks and bonds such interactions produced. Yet as men and women used texts for transactions involving urban
9 For the hospitals of Troyes, see Arbois deJubainville, 'Etudes sur les documents
anterieurs al'annee 1285'.
10 For acts of foundations, see Sethina Watson, 'City as Charter,' in this volume. See also Miri Rubin, 'Imagining Medieval Hospitals: Consideration on the Cultural Meaning of Institutional Change,' in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (eds), Medicine and Chcirity before the Welfare State(London,1991), pp. 14-25.
11 For communities functioning as part of a larger social body, see Marcia Kupfer, 'Symbolic Cartography in a Medieval Parish: From Spatialized Body to Painted Church at Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher', Speculum,75 (2000): 615-67; and more generally Marcia Kupfer, The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town (University Park, PA, 2003). For a similar idea of how urban communities functioned as a social whole within the city, see Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125­1325 (University Park.PA, 2005), particularly pp. 141-77.

; ! I
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Cities,TextsandSocial Networks, 400-1500
130
space, they developed a language that both conjured and produced their urban worlds. The practice of describing property and its place began in earnest with the creation of feudal registers for the benefit of the counts, but the inhabitants of Champagne used and elaborated on the same language to give verbal and written form to their own spaces in their personal transactions. The clear and increasingly precise articulation of space also coincided with the production of new neighbourhoods and charitable institutions. These areas just beyond a town's walls and along its margins became spaces of charity and salvation where the poor and sick received alms and care. While charters are evocative of an urban and suburban topography, the movement within and through the urban and suburban landscape is suggested in the descriptive clauses of final testaments, like Peter's, that bequeath goods and properties to individuals and institutions in a relational cartography. Champagne's mundane texts of sales, donations and wills thus offer a window into the narrative strategies men and


women used to frame their experience of urban space and its margins.12
DESCRIPTIVEPRACTICESIN CHAMPAGNE
In champagne, as in other parts of Europe, the decades on either side of 1200 were
a turning point in the use and proliferation of written records." Traditionally
the preserve of ecclesiastical institutions and the land-holding elite, charters,
cartularies, registers and sealed letters patent came to be employed in new
ways and with greater frequency by the lesser aristocracy and the growing
urban bourgeoisie in the fair towns. The principality of Champagne was at the
forefront of the bureaucratic revolution that allowed counts and kings from
Flanders to Barcelona to control and administer their territories with ever
increasing efficiency and detail." In 1178, the counts of Champagne began lo
12 On the production and use of space, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space,

11': ''
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991); and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of

,ii[!! Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984).
,,' I,
13 See, of course, Michael T. Clanchy, from Memory to Written Record, England 1~66­
1307,2nd Edition (London, 1993); and Robert F. Berkhofer, Day of Reckoning: Powerand Accountability in Medieval France (Philadelphia, 2004).
14 See Robert-Henri Bautier, 'Cartulaires de chancellerie et recueils d'actes des autorite la'iques et ecclesiastiques', in Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle and Michel Parisse (eds), Les cartulaires: Actes de la table ronde organisie par /'Ecole nationale des chartes et le G.D.R.121 du C.N.R.S. (Paris, 5-7 decembre 1991) (Memoires et documents de l'Ecole des
chartes, 39) (Paris, 1993), pp. 363-77; and Theodore Evergates, 'The Earliest Comital
Cartulary from Champagne', in Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth (eds), Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation of Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West,
(Papers in Medieval Studies, 17) (Toronto, 2002),pp. 128-36.
Anne E. Lester
131
maintain feudal records that initially consisted of lists of their fiefholders." These lists were elaborated and expanded over the course of the thirteenth century as the comital administration began to make use ofletters patent, that is open documents to which aristocratic seals were affixed authenticating the contents, which described the feudal obligations the aristocracy owed the count, and which were systematically copied into registers.'' To promote the use and organization of written records within the principality, the counts founded several new houses of secular canons, notably St-Etienne in Troyes, St-Quiriace in Provins and St-Maclou in Bar-sur-Aube, which supported canons who were employed in the comital administration." By the late twelfth century, the three
most prominent fair towns in Champagne housed permanent comital residences
and chancelleries. St-Etienne in Troyes, the largest of the three foundations, became the permanent archive and treasury for the counts and it was here that the multi-volume administrative registers were copied and augmented throughout the thirteenth century."
The creation and maintenance of feudal records relied upon gathering and ordering information about the county. Over the course of the thirteenth century, fiefholders of the count were repeatedly asked to describe and value their properties either orally before the count's officials or occasionally in written form, when they could not personally be present to account for their holdings and obligations.19 As a consequence, fiefholders (who constituted an ever-widening social group increasingly composed of non-noble landholders), those who held rents rather than property, and women all acquired a proficiency
15 See Theodore Evergates, The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300
(Philadelphia, 2007), pp. 15-21.
16 Evergates, Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, pp. 28-31, 36-50; Theodore Evergates, 'The Chancery Archives of the Counts of Champagne: Codicology and History of the Cartulary-Registers', Viator, 16 (1985): 159-79; and Littere Baronum: The Earliest
Cartulary.ofthe Counts of Champagne, (ed.) Theodore Evergates (Medieval Academy Books, 107) (Toronto, 2003).

17 In all, the counts (principally Henry I and Thibaut III) founded six houses of secular canons in their comital residences throughout the county. Their greater barons, no doubt seeing the utility of such foundations that doubled as personal chanceries, folloW.ed suit on a more modest scale. See Patrick Corbet, 'Les collegiales comtales de Chani.pagne (v.
, 1150-v.1230)',Annales de l'Est, 29 (1971): 195-241.
'
18 for a description of the codicology and chronologies of these registers, see Evergates, 'The Chancery Archives'.
19 Thus, for example, Guy of Arcis-sur-Aube sent a letter from his deathbed describing his holdings rather than appearing personally before the commissioners. Likewise, the Lady of Tralnel sent a letter because she was too ill to come in person. All letters when in the vernacular, like the testimonies, were translated into Latin when enrolled; see Evergates, The Aristocracy of the County of Champagne, p. 48.
J
132 Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500

1····
,I,'
in describing and defining the lands and incomes they held." This process reached its fullest elaboration between 1249 and 1252, when Count Thibaut IV 'firmly ordered' all of his fiefholders 'to name truthfully, on oath, all the fiefs

11 and rearfiefs that you hold from me'." The commissioners began the long task of drawing up a new and considerably more detailed record known as the Roles des fiefs, which served as a model for all subsequent surveys. What the 1249-52 inquest captures, in addition to the details of feudal tenure and castle guard, is the descriptive language that the individuals, commissioners and scribes used to articulate not only their holdings but their personal experience of the county, its castles and its towns. The Roles des fiefs offers numerous examples of how individuals described and differentiated their experiences of urban spaces. Orienting around fixed points in the townscape, like religious institutions and stalls used by foreign merchants during the fairs, fiefholders found ways to articulate as precisely as possible the locations of their holdings and the values of these properties. When asked, William ofRosieres stated that he 'held his house at Rosieres, lands, fields, men and rights of justice in the same locale; and in Troyes [he held] part of the houses next the Temple in which the merchants of Douai sell their goods:" When describing his rural fief William as the major landholder of Rosieres did not need to be specific, yet when enumerating his urban holdings he had to stipulate very carefully the exact location of his property. Likewise, Erard of Jaucourt, an armiger (a lesser-knight or a man-at-arms), 'held his own fortified house atJaucourt just outside Bar-sur-Aube, as well as rights to the stalls which the merchants from Paris used during the fairs in Bar. In the same fief in Bar he held the mill of Moote and a part of a great house situated in front of the church ofBar-sur-Aube'. 23 Emelina de Mallet must have known Peter 'the Jew', as they would have been neighbours, for in 1252 she held, by right of inheritance, 'two houses next to [the parish church of] St-Magdalene and a grange next to the house of the St-Esprit:" When describing urban houses, fiefholders often talked about neighbourhoods (vici). Thus Jean of La-Croix, 'held a house in the vico of St-Jean in Provins; as well as part of the baths and part of the oven of the baths'
20 On the changing make-up of the count's fiefholders over the course of the thirteenth century, see Theodore Evergates, 'The Aristocracy of Champagne in the Mid­Thirteenth Century: A Quantitative Description' ,Journal of Interdisciplinary History,5 (197 4): 1-18; andEvergates, Aristocracy of the County of Champagne, pp. 52-3, 58-61, and 63-81.
21 Evergates,The Aristocracy of the County of Champagne, pp. 46-50. The count's charter is translated in Feudal Society in Medieval France: Documents from the County of Champagne,
trans. and (ed.) Theodore Evergates (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 10, doc. l0A.
22 ROies des fiefs ducomte de Champagne sous le regne de Thibaud le Chansonnier (1249­
1252),(ed.) Auguste Longnon (Paris, 1877), pp. 242-3, no. 104.
23 ROiesd.es fiefs, 5, no. 17.
24 Rolesdes fiefs, 1, no. 1.
Anne E. Lester
in the lower town of Provins." Not infrequently, women were asked to describe the fiefs held by their husbands if they were abroad on business or crusade, 'beyond the sea' (ultra mare) or 'in foreign parts' like Constantinople (in partibus Constantinopolitanis).
In such cases, the history of a property's possession helped define its location and value. So Guerricus ofBoussy's wife described the houses he held in fief in the area known as Le Val, or the lower town of Provins, 'near St-Ayoul which had belonged to the deceased Peter ofBoussy'." By the middle of the thirteenth century the language of fief-holding became fundamentally akin to a language of taxation, more concerned with values than with topographic or cartographic precision.
Yet during the same decades that the records of fief-holding became routine administrative documents, members of the lesser aristocracy and citizens of the towns of Champagne began to make use of other texts, like bills of sale, deeds of gifts and rental agreements, which demanded that they represent their spaces in more exacting terms, As Robert-Henri Bautier showed, a series of institutions emerged in the late twelfth century 'divergent in their function but concurrent in their same ends: to attest the authenticity of a juridical act', that is, to create legally binding lay documents of practice." In southern France and Italy local notaries, who were versed in the legal language of Roman law, drew up private lay juridical transactions and retained copies in their notarial registers. The situation in northern France was less systematic and therefore more diverse. 28 Most of the towns in the area of Flanders maintained urban archives and scribes in the employ of the town to draw up and retain such records. In the towns and cities South of the Somme and Meuse rivers, however, this task fell to officials connected to the episcopal court or parish hierarchy, either the bishops' officials or local rural deans, commonly called deans of Christianity in Champagne."
By the middle decades of the thirteenth century, hundreds of men and women in the towns of Champagne had appeared countless times before local officials to draw up documents of everyday use: charters for gifting properties or for buying and selling urban and suburban houses or domestic gardens; rental agreements; and deeds of loans and debts, most of which came to employ an increasingly precise description of the spaces involved. 30 Moreover, because of
"  Roles des fiefs, 196, no. 889. 
26  Roles des fiefs, 187-8, no. 855. 
27  Robert-Herni Bautier, 'L'authentification des  actes  priv€s clans la \France 

m€di€vale: notoriat public et juridication gracieuse', reprinted in Robert-Henri Bautier, Chartes, sceaux et chancelleries: Etudes de diplomatique et de sigillographie me.die.vales, 2 vols (Memoires et documents de 1'€cole des chartes, 34) (Paris,1990), vol. 1, pp. 269-340.
28 For this contrast, see Bauder, 'L'authentification des actes priv€s', pp. 281-304. 29 On documents from Flanders, see Bautier, 'L'authentifications des actes priv€s',
pp. 305-18.
30 There can be no doubt that the Champenois officials were influenced by the presence of Italian merchants and creditors at the fairs. See for example John F.Benton,

134 Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500
:1

I.
the regional complexities of local customary law (which obtained in the North, in contrast to Roman law in Occitania), there was a great variety of officials involved in authenticating such private acts. In Champagne, diocesan officials
;j,.
·,          and rural deans typically authenticated documents with one other lay official,
I
often a town mayor elected by the community or the local provost, who was a representative of the count, to ensure that the document held validity in both lay and ecclesiastical courts." Yet no registers kept by these officials survive from Champagne until the end of the fourteenth century. Thus, when lay private acts survive, they do so almost exclusively in episcopal, monastic or hospital archival collections.
By the second decade of the thirteenth century, for those men and women who did not possess their own seals to authenticate acts, the main way to create a charter of sale or donation was to appear personally before the local officiales or dean of Christianity. By this time, the bishop's officialeshad moved out of the episcopal household and worked independent of the person of the bishop and his court. Indeed, by 1231 the officialesof Troyes had their own seals and their own
courts.32 In episcopal centers like Troyes, Langres and Reims, men and women
came before the officials and spoke their transactions orally in public, in acts of
performance, in which they defined and described transactions and elaborated
ii'
I
i.l
I11
,,.,        'The Accounts of Cepperello da Prato for the Tax on nouveaux acquits in the Bailliage of
I, I         Troyes', reprinted in John F.Benton,Culture, Power and Personality in Medieval France, (ed.) Thomas N. Bisson (London, 1991), pp. 255-74. For the role of these officials in drawing up contracts of loans, see the register of the Sienese creditors at the Champagne fairs kept between 1255-62: Mario Chiaudano, 'Il libro delle fiere di Champagne della cornpagnia degli Ugolini rnercati senesi nella seconda meta del secolo XIII', Studi e documenti per la storia del diritto commerciale italiano nel sec, XIII (Memorie dell'Instituto giuridico, Univ. di Torino,2), 8 (1930): 143-208, on the role of the officiality, 157-9.
31 Bautier, 'L'authentification des actes priv€s', 322-3; and Robert-Henri Bautier, 'L'exercice de lajuridiction gracieuse en Champagne du milieu du xmesi€cle a la fin du XV"', reprinted in Bautier, Chartes,sceaux et chancelleries, vol. 1, pp. 359-436, at 362-5.
32 On the role and evol11;tion of the officialesin northern France during the thirteenth century, see Paul Fournier, Les officialitis au moyen &ge (Paris,1880); Bautier, 'L'exercice de la juridiction gracieuse'; Joseph Avril, Le govemement des iv€ques et la vie religieuse dans
le diocese d'Angers (1148-1240) 2 vols (Lille, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 623-7; Olivier Guyotjeannin,
'Juridiction gracieuse eccl€siastique et naissance de l'officialit€ aBeauvais(1175-1220)', in Michel Parisse (ed.), Apropos des actes d'ivtques: homage aLucie Fossier (Nancy,1991), pp. 295-310; and Adam Davis, The Holy Bureaucrat: Eudes Rigaud and Religious Reform in
Thirteenth-CenturyNormandy(Ithaca, 2006), pp. 30-48. By the end of the middle ages
this form of document production and authentication became indispensible for urban
and royal transactions alike. See Louis Carolus-Barr€, 'L'organisation de la juridiction
gracieuse a Paris, clans le dernier tiers du Xmesiecle: L'officialite et le chatelet', Le moyen
age,69 (1963): 417-35.
Anne E. Lester
135

on the details of their urban and suburban properties. 33 These texts are therefore collective endeavours, representative of the language and vocabulary of the official scribe as well as that of the donor or seller. Hence, formulaic clauses appear in the documents framing each transaction: the officials involved had to be named, the type of transaction (whether a gift, sale or lease) had to be specified, sometimes long guarantee clauses would close the text or stipulations about the future role of heirs and spouses would be elaborated, and finally the date would be stated and the seals of those officiating would ratify and bind the transaction which unfolded above.
Yet it is in the interstices of the legal text that we can capture the perception and experience of the urban spaces of Champagne, because descriptive clauses conjure -through a reliance on intimate personal details -the space in question, be it a house, an apartment, a stall, or suburban garden. These were the clauses that could not be scripted in legal jargon, but which articulated a space that was visible, vivid and agreed upon by the individuals present; these clauses had to map onto the experience of the known urban world in all its complexity and mutability. In this sense, scribe and donor or seller created 'their own language of space' that made them cartographers of a sort. They were, like the notaries and clients Daniel Lord Smail described at work in Marseille, mastering verbal techniques [that conveyed] abstract representations of space' which in turn 'identif [ied] the locations of people and property in the city',34
Through the creation of routine official documents, men and women in the i I Champagne towns honed an ever-more precise language of description and ' association. In doing so, people were not simply stating what they saw; they were producing the space of their urban landscapes. The evocative clauses within the texts allowed them to consider, plan, and shape their towns. By naming spaces they came to know and to understand the urban world they inhabited. But to name was also to construct and produce urban space, the defined and agreed­upon space of markets and rental property, specific vici or neighbourhoods, as well as charitable and marginal spaces. Thus in one of the first donations of urban property to Les Deux-Eaux, the leprosariumto the south of Troyes, a certain Pascha, citizen of Troyes, came before Master Stephan, the official of Troyes in 1235, and gave the brothers 'half of her house situated at the gate called Comport<!', wall of the town, 'next to the
which lay along the northern

33 Guyotjeannin, 'Juridiction gracieuse eccl€siastique', remarks on this process. On this change more generally during the high middle ages, see Brian Stock, 'Medieval Literacy, Linguistic Theory, and Social Organization', New Literary History, 16 (1984): 13-29; and the articles in Walter Prevenier and Therese de Hemptinne (eds), La diplomatique urbaine en Europe auMoyenAge: Actes du congres de la commission intemationale de diplomatique,
Gand, 25-29 aout 1998(Leuven,2000).
34 Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval

Marseille(Ithaca,1999), p. 67.
I
I


Cities, Tex.ts and Social Networks, 400-1500

house of the deceased master Hubertus'. (fig. 6.2)" Descriptions grow more precise in the next two decades. In 1255, Mahaude, the widow of Guillot Noblet, a citizen of Troyes, recorded her sale to the lepers of Les Deux-Eaux of all her rights to 'a certain stall in the market of Troyes' which lay precisely 'between the stalls where bread is sold, next to the stall by the domusDei of the Count of Troyes on one side and the grain stall of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains on the other.'" Through her careful delineation, a local domestic marketplace takes shape, a space that may have been particularly familiar to a female citizen of Troyes, and in turn, her description reflects her own frame of reference, her experience of the urban environment. Such precise and relational spatial details are common in the charters. In 1260,Jacques le Lorgnes, with his wife Maria and their daughter Agnes, sold to the lepers a certain house free from all rents and obligations 'situated as it is called in the neighbourhood (vicus)of the nunnery
l
\
t calhedraloit)'   10 lU lU 4U >Okm
i "'"'"''"''l'
TRO'l'\J; fall"""~
II ''""".olc.1111,t<•Y<> • l('JYM1num


"'"'I"'''"""'

Fig. 6.3 Map of Champagne (based on Theodore Evergates, The Aristocracy in the Countyof Champagne, 1100-1300 (Philadelphia, 2007), p. 31).
35 M. Harmand, 'Notice historique sur la leproseriede la ville de Troyes', MSA,7-8 (1848): 429-680, at 557-8. The piece of property is described again in a document drawn up byPascha's heirs in 1252, pp. 574-5.
36 'quodam stallo sito in fora Trecensi, inter ceteras stallos ubi panes venduntur;juxta stallum domus Dei Comitis Trecensis, exunaparte, et stallum granetarie Beate Marie Trecensis, ex altera', Harmand, 'Notice historique sur la Ieproserie de Troyes,' pp. 581-2.
Anne E. Le:Ster

of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnians in Troyes, next to the wine press of the deceased Hugh Concereius on one side and the nunnery on the other, so the said house is located, namely in the neighbourhood of the nunnery, halfway down the street.'" This was a well-known neighbourhood that had its own orientation, with a mid-point and many potential fringes that would take their orientations from landmarks other than the nunnery.
Neighbourhoods like these existed throughout the towns of Champagne. They were the areas where people lived, died, had families, held rental property, went to market, and bought and sold goods. Neighbours and acquaintances who made up each vicus were familiar with the houses and domestic spaces of this close-knit world and knew the inhabitants of their landscape and their familial genealogies. In turn, houses and plots were often described with reference to
their previous owners as a means of orientation in space andtime. When a small
group of citizens in Reims donated to the new Cistercian nunnery of Clairmarais just beyond the city walls, their gifts of annual rents came from clusters of houses in the vicinities of Notre-Dame, St-Nicholas and Oignons, houses whose precise locations were delineated with reference to their previous inhabitants." These texts reflect the experience of the local worlds that existed within every great town or city in medieval Europe: the space of the parish and its warren of familiar streets and edifices alive with the men, women, widows and heirs who
multiplied within them.
In the second half of the thirteenth century, many men and women began to describe their sales and donations employing a language of relative measurement intended to convey the exact contours of a particular urban or suburban plot. The cartulary of St-Maclou, the count's foundation of canons in Bar-sur-Aube, contains copies of hundreds of charters involving the community and its properties within the town. In March of 1260, Ogerus, a canon of St­Maclou, purchased a certain vineyard, which 'extended in length and width and was free from all rents and customs except three half-pennies of annual rent, situated in the area of Barrvillain the place which is called Roicheforet,next to the vines of the brothers of Clairvaux on one side and next to the vines of the chapter of St-Maclou on the other'." Six years later the priest Laurent gave St­
37 'sitam,ut dicitur, in vico Beate Marie ad Moniales trecenses, juxta pressorium defuncti Hugonis Concerei, ex una parte, et juxta domum Beate Marie ad Moniales trecenses, ex d.ltera, sicut dicta domus se comportat: videlicet a vico Be ate Marie usque ad vicum medium', Harmi:lnd, 'Notice historique sur la teproserie de Troyes,' pp. 585-6.
38 AD Aube, 3 H 3785 (1234). Three charters drawn-up between March and May of the saine year detail the location of these houses whose rents were donated to the nuns. These viciare in many ways analogous to the urban 'islands' described by Smail, Imaginary Cartographies,pp. 88-92.
39

Cartulary St-.Maclou, Paris, BNF Lat. Nouv. Acq. 110, fol.67r-68v. The earliest use of this formula, 'in longitudine et latitudine' in the Cartulary of St-Maclou is from September
1237, fol.103v-r.
Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500
Maclou the house and lands he held during his lifetime 'situated in Bar in the vico called puteum vairote which extends in length from the street of the said neighbourhood up to the walls of the town of Bar and beyond the walls to the canal of the same town and in width extending from the house of the brothers of Clairvaux to the stables of the great court behind the church of St-Maclou'.'° Typically used to denote urban property free from taxes and tithes, the length and width descriptor conveyed that urban properties functioned like all other moveable assets and could be bought, sold and gifted in their entirety. In 1280, the Parisian couple Adam and Agnes Bourdon and their scribe used this formula to define the house they possessed in the Drapery of Troyes." Likewise, when
the Franciscans first came to Rouen in 124 7, they were given an estate in the
city called Le Donjon and all that pertained to it 'in length and width, in wood and stone'. 42 And the public space of the market of Arras in nearby Picardy was similarly defined and bound as a designated space intended for market commerce and public discourse."
Most towns and cities in Champagne generated new neighbourhoods as they expanded beyond the confines of their original walls. Charters record the production of these new vici, typically in suburban areas near new convents, hospitals and poor houses. These foundations, which date to the 1220s and 1230s, were frequently established in extant grange buildings or suburban dwellings given over to the support of small communities, who used the buildings as hospices or chapels before they were incorporated into an existing religious order or recognized in some other official capacity. The initial gift of a house or territory to religious men or women may have been an act of seigneiural benefaction, but the creation of a neighbourhood was the hard work of accumulated gifts and sales on the part of many townsmen and women. Thus

:{
the nunnery of Clairmarais was initially founded in a house outside the walls of Reims and over time received donations of suburban plots from townsmen
..i
'111 and local knights, often small gardens and pieces of vineyard that allowed the
' '
,l'i nuns to construct a veritable neighbourhood around their new community that
Cartulary St-Maclou, fol. 108v-109r. There are several documents ranging from 1257 through 1266 that mention this house and its delineated plot of land. The stables mentioned here were probably part of the comital court as the church of St-Maclou was connected architecturally to the comital palace, In earlier documents, this stable is described as belonging to the deceased lord Peter, once Lord of Jaucourt. Within seven years, this genealogy dropped out of the description of the place. See Cartulary St-Maclou,
fol.lllr.
41 Adam and Agnes are described as citizens of Paris, and it was an official from the

court of the bishop of Paris who drew up the charter. See AD Aube, 23 H313 (1280).
42 Hugolinus Lippens, 'Documenta: Provinciae franciae Chartularium Aliaque Documenta saec. XIII', Archivum franciscanum historicum, 30 (1937): 282-308, at 292-3, no.
8.
43 Carol Symes, 'Out in the Open', in this volume
Anne E. Lester

connected the nunnery with the town." A similar pattern of suburban purchase and donation involved the Cistercian nuns ofVal-des-Vignes, whose convent was initially founded in a house beside the leprosariumof Bar-sur-Aube in the small hamlet of Ailleville, less than two kilometres outside the town. From 1232, when the nunnery first took shape, through the mid-1260s, the women of Val-des­Vignes steadily amassed plots of suburban land and vineyards that connected their house to that of the lepers nearby and to the roadway between Bar-sur­Aube and the nunnery. Here too donors and townspeople created a zone outside the town that was given over to charity and to the women providing care of the lepers and prayers for their benefactors."
Often these new vici were spaces where poor men and women sought alms from those travelling through the towns and where others came to serve and aid the poor, transgressing the boundaries and prejudices associated with the urban margins." These spaces call to mind the area of Bar-sur-Aube that Peter described in his testament, where poor and aged women lived in the same space just beyond the town walls.joining the women serving the hospital of St-Nicholas. Medieval people created these spaces consciously, and continued to produce them through their everyday transactions and cartographic conversations. Indeed, the towns of Champagne, like the tangled tracery of Marseille's streets, 'were made of people and the landmarks that impinged on their consciousness'." The descriptions of charitable locales in property deeds situated their locations within and alongside towns. How individuals moved through these spaces and experienced this landscape, by contrast, is revealed through the final acts that enshrine memories of space, that is, through testaments and final charitable bequests.
44 See for example, AD Aube 3 H 3791 (April 1229), and Gallia Christiana in provincias

ecclesiasticas (Paris,1856-1899) [hereafterGC], 9, col.58, instr.61 (May1222). For
distributa

the changes in the city and its suburban hinterland during the thirteenth century, see Pierre Desportes, Reims et /esremois aux XIW et XIV" siecles(Paris, 1979), pp. 56-73, 183-96,
234-48, 295-308, 322-38.
45 See Anne E. Lester, 'Cares beyond the Walls: Cistercian Nuns and the drre of Lepers in Twelfth-and Thirteenth-Century Northern France', in Emilia Jamroziak and Janet Burton (eds), Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000-1400: Interaction, Negotiation,
and Power (Turnhout,2006), pp. 197-224, at 211-212.
46

for example, in 1256, the nuns of Clairmarais purchased a house in the 'vicus called the Filles-Dieu',that is, in the neighbourhood that developed around the house of repentant women, often reformed prostitutes, known as Filles-Dieu.AD Aube, 3 H 3787 (June 1256). See Desportes, Reims et les rimois, pp. 329-32.
47 Smail, Imaginary Cartographies, p. 14.
' '

140
Cities, Texts andSocial Networks, 400-1500
TESTAMENTS,MEMORYAND SPATIAL PRACTICE
Testamentary records begin to appear in northern France in the final decades of the twelfth century and were used with some regularity by the early thirteenth century.'" Members of the upper aristocracy and the ecclesiastical elite, typically bishops, were the first to employ testaments. Generally these documents were short, staccato texts bestowing properties and rents to only a very few monastic houses and hospitals. But by the middle of the thirteenth century members of the lesser aristocracy and the urban bourgeoisie like Peter began to use such records, which grow far more detailed, to bestow rents, lands and occasionally movable goods to a host of family members and religious and charitable institutions. It is at this time as well that evidence of gifts to the poor proliferates. Indeed, many testators implored those executing their wills to give personally and by hand sums of cash in alms to the poor at particular intervals during the year, or on the anniversary of their deaths." This change in testamentary practice and specifically the notable increase in gifts to the poor and sick along with the proliferation of hospitals and hospices for their care was part of what Andre Vauchez termed the 'revolution de la charite' that took hold in Europe between 1130 and 1260." Most scholarship on medieval wills tends to focus on the wealth distributed and what this says about the testator's social class, gender, personal possessions and habits." Indeed, testaments often appear to be tremendously revealing texts, composed or dictated at a moment of reflection and occasionally in the face of death or crisis when an individual was meant to come to terms with his or her past life, actions, sins and possible redemption. Yet the often-formulaic legal language that the documents required and to which the paid scribe or notary

48 On the appearance of and changes in northern French testaments, see Testaments Saint-Quentinoisdu XIV" siecle,{ed.) Pierre Desportes (Paris, 2003). See also and more generally, Actesacausedemart/ Acts of Last Will (Recueils de la Societe Jean Bodin pour l'Histoire Comparative des Institutions, 59-62) (Brussels, 1992-4); and Philippe Godding, 'La pratique testamentaire dnFlandre au 13e si€cle', Tijdschriftvoor Rechtsgeschiedenis, 58
(1990): 281-300.
49 A comparable phenomenon is discussed by Sharon A. Farmer, Surviving Poverty in
Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideo(ogy,and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca,2002), p. 33.
50 Andre Vauchez, 'Assistance et charite en occident, x1ne-xve siecles', in Vera Barbagli Bagnoli. (ed.), Domande e consumi, livelli e stru.tture XIII -XVIII,Atti della sesta settimana di studio (Florence, 1978), pp. 151-62. 51 See for example, Martha C. Howell, 'Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai', Past and Present, 150 (1996): 3-45; A. van Brandt, 'Mittelalterliche Bilrgertestamente: Neuerschlossene Quellen zur Geschichte der materiellen und geistigen
K ultur', Sitzungsberichteder Heidelberger philosophisch-historische
Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Klasse,(1973) pt. 3, pp. 5-32; and). Chiffoleau, La comptabilie de l'au-dela: /es hommes, la mort
et la religion dans la region d'Avignon ala fin duMayen Age (vers 1320-vers 1480) (Collection de
!'Ecole Fran,aise de Rome, 47) (Rome,1980).

Anne E. Lester
often adhered can frequently belie such personal revelations. Moreover, when
testaments survive in large numbers in notarial registers or municipal archives,
as is the case in northern Italy and Flanders, they have proved to be extremely valuable records for social history because they yield to statistical analysis, revealing how families divided their goods and properties, how municipalities provided for those in need, and how individuals donated to institutions and the needy in their midst." All of this means that most scholars do not read testaments as descriptive texts. Furthermore, little work has been done on the physical experience of urban space as represented in such texts. Yet, in part because of the relative paucity of surviving testaments in the region around Champagne, scholars of northern France have paid attention to their cartographic potential. Bronislaw Geremek noted that Parisian wills make it 'possible to draw up a map giving a picture of the topography of begging in Paris'." Similarly, Sharon Framer has used the extremely detailed bequests of early fourteenth-century Parisian testaments to locate and describe the lives of poor men and women in Paris, articulating a landscape of need that was previously only partially mapped in relation to existing ecclesiastical institutions." The wills that survive from thirteenth-century Champagne delineate a similar landscape of charity and need. As noted in the reading of Peter's will, surviving testaments from Champagne sketch a topography of charity built around small intramural hospitals and domus Dei complemented by extra-mural foundations, typically including one or more leper houses, houses for the poor often dedicated to the Holy Spirit, and (by mid-century) foundations for religious women, particularly Cistercian nuns, who also cared for the poor and sick. This pattern obtains in all of the fair towns and particularly Troyes, Provins and Bar-sur-Aube, as well as in larger urban settlements of the county including Reims, Chateau-Thierry, Ramerupt, Sens, St-Florentin and Auxerre.55 Drawn up in 1257, Count Thibaut V's testament

52 See for example, Steven Epstein, Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150-1250
(Cambridge, MA, 1984); SamuelK. Cohn, The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death:
Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore, 1992); Kathryn L. Reyerson, 'Changes in Testamentary Practice at Montpellier on the Eve of the Black Death', Church History, 47
(1978): 253-69; and Howell, 'Fixing Movables'.
53 Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. Jean Birrell
(Cambridge,1977), p. 187.
54 Farmer (Surviving Poverty,171-2) provides a list of Parisian wills she consulted. For an example and edition of such a text, see Boris Bove, 'Vie et mart d'un couple de marchands-drapiers Parisiens, d'apres les testaments de Jeanne et Etienne Haudri (1309, 1313)', Paris et Ile-de-France Memoires,52 (2000): 19-81. 55 The towns of Champagne were certainly not exceptional in this regard. For Toulouse and sou_thern France, see the essays inJ ohn Hine Mundy, Studiesinthe Ecclesiastical
and Social History of Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars (Aldershot,2006); and for England, see Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge,2006).

142 Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500
articulates this landscape in its clearestinstitutionalform, for the count bestowed
the enormous sum of 10,000 livresin alms to monastic houses, and also gave
between 200 and 50 livres each to all the hospitals and leper houses in his castles
in Champagne, Finally, the count set aside 1000 livresfor the purchase of clothing
and shoes to be distributed to the poor by the will's executors." His testament
charts a cartography of aristocratic charity, but also reveals the experience of
poverty, sickness and need within the county.
If the count's will creates a general template macrocosm of monastic

institutions, hospitals and hospices, men and women of lesser status and more
local horizons made similar provisions in their testaments, creating charitable
microcosms. For example, in 1220, Lady Alix ofVenizy, distributed twenty pounds
in annual rents to monasteries near her familial holdings along the southern
border of Champagne and Burgundy, stretching in an arc from Venizy to Sens
to Ramerupt." These were all locations that encircled Lady Alix's holdings and
they represent her orbit of power, authority and influence, They included her
personal chapels in Venizy and Ramerupt as well as the hospital and leper house
in Ramerupt, Moreover, her testament progresses through these donations as
she would have done, moving along familiar roadways from one town to the
next.
Many of the aristocratic wills that survive from the first decades of the

thirteenth century convey a profound familiarity with the landscape beyond a local lordship or single town. When the knight Hagan ofErvy prepared to depart on the Third Crusade in 1190, he drew up a detailed testament, preparing for the contingency that he might not return from the East." Half of his personal possessions were to go to the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, where he wished to be buried. The monks were also to receive his horse, worth 10 librasas well as 100 solidifor its care (a common aristocratic bestowal).59 After dispensing his green
56 Text edited in Alexandre Teulet, et al. (eds), Layettes du tresor des chartes (Paris, 1863-1909) 3, pp.391-2, no. 4387. For the English translation, see Evergates, Feudal Society, 70-2, no. 53. These houses, among others, are the formal institutions that also appear in the regular records of the royal almoners from the end of the thirteenth century. See Robert-Henri Bautier and Frarn;:ois Millard, 'Les aum.Ones du roi aux maladeries, maisons­Dieu et pauvres E!tablissements du royaume', in Assistance et assistis jusqu'C{1610 (Actes du 97e congers national des societes savants Nantes, 1972) (Paris,1979), pp. 37-105.
57 See Recueil de pieces pour faire suite au Cartulaire general de l'Yonne, ed. Maximilien

Quantin (Paris, 1873), pp. 108-9, no. 245.
58 Text edited in Cartulaire general de l'Yonne, ed. Maximilien Quantin (Auxerre, 1854, 1860), 2, pp. 424-5, no. 420. For the English translation, see Evergates, Feudal Society, 68-9, no. 51.
59 For example Foulques de Warmeriville, chapelian of the church of Reims, stipulated in his 1262 testament: 'Item lego fabrice Remensis ecclesie palefridum meum cum harnesio, ita quad de dicta palefrido repetentur debita que pro dicta ecclesia michi debentur', in Louis Paris, Histoire de l'abbaye d:Avenay, 2 vols (Paris, 1879), vol. 2, pp. 140-2, no. 101. Similarly, Richard of Elmham, canon of St-Martin-le-Grande London (d. 1228): 'legavi
Anne E. Lester

silk quilt, coverlet, sheets and a pillow to Canon of Ervy (possibly a brother), his thoughts turned to charity.'° He gave 100 solidi to Pontigny's porter for masses to be sung in his memory and 20 solidifor buying bread for distribution to the poor; 20 solidito the leper house of Ervy and to the hospital of the count of Troyes, as well as to the four monastic houses in the town, and 5 solidito each ofTroyes's hospitals, Leaving Troyes in the text of his will,heading south, Hagan gave 20 solidito the twenty leper houses on the road between Troyes and Pontigny and from there continued bestowing small sums on the priests and deans of Sommeval, Auxerre, and 10 solidieach to the forty rural churches in the castellanies ofErvy and St-Florentin. Hagan's testament is a portrait of a knight's piety as he weaves his way from town to town, with full knowledge of all those in need in the rural interstices between the familiar urban landscapes. Aristocratic wills make clear that charity and need were not exclusively urban phenomena; rather there were arteries along which alms flowed in regular and consistent patterns of aristocratic largess. These bequests followed the same roadways that ensured the Champagne fair towns could boast the cloth, spices, credit markets and merchant concourse that made them a vital part of the economic landscape of northern France. In this sense, a small network of charities that barely took institutional form provided alms for the poor and sick while also ensuring spiritual succour for those who may have compromised their own salvation." Indeed the margins and the centre were not so far apart, and were dependent upon each for their prosperity,
By the middle of the century, a far more nuanced and complex charitable landscape is discernable from the details ofaristocratic and bourgeois testaments, which provided for well-established hospitals and ecclesiastical institutions but also frequently evokes the many more local, rural and suburban hospices, domus Dei and infirmaries." Perhaps most indicative of this was the development of the monastic institution of the porter or the porter's gate. By the 1220s and 1230s, the Cistercian abbeys of Pontigny, Vauluisant and Clairvaux, once characterized by their isolation in the 'deserted' rural hinterland, all boasted gates that welcomed an expanding population of the poor." Charitable gifts were bestowed
Deo et beate Marie et beato Martino corpus meum cum palefrido meo ad operationem ecclesie'. Edited in Nicholas Vincent, 'The will of Richard of Elmham (d. 1228)', Historical Research,
70 (1997): 110-20, at 118.
60 Evergates,The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, p. 77. 61 On the idea of the city as a locale of moral corruption and economic indulgence in tension with the simplicity of the rural hinterland, see Gerald B. Guest, 'The Prodigal's
Journey: Ideologies of Self and City in the Gothic Cathedral', Speculum, 81 (2006): 35-75.
62 Often testaments from the seigneurial and urban milieu furnish the only reference to these small locales of charity. See the comment in Frarn;ois-Olivier Touati,Archives de la Iepre: Atlas des liproseries entre Loire et Mame au moyen dge (Paris,1996), pp. 35-6.
63 On the practice of Cistercian hospitality, see Jutta Maria Berger, Die Geschichte der GastfreundschaftimHochmittelalterlichenMOnchtum:Die Cistercienser (Berlin,1999 ); and Julie
Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500
144
upon these communities specifically for the abbeys' porters, who were charged with using rents in cash to feed and clothe the poor. The porter of Glairvaux fed the poor from two great copper cooking pots each at the abbey's gate." An annual income from tithes allowed the porter to purchase new shoes and cloaks sufficient to clothe eighty paupers each year." In keeping with Geremek's suggestion, a corridor of begging and poverty comes to light that connected the rural and the urban landscape of Champagne. These gifts also conjure the presence and experience of the poor as a population cold, hungry and consl:'antly
in motion. 66
Donations to the gates of these Cistercian monasteries, like donations to hospitals and leper houses in towns and their suburbs, in effect created a new charitable landscape. Without founding a new hospital or religious house, certain acts of charity nevertheless produced new spaces at monastic and city gates and in parish or church doorways that came to function like institutions. This served to realign and recreate familiar spaces. Similarly, many testaments from mid-century make provision for the construction or repair of churches and chapels and thus contributed in concrete ways to the creation of the urban and suburban landscape, suggesting as well the experience of such spaces as only partially built, incomplete and thus imagined. This was not only an imagined cartography but also an imagined skyline, with parish churches and friars' convents slowly raising their spires and belfries skyward in campaigns that could take generations to complete. Gifts were regularly set aside in the testaments of townsmen and women and urban canons for these projects. Thus Hodeardis, the wife of Jacques Fredeline of Sens, gave generously to the monks of St-Paul in Sens, where she elected to be buried, but she also made a modest donation to the St-Maurice, a parish church just outside of Sens, probably her own parish." By contrast, in 1262, Foulques de Warmeriville, chaplain of Reims, gave his palfrey
Kerr, 'Cislerdan Hospitality in the Later MiddleAges', in Janet Burton and Karen Stober (eds),MonasteriesandSociety in the British Islesin the I.ater Middle Ages (Woodbridge,2008), pp. 25-39.
"' The great pots were a gift of Lady Helysende, Countess of Bar-sur-Seine, and Lady Alice of Chacenay, and many other men and women, who joined together in this donation in 1226. See Marie-Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville 1 ltudes sur l'ita.tintifrieur des abbayes cisterciennes,et principalement de Ciairvaux,au Xlr et au xm~si¾cle(Paris, 1858; reprinted Hildesheim,1976), p. 368, no. 21 (1226).
65 Elizabeth of Chauteavillan gave the porter of Clairvaux the tithes of her estate in 1228specificaHy for this purpose. See d'Arbois de Jubainvtlle, Btu.dessur l'Ctatinterieur,pp. 370-1, no.47 (1228).
66 On the impermanence of poor relief and charity, see Gerem.ek,The Margins of Society, pp. 187-210; and Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge,1987), pp, 237-88.
67 FrancisMolard, 'Testaments aux archives de l'Yonne•, Bulletin du comitides tmvaux historique.set scientifeiues: sectwn d'histoire et de philology, (1884): 223 76, at 245-6, no, 16 (September1254).
Anne E. tester 145
and harness to pay down the construction costs of the cathedral of Reims, but he also gave the standard 20 solidi for the fabric of the parish church of St-Nicaise, and 100 solidifor the fabricof the Franciscan friars' church in Reims."
Common also were specific and often lavish bequests in testaments for the construction of personal chapels where the donor would be buried and have masses sung in his or her honour. Nearly three decades after the nunnery was founded, in 1261, Briard and his wife Agnes, goldsmiths and citizens of Reims, gave 100 librasto the Cistercian nuns for the construction of a chapel in the nuns' church." Perhaps indicative of a growing bourgeois fashion forpersonal chapels created through testamentary gifts, Jacques de Dampierre of St·Quiriace, a wealthy townsman of Provins and his wife Ermesende, founded a new chapel in the collegiate church in honour of Saint Louis (d. 1270) and provided for its construction and maintenance in their testaments between 1292 and 1302." Displaying superior planning and foresight, the lady Mabil!e de Bessi gave the Cisterdan monks of Reigny 100 solidito celebrate an annual mass in her honour and elected to have her tomb built in the new chapel still under construction. But, she explained, 'if she should die before the chapel is finished', she gave instructions to be buried 'in the cloister ofReigny' and then, when the chapel was finally completed, she implored the monks to 'find her body, and rebury it in the new chapel at the abbey's gate', 71 That was her imagined final resting place, and it was an ideal that would withstand the contingencies of new construction.
Many shared Mabille's desire to act after death, and the vast majority of
surviving testaments from champagne resonate with a discordance that is
particularly striking: as individuals provided for their flnal rest, they also
provided for others to stay in motion as representatives of themselves, keeping
their personal piety alive. Their gifts produced an ephemeral and ever-changmg
landscape of charity. Like many testators, Foulques, the chaplain of Reims,
instructed the three men who executed his testament to 'use 40 librasto buy
68
Paris,Histoirede l'abbaye d'Avenay,vol.2, p. 141.
~4 GC, 9, col 58, instr. 61 (May 1222) records Briard and Agnes's original foundation
gift. In 1261 waiter Angimeris and Radulph called borengiers,citizens of Reims and
executors of Bria rd and Agnes's will, came before Pontius de Parnaco, official of the court
of Lord Otto, Cardinal archdeacon of Reims,to record again the contents of the couple's
testaments, Troves, AD Aube, 3 H 3788(April 1261). ·
10 The couf)le'sseparate testaments are noted in Bautier,'L'exercke de lajurldiction
gracieuse en Champagne', pp, 53-55, See also the Fonds of the HOtel-Dieu of Provins,
Provins, Bibliotheque munidpale 87, no. 8 (1303) forErmesende's testament. I would like
to thank Adam Davis for passing along this reference and a photo of the document itself,
Fora similar testamentary foundation, see William. ChesterJordan, 'Honoring Saint Louis
in a Small Town',Jouma1ofMedievalHistory,30 (2004): 263-77. Seealso,FrancisMo lard, 'Du
culte de saint Louisdans le departement de l'Yonne',Armuairestatistiquedudepartementde
l'Yonne,53 (1889): 168-77.
11 Molard, 'Testaments aux archives de l'Yonne', pp. 246-8, no.17,

146 Cities, Texts and Social Networks, 400-1500
bread and shoes to be distributed by their hands to the poor of the city and diocese of Reims'." And if there was anything left from his goods after his will had been carried out, all that remained should be given out 'to poor and pious persons where they gather in the city and diocese of Reims' .73 When Etienne Becquard, the archbishop of Sens, considered how he would care for the poor of his vast archdiocese he also saw them gathered in urban spaces, in 'his' cities and towns throughout his great province. His testament is a sprawling map of
hospitals, monasteries, nunneries and houses of canons provisioned with sums
to sing anniversary masses and to recite Psalms for his salvation in a seemingly endless cacophony. After provisioning Filles-Dieu,beguines, lepers, friars and sick men and women in the domus Dei throughout the countryside, he turned to the poor, giving 100 librasto purchase wool cloaks and shoes to be distributed to paupers and those in great need in the towns that lay just outside of Etampes, Blois and Corbeil; and another 200 librasto be given out among the poor of 'our towns' of Briennone, Nailly, Villier-Louis and Bligny-en-Othe, which encircled the city of Sens." These acts' of post-mortem charity were carried out by the executors of his will, but whether these goods were distributed in front of parish churches, in particular vici, or before a local poor house is lost to us, only the
suburban town names persist.

The transient nature oflocal charity is made clear through a short descriptive clause in Margue de Lens's will. In 1254, this bourgeois woman of St-Quentin, a town north of Champagne but still imbricated in its charitable topography, gave alms to all the Cistercian nunneries of the county, as well as sums of money to the poor of her parish, to the beguines and lepers, and to the sick and poor women and abandoned children. But she also gave over the use of her house for twenty years to serve as a hospice for the poor. The house was provisioned with eight upholstered beds and ten measures of wheat, paid annually. Three women, her friends, were given custody of the house and charged with caring for the poor during the twenty-year period. She gave them an additional 200 librasto
I , maintain the house and to minister to their needs, after which time the property
I,,
I;:I
':':,
11,
"'
1
72

11 'Item lego quadragihta libras fortes ad emendos pannos et sotulares distribuendos pauperibus civitatis et dyoce'sis Remensis per manus executorum meorum', Paris, Histoire de
·;!!
It
l'abbaye d'Avenay, vol.2, p. 142.

73 '[E]tvolo quad si de bonis meis ultra predicta aliquid fuerit residuum, quad illud totum

1:
residuum distribuatur per man us dictomm executorum pauperibus personis et piis locis in civitate
ii
;, et dyocesi Remensi constitutes', Paris, Histoire de l'abbaye d'Avenay, vol. 2, p. 142.
"
:I 74 '[L]egamus centem libras turonensium, scilicet sexaginta ad emendos burellos, et quadraginta ad emendos sotulares, distribuendos pauperibus et magis indigentibus villamm ... per executores nostros vel ab eis deputatos', Molard, 'Testaments aux archives de l'Yonne',
:!
pp. 263-74, no. 28, at pp. 269-70. The second grouping of towns he refers to as 'vii/arum nostramm'.
Anne E. Lester

was to revert to her heirs." This record of a temporary poor house certainly has parallels in the towns and cities of northern France and beyond. Th_ese w~re locations -mainly urban and suburban houses -known to those who hved with and among the poor, who moved through these neighbourhoods and understood their domestic spaces and their genealogies.
The charitable landscape of Champagne was built within its towns and cities, but it also extended far beyond the urban walls and suburban plots. Indeed, charity in Champagne functioned through the creation of and reliance upon a network of well-travelled routes and suburban neighbourhoods that provided for those whom the towns could not. Moreover, because Champagne was a region dependant on the rotating fairs of Provins, Troyes, Bar-sur-Aube and Lagny, its inhabitants were constantly on the move, familiar with the roads that stretched between Pontigny and Troyes, Ramerupt and Bar-sur-Aube, and during the second half of the thirteenth century between the fair towns and the royal capital of Paris. Merchants and creditors from Douai, Ypres, Cologne, Genoa and Siena annually traversed the county. Charity and mendicancy were as interconnected as trade and travel. As the inhabitants of Champagne, particularly the citizens of its towns, described their worlds in mundane documents of practice they detailed a charitable landscape of interlocking concentric circles. Intramural urban hospitals, parish churches, houses of recluses, and (later) convents of friars were augmented by an ever growing suburban ring populated by Cistercian nunneries, leper houses, hospitals and communities of the poor and aged. Champagne and its towns thus suggest a different model for urban growth and mobility, in contrast to the large metropolitan hubs that Paris or London would become in the centuries to follow.
The charitable landscape of the county reveals the workings and the spatial

practices of a much larger and more fluid urban zone, characterized by a network
of towns, cities and suburbs that functioned as an integrated and inter-connected
whole through which people travelled frequently and with ease. The texts
generated by the inhabitants of Champagne's towns described and produced
urban spaces, quantifying them, locating them in relation to other structures
and inhabitants, and mapping them within a known and accepted cartography.
Testaments suggest the ways in which men and women moved through and within
such spaces. Indeed, a common feature of the Champagne wills is their ability to



evoke movements that 'weave places together', movements that in De Ce~teau's
75 'Legavit etiam post decessum suum domum suam ad hospitandum pauperes per viginti annos et octo lectos estofatos et decem modios frumenti annuos imperpetuum quos tenebit dicta domus per dictos viginti annos; quibus annis viginti completis, dicta domuset dicti decem modii redibunt ad heredes ... Voluit etiam quad amici sui ponerent tres mulieres in dicta domo pro ipsa custodienda per dictos XX annos. Legavit etiam ducentas libras pro retinenda dicta domo et pro ministrandis necessariis per dictos viginti an nos de consilio amicorum suomm',Testaments Saint­Quentinois,pp. 124-7; no. 44, at p. 126.
148
Cities, Texts and Social Networks. 400-1500
w_ords 'form one of those real systems whose existence ... makes up the city'." Distinct from the maps that plot institutions and routes in space, testaments ~llowfor the re"?nstruction of ~haritable actions and mobility. They suggest 'the act ofpassmg by and the practices of alms-giving and the operations of care and ~omfort that are no longer visible. The experiences of urban space were defined Ill part by what transpired _atand along their margins and interstices. Descriptive clauses m charters and wills demand that their readers not forget that urban space was mad~ ~nd used, that charity was dynamic, changing and responsive, and that as fugitive as one hfewas, an individual's memories and final impulse for chanty could evoke the spaces and ideals of the larger social body.

'I
11
r,
.i
ii
i l 76
De Certeau, The Pructic, ofEverydC!J Life,p. 97.
chapter 7





Anger and Spectacle in Late Medieval Rome:
Gauging Emotion in Urban Topography

Joelle Rollo-Koster and Alizah Holstein
For Romans, the fourteenth century was an especially trying time. The papacy
departed for Avignon in 1304, robbing the city of its esteemed status as epicentre
of the Christian world and depriving it of the practical comforts of a thriving
economy. In the years that the papacy ruled from Avignon, Romans mourned
the loss ofprosperity, the ensuing decline in the standard of!iving, and the city's
relegation to a backwater. This despair was felt even by many non-Romans, who
from afar lamented Rome's pitiable condition.' Yet hope, too, was an important
ingredient in the political potion, as Romans put forth differing visions of the
future of their city. Throughout the fourteenth century, the most successful social and political movements in Rome were those that offered to reinstate the city in the larger Italian and European political arenas, and to re-endow it with the symbolic importance it had for centuries enjoyed. Whether this meant convincing the pope to return to his throne at St Peter's, or reaching back to a more distant memory of Rome as the seat of empire, the city never lacked for ambitious designs.
With which emotions, then, did Rome's inhabitants greet the major political changes of their day, exhilarating or disappointing as they might have been? Underlying this are more general methodological questions: can we find a way to test Romans' responses to particular events? And framed in an even broader sense, what tools can modern historians utilize to assess the emotions expressed

1 Dante famously depicted Rome as a widow mourning the loss of her husband, the Empire: 'Vienia.veder la tua Roma che piagne / Vedova e sola, e die notl:£ chiama; / 'Cesare mio, perche non m 'accompagne?', Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia; Purgatorio,ed. ~atalino Sapegno (Milan, 2004), Book 6, 11. 112-14 (p. 66). The jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato described the political situation of mid-fourteenth-century Rome as a res monstruosa: 'Est et septim-us modus regiminis, quim.mcest in civitatR Romana,pessimus,Ibi enim sunt multi tyranni per diversas rngiones adeo fortes, quod unus contra altum non prevalet ...Quod regimen Aristoteles non posuit est enim res monstruosa. Quidenim, si quis videret unum corpus habens unumcaput commune debile et multa alia capita communia fortiora. ilio et invicem sibi adversantfa?Certe monstrum esset Appellatur ergo hoc regimen monstnwsum', Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Tmctatus de regimine civitatis,ed. Diego Quaglione in Politica e diritto nel Trecento italiano:il He tyranno' di Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1314-1357)
(Florence. 19B3), ll. 65-74 (p.152),


4444444444



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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix Contributors X Editor's Preface and Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xv Introduction: The Moment and Memory of the York Massacre of 1190 1
Sethina Watson Part I: The Events of March 1190
1.         Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York: a Royal 15 Citadel, the Citizens and the Jews Of York
Sarah Rees Jones
2.         Prelude and Postscript to the York Massacre: Attacks in East 43 Anglia and Lincolnshire, 1190
Joe Hillaby
3.         William of Newburgh, Josephus and the New Titus 57
Nicholas Vincent
4.         1190, William Longbeard and the Crisis of Angevin England 91
Alan Cooper
5.         The Massacres of 1189-90 and the Origins of the Jewish 106 Exchequer, 1186-1226
RobertC. Stacey Part II: Jews among Christians in Medieval England
6.         Faith, Fealty and Jewish 'infideles' in Twelfth-Century England 125
Paul Hyams
7.         The' Archa' System and its Legacy after 1194 148
RobinR. Mundill
Contents 
8.  Making Agreements, with or without Jews, in Medieval England and Normandy Thomas Roche  163 
9.  An Ave Maria in Hebrew: the Transmission of Hebrew Learning from Jewish to Christian Scholars in Medieval England Eva De Visscher  174 
10. The Talmudic Community of Thirteenth-Century Pinchas Roth and Ethan Zadoff  England  184 
11. Notions of Jewish Service in Twelfth-and Thirteenth-Century England Anna Sapir Abulafia  204 
Part III: Representations 
12. Egyptian Days: From Passion to Exodus in the Representation of Twelfth-Century Jewish-Christian Relations Heather Blurton  222 
13. 'De Judaea, muta et surda': Jewish Conversion in Gerald of Wales' s Life of Saint Remigius Matthew Mesley  238 
14. Dehumanizing the Jew at the Funeral of the Virgin Mary in the Thirteenth Century (c. 1170-c. 1350) CarleeA. Bradbury  250 
15. Massacre and Memory: Ethics and Method in Recent Scholarship on Jewish Martyrdom Hannah Johnson  261 
16.  The Future of the Jews of York Jeffrey Cohen  278 
Afterword: Violence, Memory and the Traumatic Middle Ages Anthony Bale  294 
Bibliography  305 
Index  342 
viii 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps
1.         Map of York, c. 1190 xx
Figures
1.        
'The Funeral of the Virgin', the chapter house at York Minster. 255 © Dean and Chapter of York: Reproduced by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter and Hilary Maxon.

2.        
'The Monkeys' Funeral', detail from the Pilgrimage Window, 258 the north aisle of the nave of York Minster. © Dean and Chapter of York: Reproduced by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter and David O'Connor.

3.        
'Lady Chapel Window', from the south side of the choir 259 clerestory of York Minster. Reproduced by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of York. © Dean and Chapter of York and W. J. Green.



.

Sethina Watson
happen when a public street became the site of a religious procession or
during periods such as Lent, Easter or the build-up to crusade. At these mo­ments a space could become timeless, as the boundaries between past, pre­sent and even eternity were elided. Then, the gaze of a known unbeliever became a vehicle through which participants could observe, and perhaps doubt, themselves. The problem of living, and believing, in the presence of the other raised questions of faith, identity, oaths, loyalty, leadership, and neighbourliness. As medieval chroniclers recognized, these may be played out locally or nationally but they challenged both Jews and Christians to see themselves in cosmic terms.
1



Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
a Royal Citadel, the Citizens and the Jews of York


Sarah Rees Jones
Barrie Dobson's wide-ranging and richly-detailed study of the massacre of the Jews of York in March 1190 remains the definitive history of that terrible event. 1 Most importantly he demonstrated that the massacre did not mark the end of a Jewish community in the city but rather occurred near its begin­ning: very soon after their first settlement under Josee and Benedict of York in the 1170s and 1180s. The return of Jews to York after 1190, and the new Jewish community which flourished in the early thirteenth century, was the subject of later papers by Dobson, now reprinted in a single volume. 2
Here we do not try to cover the same ground. Where Dobson' s history focussed on the Jews of York and the national context for the events in March 1190, this chapter deals in more depth with the city of York itself, both as a place and as a community in the later twelfth century. Modern memoriali­zation of the massacre of March 1190 has become indelibly associated with Clifford's Tower, at the foot of which there is now a plaque of commemora­tion for the victims of 1190. Yet this stone structure was built some fifty years after the massacre and named another eighty years after that: it was not the structure in which the massacre occurred. The stone tower does stand on the site of a previous wooden castle keep, which stood on top of a smaller earth motte at the centre of a castle first constructed by William the Conqueror in 1068-69.3 It is usually assumed that this was the site of the mass suicide and murder of the Jews in March 1190. However scholars have long known that even this is simply a best guess for identifying the royal' arx' at the centre of William of Newburgh's narrative, and other interpretations have been sug­
1 Dobson, JMY.
2 JCME.
3 RCHME, City of York, II, 57-89; T. P. Cooper, York: The Story of its Walls, Bars and Castles

(London, 1904); T. P. Cooper, The History of the Castle of York from its Foundation to the Present
Day (London, 1911}; King's Works, II, 889-994; J.Clark, Clifford's Tower and the Castle of York
(London, 2010).

>

Sarah Rees Jones
gested. 4 It is clear that the story of York as the place of the massacre is more complex than the image of this single later solid stone structure.
The history of York as a city and community in the twelfth century has been little studied. In part this is because of the paucity of evidence. Archae­ological work has focussed primarily on the city before the Norman Con­quest, or on the period after 1300 from which standing buildings survive in abundance. Documentary sources are also problematic. No civic archives survive before the 1260s and references to York in the records of royal gov­ernment do not easily provide a narrative of local people, places or events. Their focus is primarily on royal administration and so, too, is that of the chroniclers, such as Newburgh and Howden. The majo.r local documentary sources for York in the twelfth century are charters recording land transac­tions in the city, which survive as originals and as copies in later cartularies. 5 This chapter will integrate the evidence of these charters with the better­known chronicles and royal records before 1200.
York and its inhabitants are even neglected in narratives of the 'York Mas­sacre', largely due to the perception of them as both unimportant in and dis­engaged from the events of 1190. This can in part be traced back to the state­ment of William of Newburgh that 'the more noble and substantial citizens of the town, fearing the dangers of the king's reaction, cautiously declined to take part in such madness', a statement which makes an even greater im­pression when it is contrasted with his clear apportionment of blame to the citizens of Lincoln for the attack upon the Jewish community there. 6 As a result attention has instead focussed on those whom Newburgh did blame for the York attack; the YorkshJre knights Richard Malebisse, William Percy, Marmaduke Darrell and Philip de Fauconberg. 7 However, as Alan Cooper reminds us, it was not only knights, but also working men, youths and coun­trymen whom Newburgh blamed; only the more substantial citizens of York were exonerated by him. 8
This focus on knights as the real leaders of an unruly 'mob' in 1190 should be treated cautiously for it was almost conventional by the later twelfth century to represent cities as a civilizing influence against the endemic via­
4 Vincent, in this volume (p. 75); P. V. Addyman, 'Excavations at Baile Hill, York', Chateau Gail­
lard. Etudes de Castellogie Medievale 5 (1972), 7-12 (pp. 7-10); P. V. Addyman and J. Priestley,
'Baile Hill, York', ArchaeologicalJournal134 (1977), 115-56, and see below p. 32. 5 Some 2,500 charters survive for York in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: S. Rees Jones,
Medieval Title Deeds for the City of York, 1080-1530 (Colchester: UK History Data Archive,
1996), SN:3527; S. Rees Jones, The Database of Medieval Title Deeds for the City of York: A Guide
for Users, University of York Occasional Papers in History 3 (York, 1996). A book length study of
these materials is forthcoming: S. Rees Jones, Medieval York: The Making of a City, 1068-1350
(Oxford University Press). 6 WN as translated in Dobson, JMY, p. 32. For Lincoln see Hillaby in this volume. 7 Dobson, JMY, p. 33. 8 Cooper, below p. 95.
Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
lence of the knightly classes. 9 This rhetoric was influenced by real politics. Henry II (1154-89) and his sons Richard I (1189-99) and John (1199-1216) tried to build partnerships with major towns in the provinces throughout the Angevin realms in France as well as England in order to restrain the lo­cal power of the aristocracy. 10 In the north this meant building a relationship with the citizens of York and eroding the influence of local barons such as Roger de Mowbray and William, count of Aumale and earl of York, who had taken control of the city and its region during the wars of Stephen's reign (1135-54). As the chief city of the north, York was exceptionally important to the crown. It was the only city in the region under royal control and its strategic importance was pivotal in the wars between the kings of England and Scotland. The crown could not afford to alienate its leading citizens, but building a relationship with them was difficult too. This complex, often strained, relationship between crown and city provides a critical context for understanding both the arrival and reception of Jews in York.
The scale of the ambitions of William I, William II and Henry I in rela­tion to York and their transformative impact on the city have not been fully appreciated. We know that substantial changes were made to other towns, such as the construction of the French borough in Nottingham or of the new town centre in Norwich. 11 In the cases of Lincoln and Exeter their elevation as new cathedral sees resulted in their major redevelopment. 12 In contrast, established interpretations of the topography of York argue that the medie­val street plan was largely established before the Conquest, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, when a new pattern of markets and streets was su­perimposed upon the older Roman town plan.13 After the Norman conquest two castles were constructed and York Minster was reconstructed on a new alignment by the first Norman archbishop of York, but it is usually argued that the overall street plan of the city remained largely unaltered. 14 However both new evidence, and a reappraisal of older knowledge, suggests that the Norman refashioning of York was much more extensive than this and that it reflected the ambition of the first Norman kings to tum York into a true royal capital in the North. This ambition ultimately proved unsustainable. Nevertheless it produced a set of consequences that were instrumental not
9 P. Godding and J. Pycke, 'Le Paix de Valenciennes de 1114: Commentaire et edition critique',
Bulletin de la Commission Royale pour la publication des anciennes lois et ordonnances de Belgique
29 (1981), 1-142. 10 M. Aurel!, The Plantagenet Empire, 1154-1224 (Harlow, 2007), pp. 194-5. 11 D. M. Palliser, T. R. Slater and E. P. Dennison, 'The Topography of Towns 600-1300', in The
Cambridge Urban History of Britain I: 600-1540, ed. D. M. Palliser (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 153­
86 (p. 160); B. Ayers, 'The Urban Landscape', in Medieval Norwich, ed . C. Rawcliffe and R.
Wilson (London, 2004), pp. 1-28. 12 M. Jones, D. Stocker and A Vince, The City by the Pool: Assessing the Archaeology of the City of
Lincoln (Oxford, 2003). l3 R. Hall, English Heritage Book of Viking Age York (London, 1994). 14 ibid .; D. M. Palliser, Domesday York, Borthwick Papers 78 (York, 1990).

p

Sarah Rees Jones
only to the arrival of a Jewish community in York but also to the reception of that community by local burgesses.
The Norman transformation of York addressed the problem for the crown that before 1068 there was no direct royal presence in the city. Is The first kings of England, from the reign of Edgar (959-75) to that of Edward the Confessor (1042-66), never visited York. Instead lordship over the city and its region was delegated to the archbishops of York and the earls of Northumbria. The ancient and extensive lordship of the archbishop of York centred on the two collegiate churches of St Peter (York Minster) and Christ Church in Mick­legate, which were located respectively in the centre of the former Roman fortress and in the 'colonia', or civilian town, on either side of the river Ouse. This lordship probably originated with the foundation in the seventh cen­tury of York Minster around which a new town slowly developed outside the Roman walls, while the church also acquired estates incorporating much of York's rural hinterland. The earldom of Northumbria was established in the later tenth century and appears to have been endowed with urban and rural estates near York which were carved from those of the church. By the mid eleventh century its principal residence was in Bootham where there was also a new church dedicated to St Olave. In 1066 the combined rural estates of the Minster and the earl extended across most of York's immedi­ate rural hinterland within a radius of about fifteen miles. In 1086 many of these villages also paid geld with the city and it was only later that they were assigned to separate hundreds or wapentakes. I6 There is no evidence for a royal residence in the city during the eleventh century and the crown con­trolled no rural manors close to York from which such an urban residence could have been supported.

This situation was dramatically altered after the Conquest. The first Nor~ man kings transformed York into a royal capital as destruction in the years of conquest was followed by extensive redevelopment. William I built two castles in 1068-69, one on either side of the river Ouse, and his decisive sup­pression of fierce local resistance resulted in both the devastation of many houses in the city and a wholesale replacement of local landowners with Frenchmen. The 'harrying of the north' in the winter of 1069-70 extended into the countryside this policy of the appropriation of estates through which the king himself emerged as the largest new landowner in the county together with a small number of Norman barons.17 The first Norman kings also constructed a royal house (' domus regis') in York. This occupied a very large site on the west bank of the Ouse close to the major approach road to
l5 The following section discusses briefly materials which are laid out much more fully in Rees Jones, Medieval York. See also S. Rees Jones, 'Property, Tenure and Rents: Some Aspects of the Topography and Economy of Medieval York', 2 vols. (unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of York, 1987), I, 81-133.
16 Domesday Book, 298 b-d.
17 P. Dalton, Conquest, Anarchy and Lordship: Yorkshire, 1066-1154 (Cambridge, 1994).

Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
the town used by royal visitors.Is It is probable that it occupied most of the area (some 300 m by 100 m) within the Roman walls of the former 'colonia' to the west of modern Tanner Row, and it perhaps extended as far as the banks of the Ouse. It had a chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene and was used for meetings of the county court: the custodian of the York royal house was required to provide benches for these meetings and wax for the court's use was stored in the chapeL I9 It was regarded as one of the most important

royal houses in England: in the early 1130s the hereditary  custodian  of the 
house  was  granted a fee of 5d. per day, just 2d. less than the keeper  of the 
palace at Westminster. 20 

Such a royal residence needed to be supplied and much of the town and the surrounding countryside was turned into a supporting economic infra­structure. A royal larder was situated on the east bank of the river Ouse. It was close to the site of the original Roman river crossing, which may have survived in use as the most direct route between the royal house, the larder and the Minster. 2I The larder occupied a defensible site just within the walls of the Roman garrison, which at that time were still standing to a height of several metres. 22 The larder was also associated with an open area known as 'Arkilltofts', just possibly the site of the former residence of the Anglo­Scandinavian thegn, Arnketil, who was among the leaders of resistance to the Conquest in 1068 and 1069. Royal larderers sought to control local mar­kets and Arkilltofts may well have developed into a marketplace under their authority, later becoming the civic market place, the 'Thursday Market', in the thirteenth century (now St Sampson's Square). 23 The larderer's author­ity also extended over the city's summer fair ground which was outside the walls and was shared with the archbishops. 24

Norman authority over the site of the fair ground was further marked by a chapel dedicated to St Giles, a new cult brought to England by the French around 1100. Other new churches were dedicated to saints popular with the new Anglo-Norman and French elite, including the churches of St Helen (the mother of Constantine) in Stonegate and St Sampson, which were built near to the royal larder and in close proximity to the vestigial remains of the
18        RCHME, City of York III, 53; King's Works I, 42-7.
19        EYC I, pp. 405-6, nos. 525-6, whose date is corrected in Rolls of the Justices in Eyre: Being the Rolls of Pleas and Assizes for Yorkshire in 3 Henry III (1218-19), ed. D. M. Stenton, Selden Soci­ety 56 (London, 1937), p. 420.

20 Rolls of the Justices in Eyre, pp. 419-20; RCHME, City of York III, 53; King's Works I, 82. 21 R. B. Pugh, 'Prisons and Gallows', in VCH, City of York, pp. 491-8 (pp. 494-7). For the river crossing see below, pp. 21-2.
22        BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fol. 115r; York Archaeological Trust, York Archive Gazetteer, '44, Coney Street/Feasegate, York. Site Code: 1998.2 YORYM, SE60305182', http:/ /www.iadb. co.uk/ gaz/ gaz_details.php?SitelD=l055 [accessed 1 July 2008].
23 Charters of the Vicars Choral of York Minster, ed. N. Tringham, 2 vols., YAS, Rec. Ser. 148 and 156 (Leeds, 1993-2002), I, 33-4. 24 H. Richardson, Medieval Fairs and Markets of York (York, 1961).
.

Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
Sarah Rees Jones

Roman fortress walls and gates. 25 St Giles was particularly associated with hunting and the royal larderers also policed and defended the king's right to hunting in local forests. Indeed, in one of the most radical transformations of the landscape of kingship in England, the entire countryside surrounding York within a radius of fifteen miles had been turned into royal forest by around 1100.26 Hunting was tremendously important to the display of king­ship in the twelfth century. It conveyed simultaneously territorial, military and economic dominance. So this transformation of the landscape in par­ticular was indicative of the early Norman kings' ambition for York.
The economic infrastructure for the royal house was further enhanced by the flooding of the river Foss and the creation of a royal fishpool in the city centre (also with a royal custodian) just upstream from the new castle in Nessgate (which was renamed Castlegate). 27 The tenants of the crown's nearest larger rural manors, at Boroughbridge some twenty miles upriver from York, were alsofreed from all tolls on the passage of their ships into the city. This was a privilege which later brought them into dispute with the city but it may originally have been intended to facilitate the supply of the royal establishment in York.28
The growth of the royal presence in York was at the expense of the earls of Northumbria. By 1086 the city itself was formally divided for administra­tive purposes between the fee of the archbishop and the fee of the king. The king's fee included all commercial districts alongside the two river fronts in the city which archaeological excavations have shown to have been urban­ized over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. There is no refer­ence to the earl's estate in York in 1086 because it was at that time in the process of being transferred to a new Norman foundation, the Benedictine monastery of St Mary. Indeed the transformation of York's religious insti­tutions further underpinned the new Norman colonization. In addition to the foundation of new parish churches and chapels, a number of major new religious foundations were endowed by the Norman kings and their French followers. The Minster was rebuilt and its community reformed while Christ Church in Micklegate was refounded as a Benedictine priory, now depend­ent on a French mother house and dedicated to Holy Trinity. A number of lesser religious houses and hospitals were established in the city's suburbs, including a convent for nuns in Clementhorpe. Most importantly, the hospi­tal of St Peter (later rededicated to St Leonard) was established on a promi­
25 'The Parish Churches', in VCH, City of York, pp. 365-404; RCHME, City of York V, 20a, 44a.
The church of St Sampson is constructed on top of the Roman wall. The church of St Helen

is constructed just within the site of the southern entrance to the former Roman fortress. 26 VCH, East Riding III, 1-28; VCH, City of York, p. 501; C.R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England(Leicester, 1979), p. 21. 27 S. Rees Jones, with C. Daniell, 'The King's Pool', in Medieval Urbanism in Coppergate: Refining a Townscape, ed. R. Hall and K. Hunter-Mann (York, 2002), pp. 696-8. 28 Rolls of the Justices in Eyre, p. 392.
nent site within the Roman fortress area not far from the royal larder and occupying an equally impressive corner of the surviving fortress walls. 29 St Leonard's, in particular, was patronized by the earliest Norman kings and was one of the largest hospitals in England, on a par with the great hospital of St Bartholomew in London. The hospital's cartulary later celebrated Wil­liam I and II as its re-founders but memorialized King Stephen as a particu­larly important patron, together with many of the most prominent Yorkshire barons, knights and burgesses of early to mid twelfth-century York.30
Finally it is likely that the city defences were incorporated into this re­construction of the city. The overall alignment of major sections of the de­fences may have originated in the Roman period but it is clear that the actual defences were frequently reworked, resulting eventually in long sections of the Roman walls being buried in al} earth embankment with (at first) a timber palisade on top. Also, new sections of defences were added to the central core of the former Roman garrison area around York Minster con­necting it to the two rivers (the Foss and the Ouse), while the two sides of the garrison area defences within this newly enclosed area were gradually abandoned. Houses, gardens and one church (the church of St Sampson) were constructed in their place. Two of the medieval stone gateways into the city at Micklegate Bar and Bootham Bar contain monumental early Norman stone arches, suggesting that they were part of a considerable strengthening of the defences around Micklegate and Petergate, as well as the confirmation of those streets as major routes into and across the city.31 It is possible that they marked processional routes linking all the major churches (Holy Trinity priory in Micklegate, the Minster and St Mary's abbey) with the sites of royal power (the royal house, the royal larder, St Leonard's hospital, and the fair ground at St Giles). While we have no clear archaeological evidence for the date of this reconstruction or for the extension of the walls of the Roman gar­rison to the rivers Ouse and Foss, the latter must have been in place by 1177 when the Jewish cemetery was located outside. 32 Medieval Jewish cemeter­ies were always located outside city walls and the site of the York cemetery occupies what was probably the only such area which was both within the king's fee and not already developed.
If we take all these developments together we can see that the early Nor­man kings redeveloped the entire city as an extension of, and service centre to, a new royal palace: a royal citadel ('arx') indeed. Mapping these devel­opments on to a base map of Roman York shows the extent to which these royal sites re-utilized still impressive, visible aspects of the city's Roman to­pography and architecture, which were clustered around a focus on the site
29 RCHME, City of York V, 93-94.
30 BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fol. 3r; W. Page, 'Hospitals: York', in VCH, Yorkshire III, 336-52.
31 RCHME, City of York II, 95-101, 116-120.
32 S. Rees Jones, 'The Historical Background', in J.M. Lilley et al., The Jewish Burial Ground at
Jewbury(London, 1994), pp. 301-12.

.

Sarah Rees Jones
of the original Roman crossing over the river Ouse, suggesting that this was still in use in at least some form (whether as bridge or ferry). Coney Street, Blake Street and North Street all converge on the site of this crossing and were the only three streets in York in the early twelfth century whose names ended in the Latin (or English) suffix -street '-straet' or '-strata' rather than the Old Norse -gate or '-gata'. 33 They were part of a network of adjacent streets in the king's fee including Davygate (named after David the Larderer,
c. 1135~80) and Castlegate which can only have acquired their names after the Conquest. 34
Above all the refashioning of the entire city as a centre of Christian im­perium reflected contemporary historical writing about York. Since the time of Bede this had always asserted the centrality of York's ecclesiastical mis­sion: that royal authority was built upon Christian foundations, and that the city of York was a central monument to that imperial achievement.
35
And of course it was at just this moment, in about 1138, that Geoffrey of Monmouth was elaborating on that tradition in his inventive History of Britain which claimed a Trojan origin for the princes of Britain. Mon­mouth's History linked the origins of York in particular with the origins of the Christian faith itself. Ebrauc, the mythical Trojan prince who Mon­mouth claimed as the founder of York, lived in the time of David, king of Judea, whose own city, Bethlehem, was the chosen birthplace of Christ. According to Monmouth, York became the seat of one of the three pagan high priests of Britain, the archflamens, and was thus a natural choice for the seat of an archbishopric when Britain was converted to Christianity. 36 Indeed throughout Monmouth's History it is York's role as a centre of ec­clesiastical government in the British Isles which is emphasized. Although frequently conquered by pagan invaders, York's supremacy as the metro~ politan see of northern Britain is constantly reasserted in Monmouth's nar­rative, particularly in the story of King Arthur, who celebrated Christmas in York following his defeat of the pagan Saxons, Scots and Picts. 37 This was the moment when Arthur formally confirmed his hegemony over northern
33        Earliest recorded forms include 1108x14 'Blaicastret', 1153x8 'Cunegestrate', 1166x79 'Nor­dstreta'. For earlier discussion of the etymology of York street names see: A.H. Smith, The Place-Names of the East Riding of Yorkshire and York (Cambridge, 1937); D. M. Palliser, 'The Me­dieval Street-Names of York', York Historian 2 (1978), 2-16; G. Fellows-Jensen, 'The Anglo­Scandinavian Street-Names of York', in Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian York, ed. R. A. Hall et al. (York, 2004), pp. 357-71 esp. pp. 360-3.
34        We could possibly add both Stonegate and Petergate to this list of names originating after the Conquest. The difficulty is that virtually all York's medieval street names are recorded for the first time in the early twelfth century. However the invention of both Castlegate and Davygate proves that the Old Norse suffix -gata does not have to denote a pre-Conquest origin for the name.

35        Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth I: Bern Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568, ed. N.
Wright (Cambridge, 1985), pp. xix, xxxix-xl, xlvi. 36 Monmouth, Kings of Britain, p. 125. 37 Ibid., pp. 220-1.
22
Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
mainland Britain before turning his attention to Ireland. These stories were certainly well known in York and Yorkshire. 38 Monmouth's patron, Walter Espec (d. 1147x58), was a great Yorkshire landowner, a patron of its new monastic houses and an influential figure in the city and region. The image of York as the great Christian capital of northern Britain was reflected in many cultural contexts from the choice of local church dedications (such as St Helen) to the depiction of the city on early maps.
The early Norman kings' ambition of creating a northern royal capital in York was reflected in their visits. Our sources are extremely slight but it is clear that royal visits were more frequent in the twelfth than in the eleventh century. Henry I visited at least four times (1100-35), and his successor King Stephen was a still more frequent visitor. 39 Henry II paid at least six visits to York as he fought to restore royal authority in the north against local bar­ons and the king of Scotland. His crowning achievement came in 1175 when he staged in York Minster a public ceremonial humiliation of William I 'the Lion', king of Scotland, in the presence of the entire Scottish court. Henry also used his time in York to display his sovereignty in other ways: he went hunting, he presided over punitive sessions of the royal courts, he raised taxes and he affirmed himself as the royal patron of York's religious houses.
This refashioning of York as a royal citadel also fostered a transforma­tion of the community resident in the city. Following the Conquest and continuing into the twelfth century a great deal of land in the city was transferred to French knights who owned their urban estates alongside burgesses of Anglo-Scandinavian descent. Indeed the description of York in the Domesday Book is largely a description of the eighty-two tenements within the king's fee that had been awarded to nineteen French knights. 40 The picture is too complicated to present in detail here, but the redistribu­tion of lands also consolidated the integration of the landowning classes of the city and shire, tying the city into the politics of the county and its lead­ing knights and barons. 41 This pattern continued into the twelfth century when new generations of servants of the king's household also acquired estates in and around the city.
Norman families who retained York estates from the time of the Conquest into the later twelfth century included the Percy family. Their ancestor, Wil­liam Percy, one of the first Norman custodians of the castle, owned several properties in York, including most of the parish of St Mary in Castlegate, and the advowson of the church was still owned by Agnes de Percy in the
38        J. Crick, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth IV: Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 64,196,207,209, 214-15.
39        E. Miller, 'Medieval York', in VCH, City of York, pp. 25-116 (pp. 25-6), J. Green, 'King Henry
I and Northern England', TRHS 6th s. 17 (2007), 35-55; D. Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen
1135-1154(Harlow, 2000), pp. 38n, 40-41, 200, 243-4, 286-7.
40  Domesday Book, fols. 298 a, b. 
41  Dalton, Conquest, Anarchy and Lordship. 
23 


>

Sarah Rees Jones
later twelfth century. 42 If this castle was the place of Jewish refuge in 1190, then any Jews approaching it would have had to pass through this estate in order to reach it. This is a chilling thought, especially since the head of a jun­ior branch of that family, William Percy of Carnaby, was later charged with inciting the violence against them. Other important Norman landowners in York acquired their estates through service to the king in the twelfth century. Walter Espec, the patron of Geoffrey of Monmouth, owned land in Ogle­forth, and others with York estates included household officials of Henry I such as Herbert the Chamberlain and Nigel d' Aubigny, a knight of the royal household who rose to become a 'provincial viceroy' in the north, a royal jus­tice in Yorkshire and custodian of York castle until c. 1118.43 Indeed the c~ty estate of d' Aubigny and his son, Roger de Mowbray, included a large and prominent site in Stonegate, known as 'Mulbrai Halle', which dominated the central area of the Roman fortress and lay midway between the Minster and the royal larder. 44 Mowbray became a powerful figure in York politics in the 1140s and 1150s. He was a great rival to other local barons who were more favoured than he was by both Stephen and Henry II, and he was constantly thwarted in his desire to control the royal castle as his father had once done. He eventually joined the rebellion 'of the young king' against Henry II in 1173-74, holding the city for the rebels. A large hall in such a prominent site in the city centre would be appropriate for the man who was once described as the real 'lord of York'.45

Other royal officials rented or bought property in Coney Street. Coney Street literally means 'the king's street' in an amalgam of Old Norse and Latin. It connected the royal castle to the river crossing between the king's house and the royal larder and may have been so named because of its asso­ciation with both offices and officers of the crown. Bertram of Bulmer (sher­iff 1128/9-30 and 1154-63), Fulk Payne! I, Geoffrey Hageth, a royal justice, the infamous Richard Malebisse (alleged instigator of the attack on the Jews in 1190), Roger Batvent under-sheriff of Yorkshire in 1194-98 and William Stuteville, sheriff from 1201 to 1203, all either leased or owned houses in
42 Domesday Book, fol. 298a; S. Rees Jones, 'Building Domesticity in the City: English Urban
Housing before the Black Death', in Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in
Medieval England, ed. M. Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 66-91 (pp.

!!0-2). 43 Charters of the Honour of Mowbray, 1107-1191, ed. D. E. Greenway, Records of Social and Eco­nomic History, n.s. 1 (London, 1972), pp. xvii-xxxii; J. 0. Prestwich, 'The Military Household of the Norman Kings', EHR 96 (1981), 1-35 (pp. 24-5). 44 Property at 35a-39 Stonegate was known as 'Mulberiahalle': Mowbray Charters, pp. xxiv n.,
lxxxii, 8; York Minster Fasti II, 51; Abstracts of the Charters and Other Documents contained in the
Chartulary of the Cistercian Abbey of Fountains, ed. W. T. Lancaster, 2 vols. (Leeds, 1915), p. 274.
'Mulberiahalle' occupied a large area including the site of its modern namesake, Mulberry

Hall, at 17 Stonegate. 45 Jordan Fantosme, Chronicle of the War between the English and the Scots in 1173 and 1174, ed.
F.Michel, SS 11 (London, 1840), 971-2; H. M. Thomas, 'Mowbray, Sir Roger (I) de (d. 1188)', ODNB (Oxford, 2004). Howden, ChronicaII, pp. 79-80.
Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
Coney Street and developed close links with a number of the wealthier bur­gesses who also lived in that neighbourhood. 46 The riverside location made Coney Street one of the most important road arteries in the city and archaeo­logical evidence provides further clues about the social transformation of this neighbourhood. In neighbouring Coppergate, for example, the century after 1000 saw a significant reduction in discarded metal objects associated with metalworking and an increase in metal goods associated with riding horses. 47 This suggests an elevation in the social status of the residents under the influence of the new Norman settlement.
Here, too, the most powerful of York's Jews settled. When Benedict and Josee, and, later in the thirteenth century, Aaron of York settled in Coney Street, or the adjacent street of Bretgate (later known as Jewbretgate or Jubbergate), 48 they were choosing to live in what was effectively a royal quarter and one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of the city, where their daily lives were lived cheek-by-jowl with other servants of the crown and the most prosperous members of the York mercantile elite. Coney Street was close to the castle (a possible place of refuge) but perhaps more im­portantly it was close to the royal larder and market (Jubbergate led from Coney Street to the market ground in Arkilltofts by the royal larder), and it was alongside the river by which most travellers and much trade arrived in the city. When a Jewish community resettled in York in the thirteenth century, Coney Street was again the neighbourhood in which many of the wealthiest members lived and where the schola,or synagogue, stood near to the church of St Martin.
But the York in which Jews began to settle from the 1170s was very dif­ferent from the York of the earlier Norman kings. For, despite those earlier kings' ambitions, the twelfth century, like the later eleventh, turned into a period of protracted local warfare, particularly after 1138. By the 1170s little was left of the royal infrastructure put in place by William I and his two sons. King Stephen was the last Norman king to seek to impose his personal au­thority in the city. As challenges to his rule increased after 1138 he reverted to the older practice of appointing a local earl to represent the crown's interest in the north. 49 Control of York was given to William d' Aumale who, as earl of York, presumably took over the royal house as he did the castle. Aumale' s ascendancy, fiercely resisted by opponents such as Roger de Mowbray, pre­cipitated the outbreak of private wars which were seen by local chroniclers as a disastrous period of terrible anarchy in Yorkshire. The royal infrastruc­ture crumbled and even the royal mint in York began issuing coins in the
46  BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fols. 107r, 125r; JRUL MSS 220-1, fol. lr; Chartulary Fountains, pp. 
275, 279; EYC I, no 234: EYC IX, 18. 
47  P. Ottaway and N. Rogers, Craft, Industry and Everyday Life: Finds from Medieval York (York, 
2002), pp . 2956-67, 2996-7. 
48  Dobson, JMY, p. 46. 
49  R.H. C. Davis, King Stephen, 1135-58, 3rd edn (London, 1990), pp. 125-8. 


.

name of local barons rather than the king.so Many new private castles sprang up around the county a~d private armies terrorized t~e local pop~lation; even Henry II did not brmg peace to the north after his accession m 1154. The impact of this local warfare is perhaps reflected in the archaeological evidence of houseplots abandoned in some streets of central York for nearly a century after the Conquest.s 1

After 1154 Henry II thus adopted a very different policy towards York­shire from any of his predecessors. His first priority was to destroy the pow­er of the earl of York with military force and several of the earl's strongholds in the county, such as Scarborough castle, were taken for the crown. In the case of the city of York, Henry II at first trod diplomatically. His first charter to York simply confirmed to the merchant guild all the privileges they had previously enjoyed under royal lordship, and he also took back custody of the royal castle and presumably of the royal house.s 2 While Henry certainly visited York there is less evidence of the personal aspects of earlier Norman kingship in his patronage of local institutions. He confirmed Stephen's gifts to St Leonard's hospital, but he did not provide new endowments.s 3 Nor are there any signs of investment in the royal buildings of York: by 1186 the sheriff was collecting rent for the abandoned site of the royal mint, and royal coin continued to be minted in forges in private workshops.s 4 Rather surprisingly the castle remained a timber construction, unlike other royal castles in the north (such as Carlisle, Brough, Knaresborough, Pickering or Scarborough) whose keeps were rebuilt in stone. Indeed in contrast to the great sums which Henry lavished on some of his southern palaces, such as Clarendon, Woodstock or Westminster, in York there is just one payment for the construction of a gaol to hold those arrested under the Assize of Claren­don in 1165-66 and one other payment for work on the towers ('turris') of York overseen by David, the king's larderer, in 1172-73.55
Yet if Henry spent little on local royal buildings the financial records of royal government show that he substantially increased his financial demands on the local community. The annual farm (or rent) from York to the crown had been fixed at £100 by 1086 and was included in the farm for the whole county, but from the beginning of his reign Henry II regularly demanded substantial additional sums in the form of non-voluntary 'gifts', aids, fines and escheats. An annual gift of £133 was demanded of the city between 1155
50  Ibid., pp. 330-1. 
51  Medieval Urbanism  in Coppergate,  ed. R. A. Hall and K. Hunter-Mann  (York, 2002), pp. 
705, 727, 756, 774-87, 859; N. McNabb, 'Anglo-Scandinavian,  Medieval and Post-Medieval 
Urban Occupation  at 41-49 Walmgate, York, UK', The Archaeology of York, Web Series 1 
(York, 2003). http:/ /www.iadb.co.uk/wgate/main/discuss.php  [accessed July 2012]. 
52  British Borough Charters, 1042-1216, ed. A. Ballard (Cambridge, 1913), p. 6. 
53  BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fols. 3v-4r. 
54  Miller, 'Medieval York', p. 30; PR 33 Henry II, p. 82. See below, pp. 30-1. 
55  PR 19 Henry II, p. 2; RCHME, City of York II, 60. It is not clear whether these towers were part 
of the castle or city defences, or part of another structure. 

Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
and 1161, rising to the exceptionally large figure of £540 in 1161-2.56 In the 1160s similar sums were demanded; in 1162-3 (50 marks), 1164-5 (£200), and in 1168-69 (£333 6s. 8d.).57
The size of these demands meant that the city did not always pay the whole sum demanded, but even these were supplemented from the mid 1160s by sometimes equally large demands placed on individual citizens or trading groups. From 1164 an annual charge of £10 was placed on the weavers of York, representing an extension north of the Trent of a policy of licensing craft groups which had started in southern towns in the previous decade.ss More striking still, in the same year Lefwin of York, a prominent citizen, was put in mercy for the sum of 300 marks (£200) and the Dean (decanus) of York (possibly the secular reeve of the city) for another £100. In­deed from 1160, and particularly following the Assize of Clarendon in 1166 the steady expansion of royal law resulted in increasing numbers of York citizens appearing in the pipe rolls owing sums of money, ranging from 3s. 4d. to £66; which they and their families would often take many years to redeem. An early, but typical, case was that of William of Thixendale ('Sex­decimvallibus' or 'Sezevaux') who was first fined 100 marks (£66 13s. 4d.) for taking his wife ('mulier') by force in 1160-61. For the next thirty-five years first William and then his son appeared annually paying off this hefty fine in small instalments until eventually the debt passed to the third generation and on into the reign of King John. 59 This case illustrates well the impact of the expanding scope of royal government. It brought larger numbers of lo­cal people before the royal courts, resulting in demands for more and more money. However it was above all the use of novel written procedures of ad­ministration which meant that local offenders and their descendants could be subjected to demands from royal officers for decades. The vice of royal government gripped ever tighter, and must have seemed inescapable.
A further source of discontent, especially as these novel demands accu­mulated, was the subjection of York to the county sheriff. Other cities, such as Lincoln, were sometimes allowed to pay their own farm to the crown and from the beginning of Henry II's reign the citizens of York must also have known that burgesses in other (new) royal boroughs in the county such as Knaresborough (from 1156), Doncaster (from 1160) and Scarborough (from 1163) were allowed to account directly for their own farms. 60 It may be that this lay behind the demand of some of York's burgesses for a commune in 1173-74. In that year Thomas de Ultra Usam and his son were fined 40 marks 'pro communa quam dicti sunt velle facere'. 61 Thomas may be identified with the Thomas son of Ulviet who had paid a fine to join the guild mer­chant in 1130 and certainly with the Thomas de Ultra Usam who was fined 10 marks in 1162-63.62 'Commune' is a word that has been used by modern urban historians with a particular technical meaning: it describes a sworn association of townsmen who organized themselves either for defence, for trade or to assert their independence from lords and princes in collective and semi-autonomous corporate self-government. However we know noth­ing more about this particular commune in York. It may be more sensible to put it in the context in which it appears in the pipe roll, which is among a long series of fines imposed on York citizens for their part in the major rebellion against Henry II known as the 'young king's revolt': the war of eighteen months' duration led by Henry's three sons and his wife Eleanor together with many rebel barons against his government in England and France. In the no~th one of the leading rebels was Roger de Mowbray and numbers of men m both York and the county were fined for communicating wi~ ~e king's e~emies ('quia communicavit cum inimicis Regis'), or for ~emg m commum?n with Mowbray or the king's enemies ('pro commun­ionem quam habmt cum Rogero de Molbrai'). 63 It seems possible then that Thomas'. s ~communa', listed am?ng these fines, was in fact just another way of descnbmg a charge of conspiracy rather than a description of particular
56  PR 8 Henry II, p. 51; C. Stephenson, 'The Aids of English Boroughs', EHR 34 (1919), 457-73. 
57  PR 9 Henry II, p. 58; 11 Henry II, pp. 45-52; 15 Henry II, p. 36. 
58  PR 11 Henry II, pp. 45-52. 
59  PR 7 Henry II, p. 37 and thereafter annually into PR 2 John, p. 102. 
60  PR 2-4 Henry II, pp. 85-6; 7 Henry II, pp. 35-6; 10 Henry II, pp. 11-13. 
61  PR 21 Henry II, p. 180. 



form of borough government.
Certainly several other leading citizens, including William of Tickhill, Gerard and Hugh the sons of Lefwin, William of Selby, Robert Brun of Coney Street and Alan son of Romund, were fined for conspiracy with the rebels in 1173-74?rfor _receiving fugitives, for receiving the chattels of Flemings (who were allied with the rebels and so banned from trade), for selling shields to the rebels, and/ or simply forced to pay very large sums (£400 from Gerard son of Lefwin) in 'benevolences' to buy the king's good will. Many of these men had already appeared before the king's courts before 1173 for other rea­sons: William of Selby fined 10 marks for selling wine against the assize in ~165; William of Tickhill fined 10 marks for not wishing to stand as a pledge m 1168, Hugh son of Lefwin fined £5 for recovery of 60 marks. 64 Whether this was the reason why they were engaged with the rebels during the protracted rev?lt of 1173-74 ~e cannot tell, but almost certainly they could not carry out their normal busmess without so engaging andthey paid heavily for that. Indeed the family of the sons of Lefwin paid nearly £1000 in fines and charg­
62        Miller, 'Medieval York', p. 32; PR 31 Henry I, p. 34; 9 Henry II, pp. 57-60. Thomas's grand­
fath:r, Forne, was also named in 1106 as one of the four hereditary lawmen or judges who
presided over the city's internal administration, a position that is first recorded in 1086: D.
M. Palliser, ?he Birth of York's Civic Liberties, c. 1200-1354', in The Government of Medieval York: Essays m Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, ed. S. Rees Jones (York, 1997), pp. 88-107 (pp. 90-1).

63 PR 21 Henry II, pp. 174-83.
64 PR 12 Henry II, p. 49; 15 Henry II, p. 39; 17 Henry II, p. 73.

28
Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York

es over the later years of the reign of Henry II, more than any other Christian family in the whole of England. 65 Nor were the immediate fines the end of their punishment. A punitive session of the forest eyre in 1175, over which Henry presided in person, raised over £1600 in fines, and the ceremonious humiliation of the king of Scotland and his court in 1175 in York Minster was surely intended to impress the citizens as much as its baronial participants. 66
It is extremely significant that it was in the aftermath of the great revolt of 1173-74 and its emphatic suppression that Jewish moneylenders first settled in York. Some Jewish scholars may have been invited to attend the court of the archbishop of York for debate on matters of scripture earlier in the centu­ry, but the first Jewish families to settle in York almost certainly moved there from Lincoln and 'may have operated as an outlying agency of a national financial network dominated by Aaron of Lincoln until his death in 1186'.67 Along with other provincial Jewries, the York community was granted in 1177 the right to maintain its own cemetery, and a site was provided outside the city walls on the banks of the River Foss.68 We know relatively little about this first Jewish community. Most of our evidence about Jews in medieval York comes from the plea rolls of the Jewish Exchequer established after 1190 and it relates primarily to the second wave of Jewish settlement in the city in the thirteenth century (and especially in the reign of Henry III). How­ever incontrovertible references to Jews in York begin from the early to mid 1170s: a purchase by 'Josee the Jew, son of David' of a burgage in Fossgate, a Hebrew bond referring to Aaron of Lincoln, Josee of York and six other Jews
acquitting debts of 1260 marks due to them up to the feast of Michaelmas 1176, and references to Josee of York lending money to the king and receiving payments from the sheriffs of Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Yorkshire. 69 Josee was joined in the 1180s by Benedict, and both developed successful busi­nesses building up portfolios of property across the county and beyond. 70 These two men were exceptionally wealthy, a fact that attracted comment: Newburgh described Josee's house as 'rivalling a noble citadel in the scale and stoutness of its construction' .71 Dobson believes that the Jewish com­
65 H. M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066­c.1220 (Oxford, 2003), p. 185. 66 D. Crook, 'The Earliest Exchequer Estreat and the Forest Eyres of Henry II and Thomas fitz Bernard, 1175-80', in Records, Administration and Aristocratic Society in the Anglo-Norman Realm,ed. N. Vincent (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 29-44 (pp. 33-4). 67 R. B. Dobson, 'The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York', JHSE Transactions
26 (1979 for 1974), 34-52 (p. 35). 68 Rees Jones, 'The Historical Background', in Jewish Burial Ground at Jewbury, ed. Lilley et al. 69 Dobson, JMY, pp. 11-12.
70        ibid., pp. 12-13. In 1200 and 1205 King John granted properties of Benedict the Jew of York in Northampton and York to new owners. His 'land and houses' in York were not described but had been acquired by the crown from Philip, bishop of Durham (1197-1208) and were
granted to Richard de Richeford: Rot. Chart., pp. 52, 150.
71 WN, trans. Stevenson, p. 314.


.

Sarah Rees Jones          Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
munity before 1190 was 'a community dominated by a small and closely­integrated elite of money-lenders and dealers in bonds' of no more than 150 men, women and children. But he goes on to conclude that the community was also beginning to expand in new directions, in particular through the development of its scholarly and religious life, as it welcomed a group of prominent Jewish scholars including Rabbi Yorn Tob of Joigny, Rabbi Elijah, a certain Moses and even Josee of York himself, who was notable for his learning as well as his financial skills.72

The arrival and documentation of York's first Jewish community coin­cided with, and may well have been the product of, increased efforts by royal government to regulate and profit from not only the financial ac­tivities of Jews but also many other aspects of local trade and commerce throughout England. Robert Stacey charts the growth of royal power over Jews and their financial transactions elsewhere in this volume. Over a simi­lar period officials of the royal household also developed regulations for commodities purchased by the crown such as bread, ale, wine or cloth, and these eventually became the basis for national assizes governing the sale of these commodities. 73In 1177-78 the sheriff collected 20 marks in York for infractions of the assize of measures and in 1179-80 the range of craft guilds amerced by the king extended to the glovers and cordwainers, saddlers and hosiers. 74A particular problem was the regulation of moneyers in York, who towards the end of Stephen's reign, in the 115Os, had produced 'debased' coins in the name of the local barons Robert de Stuteville and Eustace fitz John. 75Payments from the moneyers of York, and the associated exchange, to the royal sheriff are a regular feature of the pipe rolls only from 1164­6576 but by the 117Os minting in the city was clearly being reorganized. In 1170-71 William de Brettegate paid 20 marks to be relieved of the custody of the mint and from 1176 to 1180 an allowance was made to the sheriff for
the lack of payments from the city's moneyers (variously numbered from three to eight). 77Nevertheless the York mint clearly participated in a great general recoinage of English coin in 1180 and it is likely that in York, as in Winchester, minting continued in a number of forges on private premises
72        Dobson, JMY, pp 14-15.
73        F.Sargeant, 'The Wine Trade with Gascony', in Finance and Trade under Edward III, ed. G. Un­win (Manchester, 1918), pp. 257-311; P. Grierson, 'Weights and Measures', in Domesday Book Studies, ed. A. Williams and R. W. H. Erskine (London, 1987), pp. 80-5; R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000-1500, 2nd edn (Manchester, 1996), pp. 26, 94-5; J.
M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 99-100; J.Davis, 'Baking for the Common Good: A Reassessment of the Assize of Bread in Medieval England', Economic History Review 57 (2004), 465-502.

74 PR 24 Henry II, pp. 71-2: 26 Henry II, pp. 71.
75 M. Blackburn, 'Coinage and Currency', in The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign, ed. E. King

(Oxford, 1994), pp. 145-205 (pp. 183-5). 76 PR 11 Henry II, pp. 49. 77 PR 17 Henry II, p. 73; 22 Henry II, p. 99; 26 Henry II, p. 61.
ther than at a single official site, although there may have been an unsuc­::ssful attempt to establish such a site.78By 1181-2 the sheriff was r_enting out the land where the old building of the mint had stood ('terre ubi vetus f brica monetariorium Eboraci fuit'). 79All these changes may have caught
:t older moneyers such as Gerard son of Lefwin who had paid 50 marks ~or the mint ('cuneo') of the king in 1165, but who was fi~ed ~00 marks for denying the possession of false money in 1184 along with his servant Everard Bradex who was fined 30 marks. 80

After the great rebellion of 1173-74, then, the novel exactions of the crown only increased in their sophistication and range: the l:'ip~ r_olls for the 118Os record ever lengthening lists of payments due from mdividuals. Demands on the city community as a whole also continued culminating in a new' gift' of £226 6s. 4d. in 1186-87, and only one third of this had been paid before the next year when the special 'tithe of Saladin' was requested. 81The arrival of wealthy Jewish financiers, speaking French, and protected and regulated by the crown, was most likely interpreted locally as part of this broader expan­sion of royal financial impositions in the city and its hinterland. Certainly the initial reception of Jews was not untroubled. In 1178-79 Ralph de Glanville, as sheriff of Yorkshire, arrested a man (unnamed) for the death of a Jew (un­named), and in the same year for the first time several (non-Jewish) individ­uals in York and Yorkshire were fined as usurers: both signs, perhaps, that the crown intended to defend and protect its rights over the money lending activities of 'its' Jews against the non-Jewish population. 82
The Jewish community in York was therefore less than one generation old at the time of the coronation of King Richard I in London on 3 September 1189 which, according to Newburgh, several of its leading Jews journeyed to attend. Here, Benedict of York was injured and converted to Christianity by the prior of St Mary's abbey in York (who was also in London) but recanted the next day before the king. He died of his wounds, but others returned to York. Richard I issued an injunction against further violence against Jews in England, but he and many of his leading officials soon left for France. Cru­cially, and thanks to new research by Dr Hugh Doherty, we now know that these officials included the new sheriff of Yorkshire, John Marshal, who was not (as earlier historians thought) present in York in early 1190.83This fact, as well as a vacant archbishopric, left a dangerous absence of royal author­ity in Yorkshire. By the beginning of March Jew-baiting had spread to York, starting with murderous attacks on the houses and families of the recently deceased Benedict and also Josee who is said to have led all York's surviving Jews into the royal 'arx' for protection. Whether this was the wooden keep later replaced by the stone Clifford's Tower is a matter of conjecture. Roger of Howden described the massacre as occurring 'in veteri castello' (which could refer to the 'vetus ballia', the second Norman castle, on the west bank of the Ouse), while Matthew Paris described some Jews as enclosing them­selves within the 'domo regia' and setting fire to themselves together with the 'domibus regiis' which could refer to the king's house (' domus regis') on the west bank. 84 All three of these sites are possible candidates for the 'arx' at the centre of Newburgh's tale, but we cannot be certain which may have ?een_ the tru~ site of that awful immolation, and no archaeological ex­cavations m the present castle have yet revealed evidence to firmly support Newburgh's account. 85
78  M. Biddle and D. Keene, 'Winchester  in the Eleventh  and Twelfth Centuries',  in Winchester 
in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, ed. M. Biddle (Ox­
ford, 1976), pp. 241-448 (pp. 396--421). 
79  PR 28 Henry II, p. 36; 33 Henry II, p. 82. 
80  PR 12 Henry II, p. 49; 31 Henry II, p. 69. York coins bearing  Everard's  name  survive  from c. 
1180: Cambridge,  Fitzwilliam  Museum,  Museum  Accession Numbers:  CM. 1250-2001 and 
CM. 1259-2001. 
81  PR 33 Henry II, p. 93; 'Ordinance  of the Saladin Tithe (1188)', in EHD, II: 1042-1189, ed. D. C. 
Douglas and G. W. Greenaway, 2nd edn (London, 1996), pp. 421-2. 
82  PR 25 Henry II, pp. 23, 40.  . 
83  Hugh Doherty, 'The Sheriffs of Yorkshire and the Massacre of 1190', Conference paper, Um­

Apart from chronicles, the events of March 1190 are only documented in one surviving administrative source: the lists compiled of the men fined for the ~assac~e in the years after 1190.86 As Doherty has argued, royal reaction to this horrible lapse of its authority in Yorkshire was swift and decisive . It followed the pattern of other recent royal punishments by taking the form of financial penalties imposed on the local community as well as seizing the e~tates of the leading perpetrators. An initial list of those fined appears in the pipe roll for the second year of Richard I's reign but new names were added to the original list in later years. For this reason we do not know whether the ~itizens inclu?ed in the lists were being punished because of their personal involvement m the violence of March 1190 or whether they were fined sim­ply as the leading representatives of the city of York. Following Newburgh, Dobson conch~ded that these men were fined not because of their guilt but because of their wealth: that this was a list of York's richest inhabitants, not, as in Lincoln, of those engaged in violence against the Jews. 87
Although it is impossible to know who was engaged in the events of March 1190 and how they were motivated we can flesh out the biographies of many of those on the lists using the evidence not only of the pipe rolls but also of title deeds recording property transactions which are among our
versity of York, 22 March 2010. 84 Howden, ChronicaIII, 34; Paris, Chronica Majora I, 359. 85 A quantity of burnt timbers were observed in archaeological excavations of the mound be­
neath Clifford's Tower in 1902 and were then interpreted as evidence of the destruction of
the Norma~ keep in th~ revolt of 1069. The fire in 1190 has been speculatively suggested as
an alterna~1~~ ex~lanatJon. The record of the observations is considered too sparse to sup­
port a ~efinitive mterpretation : J. Clark and Field Archaeology Services, Historic Buildings

Analysis: Clifford's Tower, York, Report for English Heritage (London, 2005), p. 3. 86 PR 2 RichardI, pp . 68-70; 3-4 RichardI, pp. 69-70, 215-16. 87 Dobson, JMY, p. 32.
.
,.
Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
most abundant surviving sources for York in this period. 88 Of the fifty-nine citizens of York named on these lists, at least fifty-one can be identified in charters as participants or witnesses in land transactions.
First, the names give us an insight into continuity with the past. Many of the patrilineal names suggest that these men were the descendants of Anglo­Scandinavian families and representative of a continuing population dating back before the Norman Conquest of 1068-69. Around 25 per cent of those fined were from the first generation to have been given French first names (such as Thomas son of Ramkill, or Robert and Serio the sons of Wulfsi). In the names of their fathers and grandfathers they carried the memories of York's turbulent history over the period of the Conquest and its aftermath.
Indeed the impression of a group well acquainted with the city's past is reinforced when we collate references to them elsewhere in the pipe rolls and in charters of land transactions in York. At least eight of those fined in 1190 had already been fined by royal officers over the preceding decade for various offences from rape, infringements of the forest law, and trading in­fractions to offences related to the mint. 89 In addition more than half of those fined in 1190 seem to have been near to the end of their lives: evidence about them is relatively sparse, although it is often possible to find references to the property holdings of close relatives and descendants. 90 This generation included some of those fined the . largest amounts in 1190, such as Warin of Cuningestrata who was fined 20 marks. Warin witnessed a number of charters between the later 1150s and the mid 1190s, but was then replaced in witness lists by his sons Thomas and Ambrose and his grandson Stephen (also known as Stephen Wariner) who lived around the corner from Coney Street in property between Ousegate and Coppergate in the early thirteenth century .91 This would certainly support the idea that those fined in 1190
88        See note 5 above.
89        Thes e eight men were Everard Bradex , Philip son of Baldwin, Robert son of Askell , Robert of Selby, Roger son of Gerard , Serio the brother of Robert (son of Wulfsi), Simon Blund and Thomas of Bretgate. Robert son of Askell was fined 15 marks in 1179-80 for taking a woman by force: PR 26 Henry II, p. 62. Most of the other offences were clustered between 1184 and 1186: PR 31 Henry II, pp. 68-9; 32 Henry II, pp. 68, 93-5.
90        Those fined in 1190 who appear to have been towards the end of their lives included Thomas son of Richard, Warin of Cuningestrata, William son of Otwy, Turkill and Gerard of Bretgate, Robert son of Liulf, John son of Goduse, Ralph son of Lundwar, Thomas son of Yo!, Roger son of Bernulf, Walter son of Godfrey, Serio Bella, Robert and Serio the sons of Wulfsi, Roger son of Lemmar , Philip son of Baldwin, Simon Sakespee, Roger son of Gerard, Osbert Stutte, Avenel and Turstin Galien. Another eight men who have not yet been identified include William Deusanz ', William son of Walkelin , Herbert brother of Walter, Galfridu s carnifex (Geoffrey the butcher), Malgerus talliator (Malger the tax assessor), Roger son of Lemmar (although Lemmer the tanner is recorded as witness to a transaction in Skeldergate in c. 1148x75: Cartulariwn Abbathia! de White!,y, Ordinis S. Benedicti fundat.:e anno MLXXVIII, ed. J.
C. Atkinson, 2 vols., SS 69, 72 (Durham, 1879-81), I, 226), Elias clericus , Erkenbaldus Wes­
dier, Robert son of Askill and William of Buggeden. 91 Chartulary Fountains, pp. 268, 273, 275; York, YMA, Cartulary of St Mary's Abbey, York, fols.
included some of the most senior figures in the city. They also included the patriarchs of dynasties which continued to be an important presence in the city into the next century and beyond.
As well as providing links with York's past the list also gives us a glimpse of the future. It includes some men who survived into the next century. Wil­liam son of Sigfrith (who was fined the largest sum of 100 marks in 1190) was one of these together with Thomas Palmer (also known as Thomas son of Hugh), Hugh son of Lefwin, Ralf the glover (le wanter), Thomas son of Ramkill and Daniel the oxherd (le buuier or bouarius) who all survived for long enough to be ta1laged in 1204.92Of these men two (Thomas Palmer fined 25 marks and William Brinkelaw fined 1 mark) both went on to achieve office as mayor and bailiff of the city in the second and third decades of the thirteenth century. 93lndeed both Palmer and Brinkelaw were associated with one of York's most prominent citizens in the reign of King John, Wil­liam Fairfax, who was one of the last royal reeves of York, possibly an early mayor, a significant property owner and a major money-lender. Fairfax was also engaged in the military resistance against King John in the barons' war, leading an attack on the royal house in York during which he captured and imprisoned its keeper. 94The group of men fined in 1190 therefore include not only those who had resisted royal authority and led demands for York's independence from the royal sheriff in the past, but also those who would continue to do so in the future.
Beyond this we can make some assessment of the wealth of the citizens of York who were fined after 1190 and identify the neighbourhoods within the city where they probably (or in several cases certainly) lived. That most of the citizens fined can be identified in charters as owners of property in itself makes a point about their wealth, since only a minority of the residents of medieval towns, probably less than 10 per cent, would have been landown­ers.95 Also their property ownership was concentrated in those areas of the city where the king's influence was strongest. The largest number (seventeen individuals) were associated with properties in Coney Street, Coppergate, Ousegate and Castlegate, and the second largest group (ten individuals) with the neighbourhood of Walmgate. 96
2r, 34r; JRUL MSS 220-1, fol. 58r; BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fols 104r, 169r.
92 PR 6 John, pp. 207-8.
93 JRUL MSS 220-1, fol. 4r; BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fol. 204r; EYC I, 177,200.
94 Rolls of the Justices in Eyre, pp. 423-4.

95        S. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300-1500 (Chicago, 1948), p. 125; D. Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1985) 1, 218, 225.
96        Those who can be identified as owners and residents in the streets between Coney Street and the Castle: William son of Sirith, Thomas son of Richard, Wain of Cunigestrata, Robert Glene, John son of God use, William of Otley, Thomas son of Yol, Serlo Bella, Malgerus Tallia­tor, Simon and Thomas Blund, Thomas son of Ramkill, Philip son of Baldwin, William son of Constantine, Walter son of Reiner, Hugh son of Lefwin and Osbert Stutte. Those associated with Bretgate (now Navigation Road) off Walmgate: Turkillus of Bretgate, Everard Bradex,
34
Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
In particular some of those who paid the largest fines in 1190 lived in and around Coney Street, where their neighbours included not only some of York's wealthiest Jews but also royal officials and Yorkshire barons. Apart from the eponymous Warin of Cuningestrata, William son of Sirith may have lived here, since he witnessed two charters in Nessgate (Castlegate) in the later twelfth century, although his son and grandson both lived across the city in Goodramgate. 97Of several notable people in the area Hugh son of Lefwin was one of the most important. His father was active early in the reign of Henry II, owing the king the huge sum of £200 (£40 of which was assigned to one of his baronial neighbours in Coney Street, Fulk Paynel). 98 His stepfather, William Tickhill, was an equally prominent citizen and both were well con­nected with local knights and were owners of rural estates as well as York property. Hugh was also a minor royal office holder (in the king's exchange in York), and an alleged ally of the disgraced Roger de Mowbray during the revolt of 1173-74 together with William Tickhill and his brother Gerard, both of whom had probably died by 1190 leaving Hugh as the family head. Hugh son of Lefwin lived in a stone hall in Coney Street on the site of the later city Guild Hall. 99 He also owned other property in the same street, at the centre of a network involving several of those fined in 1190. His estate included a large house that Hugh had acquired from Richard Malebisse, the alleged leader of the mob attacking the Jews in 1190. This same house was first leased to John son of Goduse (another of those fined in 1190) and later leased to Roger Bavent the undersheriff of Yorkshire from 1194 to 1198.100 It occupied a site beside the church of St Martin and thus near the synagogue and the homes of some of York's leading Jews, such as Aaron of York, that were first recorded in the early decades of the thirteenth century. 101 Other tenants of Hugh's in Coney Street included Thomas son of Ramkill who lived in a house and held three plots there, while near neighbours included Philip son of Baldwin and William son of Constantine. 102 Everard Bradex, the moneyer employed by Gerard son of Lefwin, was another member of this group. All four were wit­nesses to each other's charters and were fined along with Hugh in 1190.
William Deusanz, Thomas Palmer, Gerardus of Brettegate, Ralf son of Lundwar, Richard
and Martin of Sezevaux, Daniel Bovarius and Simon Sakespee. Smaller groups of four or
five individuals were associated with Bootham and Micklegate respectively, while one to
three individuals were associated with Goodramgate, Petergate, the Shambles, Fishergate
and Clementhorpe. . 97 For William son of Sirith and falnily: BL MS Cotton Claudius D. XI, fol. 2r; BL MS Cotton
Nero D. III, fol. 103r; Bodi. MS Dodsworth 7, fol. 22r; Charters Vicars Choral, I, 365. 98 PR 11 Henry II, p. 49; 12 Henry II, p. 39. 99 EYC I, 198-200; York, YCA, G16; TNA, SC 6/708, m.10; Rees Jones, 'Property, Tenure and
Rents', I, 72. 100 Chartulary Fountains, p. 274; JRUL MSS 220-1, fols. 3r, 4r, lOr. 101 Dobson, JMY, pp. 44-5. 102 YML, Cartulary of St Mary's Abbey, fol. 2r; JRUL MSS 220-1, fols. lr, Sr, 74r; BL MS Cotton
Nero D. III, fol. 107r.

A similar and equally robust network was based in and around Bretgate. Two streets in York shared this name. One, off Coney Street, later became Jewbretgate or Jubbergate because of its association with the homes of Jews living there in the thirteenth century. However the Bretgate of this group was undoubtedly off Walmgate as the description of the properties and their later history makes clear. Walmgate was a distinctive neighbourhood whose fortunes were recovering in the later twelfth . century as properties abandoned since the Conquest were resettled and redeveloped with new in­dustries. It was not yet enclosed within the city defences (that was to happen during the reign of King John) but it is clear that some of its residents were persons of substance, living in stone houses, building up estates of property across the city and county, holding public office and playing a leading role in city affairs. Thomas Palmer, the future mayor of York, makes some of his ear­liest documented appearances as a tenant in Walmgate. 103 The eponymous Turkill and Gerard of Brettegate were perhaps dominant members of the neighbourhood who were fined in 1190. It also included Simon Sakespee, the nephew of Walter son of Faganulf, whose family of hereditary priests owned the churches of St Mary and St Margaret in Bretgate within their patrimony in the early twelfth century: and Walter and Jordan Sakespee were celebrat­ed as major patrons of the hospital of St Leonard in York to which they gave the advowson of those churches. 104 Like the Coney Street group this Walm­gate group appears tightly knit, but its wealthier members were also linked with those in Coney Street, sometimes witnessing charters there. Indeed the wealthiest families used these connections to move out. Some of the earliest references to Richard and Martin of Thixendale ('Sezevaux') in York place them in Walmgate, but the family soon acquired property elsewhere in the city becoming, first, mayors of York and, eventually, county gentry in the later thirteenth century. 105
The importance of these two neighbourhoods for the men first fined for the massacre of the Jews in 1190 may be significant. Both were neighbour­hoods which lay within the king's fee in York, rather than in the fee of the archbishop and the Minster (centred around the Minster), or of St Mary's abbey (centred in Bootham). They were also both old industrial and com­mercial neighbourhoods which were being transformed by new prosperity in the last decades of the twelfth century. Given both the vigorous growth of new centres of industry and commerce and their location within the king's jurisdiction it is not surprising that it was the residents of these neighbour­hoods who were particularly active in emerging new structures of civic government. Coney Street and Walmgate were also neighbourhoods where we know (at least from slightly later evidence) that Jews settled or had con­
103 BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fol. 9r.
104 JRUL MSS 220-1, fol. 3r; BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fol. llr-v; EYCI, 240-51.
105 Yorkshire Deeds, ed. W. Brown et al., 10 vols., YAS, Rec. Ser. 39, 50, 63, 65, 69, 76, 83, 102, 111,

120 (Leeds, 1909-55) II, 203, no. 534. For the Sezevauz family see, Rees Jones, Medieval York;
36


Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
nections, particularly in streets near Coney Street, but there is also the very early reference to Jewish property in Fossgate, which was an extension of Walmgate towards Ousegate and the city centre. 106 More important may be the evidence that a number of York citizens were indebted to Aaron of Lincoln (whose debts were administered by the crown following his death in 1186) and the two streets where properties are specifically identified as having been mortgaged to him were (again) Walmgate and Ousegate (by one Richard Blundus). 107 All this suggests significant engagement between wealthy Christian and Jewish residents in these neighbourhoods in par­ticular. Might these debts have provided a motive for antipathy towards the king's Jews similar to that which has commonly been ascribed to the knights of the shire? Yet, to complicate this picture, there is evidence that the citizens fined in 1190 were themselves providers of credit. Hugh and Gerard the sons of Lefwin both acquired rural estates in this manner, while the growing practice of purchasing rent charges on property enabled many of this group (and their associates and descendants) to build up extremely valuable estates in the city.108
It is not possible here to explore all the possible connections between those fined in 1190. This was a tight-knit group, united by bonds of fam­ily, business and neighbourhood. Certainly they were wealthy and promi­nent citizens, but also they were associated with particular neighbourhoods sharing certain characteristics: of growing commercial prosperity, of strong networks around key individuals and of proximity to the institutions associ­ated with royal government. They were also the neighbourhoods in which York's new Jewish families were most active and prominent. It was certainly to these neighbourhoods that Jews returned in their second settlement in the reign of Henry III.
Perhaps not surprisingly a final characteristic of the citizens fined for the attack on the Jews is the degree to which they were associated with local knights, barons and royal officials both before 1190 and afterwards. Theim­portance of wealthy burgesses in the county communities of twelfth-century England has not been adequately recognized. However the close engage­ment of York men with the rebels in 1173-74 should come as no surprise; neither should their connections, through trade and ownership of property, with Yorkshire barons and knights. We have already seen that Hugh son of Lefwin acquired property in Coney Street from Richard Malebisse, and later
106 See above, n. 69.
IO? PR 9 Richard I, pp. 46, 61-2. Richard Blundus was possibly a relative of Simon Blund, who was fined in 1190, although Blund was a common cognomen. Citizens of York are not ex­plicitly identified as such in the lists of his debtors, but names which do appear such as 'Walter Aurifaber', 'William de Selby' and 'Nicholas de Buggethorpe' were all names of wealthier York residents occurring in other contemporary records and it is likely that they
were citizens. I08 For Hugh and Gerard, sons of Lefwin see: Miller, 'Medieval York', p. 26. For the trade in rents in the thirteenth century see: Rees Jones, Medieval York for more detail.

.

Sarah ReesJones
let it to the undersheriff of Yorkshire; the connections of Hugh and Rich­ard with Roger de Mowbray are also well established. One of Hugh's other properties in Coney Street, inhabited by Thomas and William Ramkill and their families, and later by Hugh's wife's daughter, neighboured a house of William de Stuteville (a royal justice who married the niece of Ranulf de Glanville, sheriff of Yorkshire). 109 Philip son of Baldwin (fined in 1190) held land from Geoffrey Hageth the royal justice in Coney Street, while Avenel (fined in 1190) looked after the town house of Richard of Huddleston, owner of the manor of Huddleston in west Yorkshire where stone for York Minster was quarriedY 0 These connections continued after 1190: both Warin of Cun­ingestrata and Henry of Fishergate (among those fined for the massacre) were employed on the works restoring and enlarging the castle after 1190.111
Perhaps the most important presence in York before 1190, and indeed a critical absence in 1190 itself, was Ranulf de Glanville, the former royal justiciar, sheriff of Yorkshire and close friend to Henry II, who had presided over several of the courts in which York citizens had been fined in the 1180s. Glanville was absent from York in March 1190, since he had left the govern­ment on the accession of Richard in 1189 and departed on the crusade. 112 Despite his association with the unpopular novel demands of Henry II's government he too had become an established presence in the city. In par­ticular he had acquired a large stone house immediately before the west front of York Minster. The house had been forfeited to the king by Walter son of Daniel between 1178 and 1181 because Walter had murdered his wife (his guilt having been decided by a duel in the king's court). It would have made an imposing residence for Glanville's visits to York, but shortly be­fore 1189 he granted it to William of Fishergate who in turn gave it to the hospital of St Leonard, a gift that was confirmed by Henry 11.113 It is nota­ble, however, that Petergate was not one of the streets from which many citizen property owners were fined in 1190, perhaps because Petergate lay within the archbishop's jurisdiction, and to some extent was dominated by the community of the cathedral close. Whether by accident or design, Glan­ville' s house lay away from the neighbourhoods of those citizens who were most strongly associated with events in 1190.
The months following the accession of Richard I were important in the lives of all these men, for a reason other than the massacre in March 1190. For it was in those same months that the citizens of York first won exemp­
109 See above and also BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fol. 107r; YML, MS Cartulary of St Mary's Ab­
bey, fol. 2r; EYC, VII, 9. 110 EYC I, 180, no. 216. 111 PR 3-4 RichardI, p. 61. 112 J. Hudson, 'Glanville, Ranulf de (1120s?-1190)', ODNB (Oxford, 2004). 113 Between 1205 and 1214 the house was demolished in order to enlarge the Minster Close
around the west end of the cathedral: BL MS Cotton Nero D. III, fol. 130v; BL MS Cotton
Claudius B. III, fol. 40r; YML, 12 / 1, pt ii, fol. 45r-v, pt iii, fols. 42r, 62r, 67v; pt iv fol. Sr; Rees
Jones, 'Property, Tenure and Rents', II, 206-9.
Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
tion from taxes on their trade throughout the Angevin empire, and were also allowed to pay the balance of the annual farm due from the city directly to the crown, without the sheriff acting as intermediaryY 4 The right to farm the city directly from the king lapsed after just one year. We do not know why, but might speculate that the massacre in March was the primary reason that the citizens failed to maintain this privilege which would not be confirmed again until 1212 when King John granted the city the right to pay its own farm in perpetuity by charter. 115 Instead of being the first county town to receive this privilege by charter, York became one of the last. 116
This achievement of civic liberty needs to be placed in context. The in­habitants of York were already well used to managing their own internal affairs, regulating trade, and holding courts without any royal prescription and without keeping any records. 117 The new freedom to pay their own farm, acquired first in 1189-90 and again in 1212, did not therefore mark the begin­ning of local government in York, but it did represent a decisive moment in which that autonomy was extended and reinforced through the transfer of responsibilities for royal administration in the city from the royal sheriff of the county to the citizens themselves. Winning, but also then losing, the right to pay their own farm is a forgotten but crucial part of the civic context to the attacks on the king's Jews in York that year, in part because it perhaps rein­forced a new emphasis being placed on the other cultural contexts through which York citizens were asserting their autonomy from royal administra­tion around 1190, in particular the idea of York as a Christian city founded in the shadow of York Minster. The final context in illuminating the simmering cauldron which exploded in March 1190 is faith; in this case, the meaning and uses of faithfulness in both constructing and disrupting neighbourliness.

As Paul Hyams indicates 'faith' was a powerful concept which militated against the easy integration of new immigrants who were not Christian. In York the Christian faith had a strong historical resonance in a city which had developed in the shadow of its cathedral church and which had no long tradition of royal government. Indeed before 1200 the courts of York Minster and other religious institutions, such as St Mary's abbey and St Leonard's hospital often provided more effective and more local places of trust for residents than did the royal courts.118 The flourishing cult of St William in York (a recent archbishop who had died in 1154 and was canonized in 1170) also provided a vehicle through which local people could organize them­
114 PR 2 Richard I, p. 59; Miller, 'Medieval York', pp. 30-1, 33.
115 Rot. Chart., pp. 40b, 187.
116J. Tait, The Medieval English Borough: Studies on Its Origins and Constitutional History (Man­

chester, 1936), p. 291. 117 Palliser, 'York's Civic Liberties', p. 89. 118 For what follows see: S. Rees Jones, 'The Cults of St William of York and St Kenelm ofWinch­
combe', in Cities, Texts and Social Networks 400-1500: Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space, ed. C. Goodson et al. (Farnham, 2010), pp. 193-214.

.

Neighbours and Victims in Twelfth-Century York
Sarah Rees Jones
selves and express their desires for good government in two ways. First, lo­cal saints' cults made it legitimate for local people to group together in order to raise and spend money on good causes, including the construction of a new stone bridge across the river Ouse. Second, through the recording of mundane miracles (the revival of children who had fallen down wells or of middle-aged men felled by strokes), the cults provided ordinary people with a public theatre in which they could articulate the things that really mattered to them: the health of their family, their problems with old age, difficult personal relationships, the sufferings and cruelties inflicted by war. These were the problems which affected their daily health, wealth and hap­piness. They were very far removed from the agenda of royal government but became one of the principal cornerstones of municipal self-government down to modern times. Certainly in York the cult of St William was in many ways more fundamental to the successful foundation of civic government than the acquisition of a commune and it is telling that the main offices of civic government were located in the chapel of St William built after 1170 on Ouse Bridge, where a fraternity of prominent citizens established both a hos­pital and other charities for the poor of the city. Such faith communities were formed around a concern for mundane domestic issues which should have provided the kind of motivation to enable Jews and Christians to live well together, to share their anxieties about child-care, poverty and old age. But by their very nature such fraternities excluded Jews, forcing them to develop separate public networks of mutuality and charitable assistance.
This powerful conjunction of resistance to royal interference and the em­bracing of local faith institutions is nowhere more evident than in York's common seal, one of the most remarkable survivals from York and one of the earliest surviving civic seals in England.119 The seal is also attached to a char­ter containing one of the earliest references to the citizens acting together as a corporate body, a commonalty. It was issued not long after the momentous months in which York both first acquired the right to pay its own farm to the crown and just as quickly was plunged into the horrific events of 16 March 1190. The design of the civic seal imitated the royal chancery seal in size and colouring, being some 2.5 inches in diameter and made of green wax. 120 However the legends and iconography of its two faces give equal weight to king and church. One side depicts a walled city (or possibly, even, a castle) and the (now damaged) legend: SIG[IL]LUM CIV[I]VM [CIVIT]A[TIS ... ] FIDELES R[EG]IS (the seal of the citizens of the city of York, ... the faithful of the king). This is probably the earliest surviving view of York, and may provide a unique insight into the possible appearance of the castle, in par­
119 BL Add. Charter 10636; British Museum Catalogue of Seals, no . 5542; R. B. Pugh, 'The Seals,
Insignia, Plate and Officers of the City', in VCH, City of York, pp. 544-6. 120 An impression of the royal chancery seal of Henry II is appended to the city' s oldest surviv­
ing royal charter: YCA Al.
ticular, close to 1190.121 On the other side the seal displays the image of St Pe­ter flanked by two angels and the legend: [SIG]ILLUM ECL[ESI]E SAN[CTI PET]Rl CAT[HEDRALIS E]BURAC[ENSIS] (the seal of the cathedral church of St Peter of York).122 This new civic seal perfectly illustrates how York's development in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was fundamentally shaped by both the ancient lordship of the church and the more recent lord­ship of the crown. It asserts that the development of a corporate civic iden­tity was constructed within the context of faithfulness to both. Made not long after the citizens had won (but also lost) their long-sought status as a commune (a word that is not included in the legend as it is in other towns' early common seals), and before this title was officially regained in 1212, the seal perhaps betrays a determination to act as a body of citizens regardless of any formal concession of such privilege from the crown. The unique use of the term 'fideles' in the legend in the aftermath of 1190 is a particularly evocative (even chilling) word for a group of citizens in constant negotiation with the different authorities demanding their loyalty. It was a word used increasingly commonly at the time, in other legal contexts, as an alternative to 'ba~ones': the king's barons also emphasized their faithfulness to the king (at a hme when many had not been so faithful). 123 Since the citizens of Lon­don also described themselves (on their seal) as 'barones' it is possible that York's leading citizens were aware of the multiple claims they were mak­ing by using this word: as important as London, as faithful subjects of the crown (in the face of evidence to the contrary) and above all as a citadel of Christian government. The seal suggests an acute awareness within the city of its external and historical reputation, and also illustrates how much these citizens, living close to their new Jewish neighbours and in daily interchange with them, were at the same time constructing a sense of citizenship which drew explicitly on their faith.
So were the citizens of York who were fined in 1190 simply the most im­portant citizens of York and innocent of any direct part in the violence unlike the working and young men of town and country and at least some knights of the shire, as Newburgh claimed, or were they (as the citizens fined at Lin­coln were said to be) guilty of the massacre of the Jews in 1190? The evidence presented here offers no clear answer. It does demonstrate, however, that those listed in the pipe rolls in 1190 and 1194 were very closely associated as neighbours with both the leaders of the mob and their victims on that night
121 Th
. · nlik th h ·
e image 1s u e ose on ot er city seals and does not appear to be a walled city. It shows a central tall crenellated tower with a double-arched window, flanked by two shorter towers and surrounded by a curtain wall.
122 See Pugh, 'Seals, Insignia, Plate and Officers', p. 544; S. Rees Jones, 'York's Civic Administra­tion, 1354-1464', in Government of Medieval York, ed . Rees Jones, pp . 108-40 (p. 121).
123 M. Gervers and N. Hamonic , 'Pro Amore Dei: Diplomatic Evidence of Social Conflict during the Reign of King John', in Law as Profession and Practice in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of JamesA. Brundage, ed. K. Pennington and M. H. Eichbauer (Farnham, 2011), pp. 231-62 (pp. 251-2) .
in March. Even if they did not reveal it, they certainly knew very well what had happened and who was responsible for it.
As Dobson so acutely concluded his study of the massacre in York in 1190 'it was the Jews who had to pay the harshest price for the unpopularity of royal government whose purposes they served'. 124This chapter has in part developed that theme: the leading citizens of York were indeed feeling the grip of a new style of national bureaucracy which was replacing more per­sonal aspects of royal government and beginning to invade many aspects of their daily life. The alternative framework on which they could, and did, construct a collective identity was that of their Christian faith. But this is only part of the story and in itself oversimplifies the many connections be­tween citizens and knights, royal officials and merchants, Christians and Jews who lived in such very close proximity with each other in the small neighbourhoods of Coney Street and Walmgate. It is within those intimate, informal and complicated personal relationships, which can barely be recov­ered historically, that the real causes and consequences of the massacre of York 1190 should be sought.
124 Dobson, JMY, p. 37.
42
2



Prelude and Postscript to the York Massacre: Attacks in East Anglia and Lincolnshire, 1190
JoeHillaby
The York massacre on 'Shabbat ha-Godol', whilst by far the most disastrous attack on a Jewish community, did not occur in isolation. The widespread riots in London, following Richard I's coronation on 3 September 1189, led to a series of onslaughts on Jewish communities in the eastern counties of England, the heartland of the late twelfth-century English provincial Jewry.
Ralph de Diceto, dean of St Paul's from 1180 to c. 1200, has little to say about the events in London, probably because, the see being vacant, he took the place of the bishop of London at the coronation and subsequent festivi­ties. For a detailed account of events in London we have to turn to William of Newburgh's Historia,which explains that the riot erupted when the press carried some Jews, who along with women had been forbidden entry, into Westminster Palace. The sources reveal that the London mob was predomi­nant, with a sprinkling of retainers of nobles attending the ceremony, and a number of fire-raisers. Ultimately, as Newburgh points out, in the general desire for plunder 'neither friends nor companions' were spared. 1
Attacks on Jewries spread to the provinces. According to Diceto, the first took place at Norwich on 6 February, followed by assaults at Stamford (Lin­colnshire), York and Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk) on 7, 16 and 18 March respec­tively.2 What follows is an attempt to trace their path and character, against the background of the emerging provincial Jewish communities concerned.
Lynn (Norfolk)
Richard I, Newburgh tells us, departed on crusade, 'holding a solemn con­ference with the French king', on 30 December 1189. The first attack was not,
1 Diceto, Historical Works; WN, ed. Howlett (Bk IV, ch. 1). For general discussion of the London
riot, see J. Hillaby, 'The London Jewry: William I to John', JHS 33 (1995 for 1992-94), 1-44
(pp. 26-30). 2 Diceto, Historical Works II, 75-6.




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