Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008) 119–129
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Journal of Medieval History
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The bonds that bind: money lending between Anglo-Jewish and Christian women in the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, 1218–1280
Victoria Hoyle
The Borthwick Institute for Archives, The University ofYork, Heslington,York YO10 5DD, UK
Keywords:
Christian–Jewish relations Jewish women Christian women Money lending Credit Medieval England The Exchequer of the Jews Kinship Interfaith
abstract
The plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews represent the single most important source for understanding the interrelations and interactions of Jewish and Christian women in thirteenth-century England. A uniquely voluminous series of documents pertaining to the bureaucracy that grew up around Jewish lending after 1190, the rolls reveal the many ways in which women of different faiths were brought into contact d both amicable and oppositional d through .nancial transactions, predominantly the borrowing and lending of money. It further considers the shared family interests, credit networks and daily necessities that such transactions signi.ed. Finally, by examining speci.c cases d from large scale, national disputes played out in the Exchequer Court to small-scale disagreements in the locality d it seeks to demonstrate how Jewish and Christian women negotiated with one another for economic resources. It concludes that money-lending, complicated by the particularities of kinship and business structures, .rst brought women of different faiths together and then tore them apart.
© 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Despite a rapid expansion in the .eld of Anglo-Jewish historiography in the last decade, the lives of the women of England’s medieval Jewry have been almost entirely neglected.1
Jewish wives, mothers and daughters have either been omitted from survey studies of the community altogether, or have only
E-mail address: veh501@york.ac.uk
1 This is especially surprising given the interest scholars of the nineteenth-century Jewish community have shown in women. See, for example, M. Galchinsky, ‘Engendering liberal Jews: Jewish women in Victorian England’, in: Jewish women in historical perspective, ed. J.R. Baskin, 2nd edn (Detroit, 1998), 208–26; M. Galchinsky, The origin of the modern Jewish woman writer: romance and reform in Victorian England (Detroit, 1996); C. Scheinberg, Women’s poetry and religion in Victorian England: Jewish identity and Christian culture (Cambridge, 2002).
0304-4181/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jmedhist.2008.03.002
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
appeared incidentally and as anonymous links between one generation of males and another.2
Only a small number of articles, largely focused on particularly famous (or infamous) women, have been published; the potential implications of these important case studies have often been lost within the wider, male-dominated narrative.3
This is despite the fact that references to Jewish women are ubiquitous throughout the administrative documentary material we have pertaining to the pre-Expulsion period in England, particularly in the surviving and published plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews.4
This record, unique in extent in northern Europe, is rich in its scope and makes constant reference to women in their many guises d as family members, independent businesswomen, outlaws and even community leaders. Despite its dry, bureaucratic nature it has much to reveal about the economic and social activities of Anglo-Jewish women.5
The plea rolls further represent the single most important English source for isolating interactions, and understanding relationships, between Anglo-Jewish women and their Christian counterparts. They reveal the ways in which Jewish and Christian women were brought into contact, both amicable and oppositional, through economic transactions d predominantly, money lending d and by the shared family interests, credit networks and necessities that such transactions represented. They suggest both the intimate, small scale economic arrangements which women of different faiths made between themselves in the locality, and the large scale national disputes between Jewish and Christian women of wealth and in.uence.
This vitally .nancial aspect of interaction between women of different faiths has been considered before, by William Chester Jordan in his seminal ‘Jews on top: women and the availability of consumption loans in northern France in the mid-thirteenth century’, but never in an English context.6
Yet, the economy of lending and borrowing in thirteenth century England fostered, by its nature, an almost unique forum for interfaith communication and co-operation. Predicated upon an interdependent relationship between the Jewish creditor and the Christian seeking credit, it bound lenders and borrowers together in reciprocal networks of supply and demand. The dependency and acrimonious disputes that attended such cross-cultural indebtedness inevitably became complicated with domestic interests and familial dramas. Thus, not only the inheritance of bonds, but also the shared responsibility for debt and repayment within kinship networks frequently implicated women (and children) in credit relationships.
Evidence suggests that the .rst Jews came to England shortly after the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, and that they did so speci.cally at the behest of the Conqueror.7
Their role, even so early in the community’s career, was an overwhelmingly .nancial one. The dukes of Normandy had borrowed and made use of Jewish money in the past and by the late twelfth century Jewish .nanciers dominated England’s lending markets. 8
They played a vital role in directing the .ow of
2 See, for example, V.D. Lipman, The Jews of medieval Norwich (London, 1967); Joe Hillaby, ‘London: the thirteenth-century Jewry revisited’, Jewish Historical Studies, 32 (1990–92), 89–159; and Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish solution: experiment and expulsion,1262–1290 (Cambridge, 1998).
3 See particularly, Susanna Bartlet, ‘Three Jewish businesswomen in thirteenth-century Winchester’, Jewish Culture and History, 3 (2000), 31–54; Reva Berman Brown and Sean McCartney, ‘David of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester: glimpses into a Jewish family in thirteenth-century England’, Jewish Historical Studies, 39 (2004), 1–35. Charlotte Newman Goldy’s essay in this volume d ‘A thirteenth-century Anglo-Jewish woman crossing boundaries: visible and invisible’ d helps to set these articles in their wider context.
4 Select pleas, starrs and other records from the rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, A.D. 1220–1284, ed. J.M. Rigg (London, 1902), and Calendar of the Plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, I: 1218–1272, ed. J.M. Rigg (London, 1905), II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. J.M. Rigg (Edinburgh, 1910), III: EdwardI,1274–1277, ed. H. Jenkinson (London, 1929), IV:Henry III,1272 and EdwardI,1275–1277, ed. H.G. Richardson (London, 1972); V: EdwardI,1277–79, ed. S. Cohen, rev. P. Brand (London, 1992).
5 See V. Hoyle, ‘Negotiating the margins: Anglo-Jewish women in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews’ (Unpublished MA thesis, York, 2006).
6 William Chester Jordan, ‘Jews on top: women and the availability of consumption loans in northern France in the mid-thirteenth century’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 29:1 (1978), 39–57.
7 Joseph Hillaby, ‘Jewish colonisation in the twelfth century’ in: Jews in medieval Britain: historical, literary and archaeological perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge, 2003), 16.
8 Norman Golb, The Jews in medieval Normandy:a social and intellectual history (Cambridge, 1998), xvi; Suzanne Bartlet, ‘Three Jewish business women in thirteenth-century Winchester’, 32.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
wealth in a land economy and in ensuring a steady supply of cash to meet rising demand.9
In the absence of Christian competitors, Jewish lenders, both male and female, .ourished in the interstices of the dominant institutional forms of lordship and peasant-based agriculture in England.10
There were always Christian men, and women too, at all levels of the economy, in need of ready money; supplying it became the Jews’ raison d’eˆtre.11
Consequently, historians have been gifted with a glut of extant records detailing their .nancial transactions and activities. By far the most important of these survivals is an incomplete but extensive set of plea rolls wherein the Exchequer of the Jews recorded the thousands of cases of debt and account, as well as a variety of other Jewish-related pleas, that were heard in its dedicated court.12
Their compilation was unique to the Anglo-Jewry, as was the institution that created them: a product of both the Jews’ .nancial specialisation and of their particular relationship with the English crown.
As early as 1135 the idea that the Jew, and all his/her assets, belonged to the king was expounded in the apocryphal ‘Laws of Edward the Confessor’; these made it quite clear that the Jews were reserved for royal purpose and, as such, were under the crown’s protection and control.13
Evidence in the charters of Richard I and John suggests that by the reign of Henry II this tradition had concretised into a document guaranteeing the Jews the right to practise their peculiar livelihood nationwide and in safety.14
The implication was clear enough: harm the Jews, their property or prosperity, and you harm the king himself. In the late twelfth century this protectionism developed still further to provide access to certain forms of administrative justice d that is, the Exchequer of the Jews d from which Christian money lenders were excluded.15
The establishment of the Exchequer was part of an increasing regulation of Jewish affairs by royal administration that began in the latter decades of the twelfth century to both the community’s gain and detriment. The long-term motivations were undoubtedly monetary: the Jews were the king’s assets and, through their own .nancial strategies, were increasingly af.uent. Around 1170 Henry II had stopped borrowing money from them and begun extorting it instead in the form of .nes and arbitrary taxations known as tallages; these were calculated as a percentage of overall Jewish wealth.16
Thereafter, it became increasingly necessary to create an administrative system that would help to maintain, and monitor, Jewish productivity to the crown’s advantage.
The short-term catalyst was almost certainly the anti-Jewish violence that followed Richard I’s coronation and the preaching of the third crusade in 1190. Characterised by short, violent attacks against provincial Jewish settlements across England, it culminated in the massacre at Clifford’s Tower in York on the night of 16 March.17
The damage done, however, was not limited to lives lost. During the attendant mayhem the Christian perpetrators had made concerted efforts to destroy any Jewish business records that detailed the money they had lent and which was owed to them. The accounts of innumerable transactions were lost to the real detriment of Jewish businessmen and women; without evidence, their money could never be reclaimed or exhorted from the debtors.
9 P. Elman, ‘The economic causes of the expulsion of the Jews in 1290’, Economic History Review, 7:1 (1936), 145.
10 Edwin S. Hunt and James M. Murray, A history of business in medieval Europe,1200–1550 (Cambridge, 1999), 30.
11 The extent of Jewish lending in England has been disputed, as has the percentage of the Jewish population engaged in .nancial markets. Estimates of the latter have varied drastically from 1% to 100%. Neither extreme seems entirely reasonable; rather, we might con.dently assert that a signi.cant portion of the Jewish community were engaged in money-lending of variant magnitudes.
12 Select pleas, ed. Rigg, and Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg; II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg; III: Edward I,1274–1277, ed. Jenkinson; IV: Henry III,1272 and Edward I,1275–77, ed. Richardson; V: Edward I,1277–79, ed. Cohen, rev. Brand.
13 Bracton (d.1268) later elaborated that the Jews could have no property because whatsoever he acquired was not for himself but for the king. (H.G. Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin kings (London, 1960), 103–9).
14 Paul Brand, ‘Jews and the law in England, 1275–90’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), 1138.
15 There was no forum for Christian money lenders to recover debts until 1284, at which time Edward I did begin to regulate Christian–Christian lending. (Elman, ‘The economic causes of the expulsion of the Jews in 1290’, 150).
16 It is dif.cult to identify the .rst national Jewish tallage. Although the Northampton ‘donum’ of 1194 is the .rst for which we have substantial evidence, including lists of contributors and their contributions, it was more than probably based on earlier collections. (Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin kings, 161–2).
17 For a clear narrative of this crisis and the events leading up to it, see R.B. Dobson, The Jewsof medievalYork and the massacre of March1190 (Borthwick papers, 45, York, 1974).
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
The national network of of.cially maintained deposit chests (archae) and recording clerks (chirographers) for bonds of loan and account (chirographs), .rst noted in the mid-1190s, was probably created in direct response.18
It was in both the king’s and the Jewish lender’s interests to make formal, legal records of lending transactions. As far as the monarchy was concerned a properly sealed chirograph turned the potential wealth tied up in a bond into a taxable asset, and as far as the Jew was concerned it made the capital recoverable through the archa system’s judicial arm: the Exchequer of the Jews. This was initially an administrative venue for debt recovery and account adjudication, but eventually became a forum speci.c to all Jewish concerns.19
Stationed close to Westminster, it functioned along similar lines to the main Exchequer, having its own seal, meeting in termly sessions and hearing cases from across the country in its court.20
Dominated by pleas for repayment or restitution between Jewish lenders and their Christian clients, the extant records are the obvious starting point for any historian looking for evidence of interfaith interaction in thirteenth-century England.21
Survey work on the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews suggests that the court, as it functioned between 1218 and 1280, was exceptional in its treatment of women, both Jewish and Christian and whether plaintive or defendant.22
In common with the equity courts of the later fourteenth and .fteenth centuries, the Exchequer of the Jews allowed the participation of women independent from their husbands, fathers or male kin.23
It further made no effective distinctions based on a woman’s life cycle status d she might come to the court as a single woman, a wife or a widow, or in her capacity as a daughter or a mother. It accepted pleas from married women concerning their own credit interests, and also pleas from women concerned with the credit interests of their husbands or sons.24
That many women of both faiths were implicated in money-lending through the Exchequer is undeniable. At the top end of the market were women like the dowager queen Eleanor of Provence, who was deeply involved in the trade in debt bonds, and Licoricia of Winchester, one of the most successful Jewish .nanciers of the thirteenth century. Moving across the social scale we .nd women of all statuses, right down to poor urban widows and single-women borrowing and lending small amounts on domestic securities. All of these women were operating within .nancial markets, be they local or national.
This state of affairs must have followed partly from the already high status of Jewish women as business people in their own rights, and partly from the ubiquity of Christian borrowing. Continental evidence is unambiguous about the importance of women in the operation of Jewish community life and in the day-to-day procedures of Jewish family business.25
Clearly, for example, women were active in the communities of northern France in the tenth and eleventh centuries, like that at Rouen from which the London community originated.26
Jordan has further emphasised their involvement in lending in mid-thirteenth-century France.27
However, it is only with the survival of the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews after 1218 that the extent of Jewish women’s lending and .nancial operations in England becomes apparent. Such integral involvement of Jewish women in the .nancial arena necessarily led to frequent contact with their Christian counterparts.
There are 641 references to 310 distinct and individual Jewish women (all but 23 of whom are named) in the published plea rolls. Although the appearance of male individuals signi.cantly outnumbers these references, the differential is not as marked as one might expect. Full data on the number
18 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, xiv.
19 Brand, ‘Jews and the law in England, 1275–90’, 1139.
20 Mundill, England’s Jewish solution,6.
21 Paul Brand, ‘The Jewish community of England in the records of the English royal government’ in: Jews in medieval Britain,
ed. Skinner, 73.
22 See Hoyle, ‘Negotiating the margins’.
23 Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Women, credit and family relationships in England, 1300–1620’, Journal ofFamily History: Studies in
Family Kinship and Demography, 30 (2005), 151.
24 See Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 80 and I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 26 for respective examples.
25 For a survey, Judith R. Baskin, ‘Jewish women in the middle ages’ in: Jewish women in historical perspective, ed. Baskin,
109–14; more speci.cally, Jordan, ‘Jews on top’; Cheryl Tallan, ‘The economic productivity of medieval Jewish widows’, Proceed
ings of the eleventh world congress of Jewish studies, 9 vols (Jerusalem, 1994), division B, vol. 2, 151–8. 26 See particularly Golb, The Jews in medieval Normandy, xvi. 27 William Chester Gordan, ‘Jews on top’.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
and individuality of male Anglo-Jews is unavailable for comparison, but of the 320 cases of debt, account or coin clipping involving Jewish individuals recorded between Michaelmas Term, 1275 and Trinity Term, 1277, 88 of them (or 27.5%) were brought or defended by at least one woman, either independently or in consort with a male relative. A further 10 women appeared to pay .nes to the Exchequer. Three of the 88 cases involved more than one women d for example, Ermina and Rose, both daughters of Deudone Crespin of York, were joint defendants in a plea of account in 1275 and .ve women were listed amongst those arrested in York for coin clipping in 1277.28
The majority of these cases concerning Jewish women involved male Christian defendants or plaintives. This should come as little surprise d Christian men were the predominant actors in England’s borrowing markets. However, Christian women do persistently appear in the record, often in cases involving male Jews but also in actions brought or defended by Jewish women. In total they appear opposite each other in 40 cases of debt, account and petty crime, a number that is relatively low but remains signi.cant.
We can con.dently assume that it represents only the tip of the iceberg of women’s .nancial contact with each other. The Exchequer of the Jews functioned at the highest levels of bureaucratic administration. Consequently, the vast majority of disputes over debts of a small or middling nature must have been resolved elsewhere, probably by local chirographers or by negotiation between the parties themselves. Equally, we must consider that, although the Exchequer of the Jews was unusually fair (or, one might say, indifferent) in its treatment of women, cases between two women were still less likely to appear than those involving one or more males. Further, evidence from the Plea Rolls has suggested that female .nanciers were more successful and in.uential in the geographical margins of their community and thus away from the centralised Exchequer.29
Those cases that did reach London and the court must have been extraordinary, both in their import and in the determination of the women involved.
Finally, we should consider that all of the cases in the rolls represent credit agreements gone wrong and sour. Amiable borrowing and repayment does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Exchequer of the Jews, and the majority of a woman’s .nancial transactions must have been just that. Even disputes stem from an initially equitable and reasonable negotiation between creditor and borrower. Thus, although our evidence is largely for Jewish and Christian women in con.ict, we might remember that acrimony cannot have been the norm. These 40 cases represent only a tantalising snapshot of the intersections of Jewish and Christian women’s lives over the matter of money lent and borrowed.
Causes between two female parties were nearly always associated with the demand, made by the Jewish woman, for the repayment of a debt by the Christian woman (or, occasionally, her heirs). Alternatively, but less frequently, a Christian woman might complain about the unfair distraint of her goods by her creditor. Such a dispute occurred most commonly along simple lines between two individuals. In 1220, for example, Belina of Bedford, the young daughter of the Gloucestershire magnate Mirabel but already a signi.cant lender in her own right, made a demand of debt against Dionisia of Bedford, a widow.
Belina was Mirabel’s eldest daughter, and a married woman .nancially independent of her husband.30
It seems clear from the opening of the case that she had .rst made attempts to recover her capital in the locality, without immediate recourse to the court. Instead, it was Dionisia who .rst brought their business to the attention of the Exchequer when she complained about Belina’s ‘unlawful demand’ for the repayment of a debt.31
The plea rolls do not record her reasons for complaint – most commonly plaintives claimed the debt had been previously acquitted – but we know that Belina subsequently presented her copy of the chirograph bond in her own defence. It had been drawn up between her, as principle creditor, and Henry de Bedford (presumably Dionisia’s husband) and was worth £8, plus interest. Unfortunately, we do not know how the case ended because, in common with many medieval court records, the rolls rarely note settlements or judgements. It seems quite
28 See Plea Rolls, III: EdwardI,1274–1277, ed. Jenkinson, 20; IV: Henry III,1272 and Edward I,1275–77, ed. Richardson, 277.
29 See Hoyle, ‘Negotiating the margins’, 41–8.
30 Joe Hillaby, ‘Testimony from the margin: the Gloucester Jewry and its neighbours, c. 1159–1290’, Jewish Historical Studies,37
(2002), 41–112.
31 Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 37.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
likely, however, that Belina was able to enforce at least part of her claim d a chirograph obligation, even inherited, was binding.
The case demonstrates clearly how two women of different faiths might engage oppositionally in the .nancial arena, both taking active roles in the legal and administrative process. Neither woman appears to have employed a proxy or attorney to present their case and Belina, at least, appeared in court in person to deliver her chirograph as evidence. Dionisia, for her part, acted as the catalyst that brought the dispute to the court’s attention in the .rst place. Thus, although they belonged to different religions and held divergent cultural allegiances, they shared the world of credit relationships in common and the Exchequer of the Jews as a forum for the expression of their respective rights.
Whether the women had ever met is debatable and we simply do not know enough about the workings of the Exchequer Court to make pronouncements about their interaction during proceedings, but they must have been hyper-aware of one another. The interests of Belina, the rising star of a dynasty of powerful lenders, whose family through marriage and blood dominated the economy of the marcher lands, intersected closely with those of Dionisia.32
For Dionisia the outcome of the dispute may have been crucial to her future .nancial security; whereas for Belina the point at issue was more probably the reputation and well-being of her business. She was already familiar with disputes in the Exchequer of the Jews and with the use of the chirograph system to assume a position of authority over her creditors. Her mother, Mirabel of Gloucester, had inherited a burgeoning family .rm from her husband and was repeatedly active in the court herself.33
Dionisia had been drawn into intimate contact and con.ict with this economic and legal expertise through her husband’s credit obligations and, although we have no way of gauging her level of personal knowledge or preparedness, it was unlikely to be on a par with Belina’s professional skill set. Undoubtedly, disputes of this kind must have affected the tenor of personal interface between Jewish and Christian women.
Christian women were most frequently drawn into credit relationships during their widowhoods. This appears to have been true in 25 of the 40 cases under discussion, and was often the case for Jewish women as well. A recent statistical analysis of the plea rolls in their entirety found that half of all cases involving Jewish women were brought or defended by a widow.34
However, it is much more dif.cult to establish how and why women became implicated in these cases d did they inherit the bonds via their deceased husbands’ or other family members, or did they contract them independently between themselves? Both circumstances appear to have been relatively common, but although in some cases the plea records the partners of the original debt under dispute it does not always do so. The problem is further complicated by the fact that Jewish wives frequently made loans independently of their husbands during their marriages, and by the fact that the ownership of any one bond could be .uid. It might pass from one family member to another during their lifetimes, and might even be purchased by a third party, Jewish or Christian.35
Some were clearly drawn up between two male relatives and subsequently inherited: Belya, widow of Manser of York and Amice, widow of Richard Maunsel came to the court over a debt between their late husbands in 1273, although they subsequently settled their disagreement between themselves.36
In another case the original debt had apparently been agreed independently between the two women d in 1274 the rolls state that the widow Isabella de Albiniaco had ‘bound’ herself to Maydin, the widow of Jacob Crespin for the sum of £10.37
One assumes that, in such cases, the women must have met and negotiated with one another. In others, where they inherited the debt from their husband, they may have been previously unknown to each other. Either way, it was the .nancial market that eventually brought them into personal contact.
Christian and Jewish women might equally become involved in a credit dispute via other kinship obligations. For example, Jewish women often made demands against the wives of their living male
32 Hillaby, ‘Testimony from the margin’, 94–99.
33 For example, in the same year, Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 43.
34 Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 24.
35 The trade in Jewish bonds is fascinating but incredibly complicated and beyond the scope of this discussion. For an intro
duction, H.G. Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin kings (London, 1960), 67–82.
36 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 80.
37 The debt was subsequently sold to Master Samuel de Lohun. (Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 257).
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debtors d this is true in 30% of the cases in the plea rolls involving two or more women. It is not entirely clear why this should have been the case, or whether this was a re.ection of the obligations recorded on bonds of debt. The plea rolls do not make clear whether couples borrowed co-dependently or whether women were only implicated by conjugality at the point of repayment. However, it may well be more of a re.ection of the traditions of Jewish families and business practise than of the .nancial status of Christian wives.
Jewish couples frequently made bonds and brought cases together; 72.4% of the married Jewish women who appear in the plea rolls do so in consort with their husband. I have previously argued that this was indicative of a Jewish family’s shared economic assets: men, women and their children were often active together in the money market, forming close ‘consortia’ of kin. Thereby they shared obligations, pro.ts and credit reputations. Should one family member die or become unable to sustain their .nancial agreements, their place could immediately be .lled by an associate, be it a wife, son or daughter, nephew or niece.38
This was particularly important in a .exible credit economy where the only permanent .xture of a debt was the archa bond itself, and in which the involved parties, the gages or securities and the amount owed could all change over time. Shared responsibility for .nancial transactions was one way by which the security of returns could be protected and kept within the familial group.
It seems possible that this state of affairs was mirrored in Jewish dealings with Christians d by implicating a woman in her husband’s debts, either on the bond itself or during a court case, the creditor staked their claim on compensation from the family unit and not just from an individual borrower who might die, default or become bankrupt. An early case plea roll is instructive.
In 1220 Chera of Winchester came to the Exchequer to demand the repayment of a debt agreed between her late husband, Isaac the Chirographer and Simon de Craye. The bond she presented was for 16 marks. During the same hearing Margeret de Craye, Simon’s wife, made an independent complaint: namely that Chera had already caused her to be unlawfully disseised of her land in lieu of repayment of the debt. Margaret went on to claim that the land in question was her own and thus not relevant to the case. Chera whom, we must assume, was present at court, answered ‘that she demands the debt, not of Margaret, but [.] of Simon of whom the chirograph speaks’.39
The case is important not only because it demonstrates the familial implications of debt, but because it focuses on the rights and interactions of the two women involved. Chera staked her claim as a creditor, having inherited the debt from her husband, while Margaret questioned her own culpability for repayment as the debtor’s wife. It is notable that Chera does not make a demand against husband and wife at the court, although she appears to consider both responsible for compensation in the .rst instance. Margaret’s claim that she had already been disseised of property is also interesting. Firstly, it con.rms that disagreements about debt could already be well advanced by the time they reached the attention of the Exchequer of the Jews, and that women (and men) must often have met about their credit disputes before they escalated into formal proceedings.
The Exchequer of Jews also had the power to enforce payment of debt from non-family members and frequently did so. Culpability for the repayment of debt not only lay with blood relatives but with all the debtors’ social and .nancial dependents: tenants, for example, were frequently distrained for sums on which their landlords had defaulted. Such a case, involving a total of three women, was brought by Belassez, widow of Leo, son of Preciousa in 1278.40
She appears to have held the bond for a large amount for which Isabelle de Berdestaple was responsible, but the case does not state how much was owed. Isabelle had defaulted or was unable to pay and subsequently her tenants, Peter and Johanna de Stanford, were distrained. Neither Isabelle nor the Stanfords appeared to defend themselves in court and, on the second occasion, were ordered disseised of the amount.
On another occasion a Jewish woman attempted to take advantage of the tenant-landlord obligation in the opposite direction, but without success. In 1275 Genta, daughter of Cresse, son of Genta moved to
38 Hoyle, ‘Negotiating the margins’, 25–6. 39 Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 26. 40 Plea Rolls, Vol. V, 60, 93.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
distrain Emma Oliver for her tenant’s debts.41
What subsequently appears in the plea rolls is tantamount to a statement of failure: Genta was forced to issue a quitclaim in favour of Emma in which she admitted that nothing could be claimed from the land rented by the debtor, William Poinz of Little Blanford, because it did not belong to him and was not his to offer as security at the time the loan was made. In keeping with Jewish business traditions, Genta’s father Cresse and her husband Samuel also issued quitclaims d this meant that they could not pursue the debt further in the interest of the family consortia. Clearly, although a debt could .lter down through family networks and be exhorted from the debtor’s dependents, the obligation for repayment did not extend up the social ladder.
Jewish and Christian women might also come into con.ict over more material wealth and property. In 1274 Slema, the daughter of Isaac of Southwark was in dispute with Elice, widow of Nicholas le Taylur regarding a messuage with appurtenances in Southwark.42
There followed a long and protracted dispute in which the Exchequer was heavily involved – the messuage in question had apparently fallen into the hands of the king through default earlier in the same year, after which Slema had sued for replevin.43
In the next term of the court she was making more demands against Elice, even though she was legally underage; and in early 1275 she returned to court again.44
Such persistence was apparently typical of pleas between women d 15 of our 40 cases appeared at court twice or more.
This .nal appearance, however, reveals plainly how Jewish and Christian womens’ interests were complicated by family relationships. Elice had inherited the house in Southwark from her husband Nicholas and argued, therefore, that Slema had no claim on it; Slema, on the other hand, had inherited ‘a moiety of the said messuage through an agreement of her fathers’.45
The women were brought into contact and dispute via this agreement. It seems that Nicholas Taylur had made a bond with Slema’s father Isaac under the terms of which he mortgaged part of his Southwark property. Their respective deaths subsequently confused the right of ownership and brought the women’s interest into direct collision.
As they both resided in Southwark at the time of the dispute, and given that they were claiming something as substantial and practical as a house, it seems likely that they knew each other, perhaps quite well. They must have shared the same public spaces, and have met concerning their joint claims to the Taylur house. It is possible that they had quarrelled verbally or even physically with one another.
We know of at least one such quarrel between a Jewish and a Christian woman in a public space, although we do not know precisely what lay behind it. In 1278 Agatha, the wife of Robert Nemek of Nottingham impleaded Henna, the wife of Solomon, son of Bonenfaunt, a Jew of the same town ‘touching contumelious blasphemies in contempt of the Christian faith against the said Agatha.’ Agatha went on to explain how Henna had ‘assaulted’ her in the public market, assailing her with abusive words and ‘scandalising the Christian people standing about’. Henna had ended by spitting in her face.46
We should not necessarily interpret Henna’s actions as part of a .nancial dispute, but it does suggest the close proximity in which Jewish and Christian women in con.ict could .nd themselves.
To what extent Henna and Agatha’s relationship was typical of interfaith relationships is arguable. Open hostility must have been a relatively rare facet of women’s interactions. Certainly we have circumstantial evidence from the plea rolls for more positive meetings between women of different faiths, both within the economic sphere and in their homes. In 1277 it was recorded that Licoricia of Winchester’s Christian servant was murdered alongside her mistress in their home.47
Further, in 1272 ‘Dame Abigail’ of Canterbury paid a signi.cant .ne for dispensation to employ and house a Christian wet nurse.48
These domestic arrangements were apparently made despite the frequent promulgations against the employment of Christians by Jews, or vice-a-versa. That Christian and Jewish families were also neighbours and friends is clear enough: in 1280 the bishop of Winchester
41 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 237.
42 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 124.
43 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 175.
44 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 197, 215–16.
45 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 215–16.
46 R.R. Mundill, The Jewish Entries in thePatent Rolls,1272-1292, 60–1.
47 Plea Rolls, III: Edward I,1274–1277, ed. Jenkinson, 293.
48 Plea Rolls, IV: Henry III,1272 and Edward I,1275–77, ed. Richardson, 146.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
was thoroughly incensed when large numbers of Christians attended a .amboyant Jewish wedding ceremony in Gloucester, complete with a procession and dancing. We can readily imagine Jewish and Christian women sharing the atmosphere and excitement of the nuptials, as well as recognising and conversing with one another.
Finally, in periods of persecution or acute taxation Jewish families often lodged their valuables with Christian neighbours. It is true that we only now know of the cases in which the return of such valuables was contentious but they must represent a larger number of friendly exchanges. A poignant case from 1280 is demonstrative: Flora, widow of Isaac of Berkhamstead gave 20 marks of silver, a silver bowl and a red super-tunic into the safe keeping of her neighbour and, possibly, friend Agnes le Call-ester. When Agnes died suddenly the items were passed to her son-in-law, Hugh de Boulogne, who denied that they were Floria’s and refused to return them.49
These, and similar interactions must have normalised the relationships between Christian and Jewish women, bringing them together as members of neighbourhoods and townships.
Money lending must have both fostered and complicated such intimacies, driving a wedge of con.icted .nancial interests between otherwise amiable clusters of women. One case in particular, perhaps the most detailed and interesting of all the cases between women in the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, reveals both sides of interfaith contact d the daily tolerance, negotiation and friendship of the community and the acrimony of the .nancial dispute. Importantly, its participants are members of the Jewish and Christian urban community in London and are involved in a negotiation of the kind of small-scale ‘consumption’ loan that William Chester Jordan has previously highlighted.
Small-scale economic transactions are not ordinarily the stuff of the Exchequer of the Jews. As previously noted, the plea rolls represent the top tier of money-lending cases, those that involved very large sums or that had escalated into immutable con.ict. The debts that appeared before the court were usually large, old or contentious in some other way. The original debtor was often dead or had disappeared or had defaulted on their security. It is very unusual to come across evidence of low-end lending, the kind which occurred without argument through the archa chest in the locality or which took place at an even more informal level. Unfortunately, these are precisely the kinds of transactions that historians of women .nd most interesting, as low-end lending activities d pawn-broking and pennies loaned on domestic sureties d must often have been the preserve of women.
There is only occasional and oblique evidence for such activities in the rolls. The brothers of Mount Carmel in Oxford, for example, had probably dealt with Margarina of Oxford (whose family associations are lost) in the guise of a pawnbroker. Needing small advances of cash in the locality, they had gone to a female lender. In 1278 Henry de Wimpole came before the court in the name of the brotherhood and demanded she return three books she had from them: St Paul’s epistles with glosses, St Matthew’s gospel with glosses and the Sentences with glosses, all together worth 57s. Although Margarina claimed she had never had them, witnesses testi.ed and the jury .nally ruled, that she had had them for over the agreed two-year period and had subsequently sold them, as was her right as a pawnbroker.50
Incidentally, borrowing small amounts on the surety of books was apparently a regular occurrence in the university town. In 1281 two converts to Christianity, Belasez and Hittecote, had in their combined possession a small library of books, all of them student texts and including two Grammars, a book on ‘ancient Logic’ (possibly Porphyry’s Isagoge), a law textbook and a book ‘on Nature’. The combined value was signi.cant and they were sold towards their upkeep in the Domus conversorum, the house founded especially for Jewish converts by Henry III.51
It is not possible to ascertain whether the women had worked and converted together, or whether their brokering of the books had been independent.
The arrangements surrounding such small loans must have frequently been negotiated privately between women in the urban environment. The following case may well be representative. In 1284
49 Select Pleas, ed. Rigg, 108–9.
50 Plea Rolls, V: Edward I,1277–79, ed. Cohen, rev. Brand, 66.
51 Select Pleas, ed. Rigg, 114.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
a Christian woman, Matilda le Megre, brought a case of detention of pledge and usury against Bona, the wife of Moses of Dog Strete. Bona’s own lending partner Belasez (no familial identi.er is given) stood as Matilda’s chief witness, giving testimony, in person, that: ‘on one occasion she was asked by Matilda to lend her 5s upon 7 ells of cloth and that, not having the said money, she asked Bona to join her in lending each a moiety of the 5s. And that Bona then lent 2s 6d and Belasez lent the same, and that on another occasion the women lent Matilda another 12d on the same pledge so that in the whole she had 6s, 3s from each of them.’52
The case arose because, although Belasez was pleased to return the pledge on the receipt of her original outlay, Bona was intent upon extracting the original amount plus 10s, an extortionate cumulative rate of interest. Given the legislative conditions of the Statute of the Jewry of 1275 and on account of her usurious demands Bona was committed to the Tower until she made amends.53
The case is intriguing not only because it shows Bona and Belasez acting together in the locality to lend a Christian woman a small amount of money in the short term, but because it highlights the con.icts that could arise from shared economic interests. That Matilda, Belassez and Bona knew each other is self-evident; it is equally likely they lived in close proximity, perhaps on the same street. Belassez in particular appears to have been close to Matilda, so much so that she was prepared to stand as a witness against her co-religionist and lending partner. Indeed, closely examined, her part in loaning the money is that of a friend: having been approached for a small loan and being unable to render it from her own capital, she actively sought a partner in Bona. Apparently, she did not do so in pursuit of pro.t. When Matilda repaid the original amount of money, Belassez was prepared to give back her pledge in full. She testi.ed that she believed that these were the terms that the three women had agreed upon. Bona, however, had understood their contract differently. For her the loan had been a business transaction and meant to be pro.table.
It is notable that whereas Belassaz was disassociated from her family members during the proceedings, Bona emphasised hers and defended the case in partnership with her husband, Moses. Whether she had originally lent out of her own money or out of capital that she shared with him is impossible to determine from the rolls. What is important, however, is how her family unit vigorously mobilised to defend what it perceived to be the terms of the .nancial agreement. For Belessaz the transaction was personal, for Bona it was business. It stands to reveal two vitally different sides to Jewish women’s interactions with their Christian counterparts d on the one hand, they were friends and neighbours, on the other individuals in competition for resources and pro.t.
Additionally, the particulars of this case, including Belasez’s testimony, hint that no of.cial bond was ever made or deposited in one of London’s archa chests. At no point did either party produce a chirograph or written agreement concerning the loan, which explains why Belassez’s testimony was entered into the rolls at all d ordinarily the archae or chirographer would have provided the necessary evidence. Unlike their wealthy and in.uential sisters, women like Belassez and Bona did not record their business through of.cial channels. Women’s lending, but especially small-scale consumption lending to other women, must often have been unof.cial in this way, not just hidden from the record of the plea rolls but also from the local archa system. It seems likely that, as in this case, they lent as and when the opportunity presented itself, alone or in partnerships, to their neighbours, friends and acquaintances.54
Jewish historians, and women’s historians too, have traditionally made an unnatural distinction between economic activities and socio-cultural and familial life, which is only just beginning to break down.55
Isolating the interactions between women of different faiths, and particularly their involvement in the strategies and structures of money-lending, is a sure way of demonstrating the falsity of such a dichotomy. It is important for us to remember, when approaching such issues, that family was the foundation of Jewish and Christian social life; further, that it was the stem unit of many lending transactions and the basic building block of Jewish business. As a result both Jewish and Christian
52 Select Pleas, ed. Rigg, 116.
53 Select Pleas, ed. Rigg, 131–2.
54 Jordan, ‘Jews on top’, 45.
55 For example, Golb, The Jews in medieval Normandy, xiv.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
women functioned economically around the narratives that de.ned their family lives: marriage, divorce (for Jews at least), education, employment, property and inheritance.56
We have seen how Jewish and Christian women’s marriages and widowhoods, combined with their .nancial obligations, affected the way they interacted and communicated with one other. We have also noted how normalised interfaith relations evident within the community and between neighbours and friends could become complicated in the light of disputed .nancial resources and obligations. Evidence points to complex skeins of association that existed between and within faiths and families in order that such obligations might be ful.lled and capital recovered.
Thus money lending is the shibboleth to understanding interfaith interaction between women in high medieval England. While culture, religion and tradition separated and demarcated their lives, even despite shared community and space, the economy of money lending brought them together as they pursued strategies of .nancial necessity and competed for .nite resources. Drawn into communication and con.ict by credit relationships, either in their own names or through kinship networks, they became intimate with each other’s .nancial interests. The cycle of credit and repayment bound them together, closely and densely, even as it forced them apart. The plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews go some way to revealing the ways in which women negotiated this dangerous terrain of cross-faith interaction.
Victoria Hoyle received her MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York and plans to pursue doctoral research into the interaction of Jewish and Christian women in thirteenth and fourteenth century Europe. She currently works at The Borthwick Institute for Archives and Historical Research.
56 Brown and McCartney, ‘David of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester’, 1.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Medieval History
journal
homepage:
www.elsevier.com/locate/
jmedhist
The bonds that bind: money lending between Anglo-Jewish and Christian women in the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, 1218–1280
Victoria Hoyle
The Borthwick Institute for Archives, The University ofYork, Heslington,York YO10 5DD, UK
Keywords:
Christian–Jewish relations Jewish women Christian women Money lending Credit Medieval England The Exchequer of the Jews Kinship Interfaith
abstract
The plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews represent the single most important source for understanding the interrelations and interactions of Jewish and Christian women in thirteenth-century England. A uniquely voluminous series of documents pertaining to the bureaucracy that grew up around Jewish lending after 1190, the rolls reveal the many ways in which women of different faiths were brought into contact d both amicable and oppositional d through .nancial transactions, predominantly the borrowing and lending of money. It further considers the shared family interests, credit networks and daily necessities that such transactions signi.ed. Finally, by examining speci.c cases d from large scale, national disputes played out in the Exchequer Court to small-scale disagreements in the locality d it seeks to demonstrate how Jewish and Christian women negotiated with one another for economic resources. It concludes that money-lending, complicated by the particularities of kinship and business structures, .rst brought women of different faiths together and then tore them apart.
© 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Despite a rapid expansion in the .eld of Anglo-Jewish historiography in the last decade, the lives of the women of England’s medieval Jewry have been almost entirely neglected.1
Jewish wives, mothers and daughters have either been omitted from survey studies of the community altogether, or have only
E-mail address: veh501@york.ac.uk
1 This is especially surprising given the interest scholars of the nineteenth-century Jewish community have shown in women. See, for example, M. Galchinsky, ‘Engendering liberal Jews: Jewish women in Victorian England’, in: Jewish women in historical perspective, ed. J.R. Baskin, 2nd edn (Detroit, 1998), 208–26; M. Galchinsky, The origin of the modern Jewish woman writer: romance and reform in Victorian England (Detroit, 1996); C. Scheinberg, Women’s poetry and religion in Victorian England: Jewish identity and Christian culture (Cambridge, 2002).
0304-4181/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jmedhist.2008.03.002
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
appeared incidentally and as anonymous links between one generation of males and another.2
Only a small number of articles, largely focused on particularly famous (or infamous) women, have been published; the potential implications of these important case studies have often been lost within the wider, male-dominated narrative.3
This is despite the fact that references to Jewish women are ubiquitous throughout the administrative documentary material we have pertaining to the pre-Expulsion period in England, particularly in the surviving and published plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews.4
This record, unique in extent in northern Europe, is rich in its scope and makes constant reference to women in their many guises d as family members, independent businesswomen, outlaws and even community leaders. Despite its dry, bureaucratic nature it has much to reveal about the economic and social activities of Anglo-Jewish women.5
The plea rolls further represent the single most important English source for isolating interactions, and understanding relationships, between Anglo-Jewish women and their Christian counterparts. They reveal the ways in which Jewish and Christian women were brought into contact, both amicable and oppositional, through economic transactions d predominantly, money lending d and by the shared family interests, credit networks and necessities that such transactions represented. They suggest both the intimate, small scale economic arrangements which women of different faiths made between themselves in the locality, and the large scale national disputes between Jewish and Christian women of wealth and in.uence.
This vitally .nancial aspect of interaction between women of different faiths has been considered before, by William Chester Jordan in his seminal ‘Jews on top: women and the availability of consumption loans in northern France in the mid-thirteenth century’, but never in an English context.6
Yet, the economy of lending and borrowing in thirteenth century England fostered, by its nature, an almost unique forum for interfaith communication and co-operation. Predicated upon an interdependent relationship between the Jewish creditor and the Christian seeking credit, it bound lenders and borrowers together in reciprocal networks of supply and demand. The dependency and acrimonious disputes that attended such cross-cultural indebtedness inevitably became complicated with domestic interests and familial dramas. Thus, not only the inheritance of bonds, but also the shared responsibility for debt and repayment within kinship networks frequently implicated women (and children) in credit relationships.
Evidence suggests that the .rst Jews came to England shortly after the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, and that they did so speci.cally at the behest of the Conqueror.7
Their role, even so early in the community’s career, was an overwhelmingly .nancial one. The dukes of Normandy had borrowed and made use of Jewish money in the past and by the late twelfth century Jewish .nanciers dominated England’s lending markets. 8
They played a vital role in directing the .ow of
2 See, for example, V.D. Lipman, The Jews of medieval Norwich (London, 1967); Joe Hillaby, ‘London: the thirteenth-century Jewry revisited’, Jewish Historical Studies, 32 (1990–92), 89–159; and Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish solution: experiment and expulsion,1262–1290 (Cambridge, 1998).
3 See particularly, Susanna Bartlet, ‘Three Jewish businesswomen in thirteenth-century Winchester’, Jewish Culture and History, 3 (2000), 31–54; Reva Berman Brown and Sean McCartney, ‘David of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester: glimpses into a Jewish family in thirteenth-century England’, Jewish Historical Studies, 39 (2004), 1–35. Charlotte Newman Goldy’s essay in this volume d ‘A thirteenth-century Anglo-Jewish woman crossing boundaries: visible and invisible’ d helps to set these articles in their wider context.
4 Select pleas, starrs and other records from the rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, A.D. 1220–1284, ed. J.M. Rigg (London, 1902), and Calendar of the Plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, I: 1218–1272, ed. J.M. Rigg (London, 1905), II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. J.M. Rigg (Edinburgh, 1910), III: EdwardI,1274–1277, ed. H. Jenkinson (London, 1929), IV:Henry III,1272 and EdwardI,1275–1277, ed. H.G. Richardson (London, 1972); V: EdwardI,1277–79, ed. S. Cohen, rev. P. Brand (London, 1992).
5 See V. Hoyle, ‘Negotiating the margins: Anglo-Jewish women in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews’ (Unpublished MA thesis, York, 2006).
6 William Chester Jordan, ‘Jews on top: women and the availability of consumption loans in northern France in the mid-thirteenth century’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 29:1 (1978), 39–57.
7 Joseph Hillaby, ‘Jewish colonisation in the twelfth century’ in: Jews in medieval Britain: historical, literary and archaeological perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge, 2003), 16.
8 Norman Golb, The Jews in medieval Normandy:a social and intellectual history (Cambridge, 1998), xvi; Suzanne Bartlet, ‘Three Jewish business women in thirteenth-century Winchester’, 32.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
wealth in a land economy and in ensuring a steady supply of cash to meet rising demand.9
In the absence of Christian competitors, Jewish lenders, both male and female, .ourished in the interstices of the dominant institutional forms of lordship and peasant-based agriculture in England.10
There were always Christian men, and women too, at all levels of the economy, in need of ready money; supplying it became the Jews’ raison d’eˆtre.11
Consequently, historians have been gifted with a glut of extant records detailing their .nancial transactions and activities. By far the most important of these survivals is an incomplete but extensive set of plea rolls wherein the Exchequer of the Jews recorded the thousands of cases of debt and account, as well as a variety of other Jewish-related pleas, that were heard in its dedicated court.12
Their compilation was unique to the Anglo-Jewry, as was the institution that created them: a product of both the Jews’ .nancial specialisation and of their particular relationship with the English crown.
As early as 1135 the idea that the Jew, and all his/her assets, belonged to the king was expounded in the apocryphal ‘Laws of Edward the Confessor’; these made it quite clear that the Jews were reserved for royal purpose and, as such, were under the crown’s protection and control.13
Evidence in the charters of Richard I and John suggests that by the reign of Henry II this tradition had concretised into a document guaranteeing the Jews the right to practise their peculiar livelihood nationwide and in safety.14
The implication was clear enough: harm the Jews, their property or prosperity, and you harm the king himself. In the late twelfth century this protectionism developed still further to provide access to certain forms of administrative justice d that is, the Exchequer of the Jews d from which Christian money lenders were excluded.15
The establishment of the Exchequer was part of an increasing regulation of Jewish affairs by royal administration that began in the latter decades of the twelfth century to both the community’s gain and detriment. The long-term motivations were undoubtedly monetary: the Jews were the king’s assets and, through their own .nancial strategies, were increasingly af.uent. Around 1170 Henry II had stopped borrowing money from them and begun extorting it instead in the form of .nes and arbitrary taxations known as tallages; these were calculated as a percentage of overall Jewish wealth.16
Thereafter, it became increasingly necessary to create an administrative system that would help to maintain, and monitor, Jewish productivity to the crown’s advantage.
The short-term catalyst was almost certainly the anti-Jewish violence that followed Richard I’s coronation and the preaching of the third crusade in 1190. Characterised by short, violent attacks against provincial Jewish settlements across England, it culminated in the massacre at Clifford’s Tower in York on the night of 16 March.17
The damage done, however, was not limited to lives lost. During the attendant mayhem the Christian perpetrators had made concerted efforts to destroy any Jewish business records that detailed the money they had lent and which was owed to them. The accounts of innumerable transactions were lost to the real detriment of Jewish businessmen and women; without evidence, their money could never be reclaimed or exhorted from the debtors.
9 P. Elman, ‘The economic causes of the expulsion of the Jews in 1290’, Economic History Review, 7:1 (1936), 145.
10 Edwin S. Hunt and James M. Murray, A history of business in medieval Europe,1200–1550 (Cambridge, 1999), 30.
11 The extent of Jewish lending in England has been disputed, as has the percentage of the Jewish population engaged in .nancial markets. Estimates of the latter have varied drastically from 1% to 100%. Neither extreme seems entirely reasonable; rather, we might con.dently assert that a signi.cant portion of the Jewish community were engaged in money-lending of variant magnitudes.
12 Select pleas, ed. Rigg, and Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg; II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg; III: Edward I,1274–1277, ed. Jenkinson; IV: Henry III,1272 and Edward I,1275–77, ed. Richardson; V: Edward I,1277–79, ed. Cohen, rev. Brand.
13 Bracton (d.1268) later elaborated that the Jews could have no property because whatsoever he acquired was not for himself but for the king. (H.G. Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin kings (London, 1960), 103–9).
14 Paul Brand, ‘Jews and the law in England, 1275–90’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), 1138.
15 There was no forum for Christian money lenders to recover debts until 1284, at which time Edward I did begin to regulate Christian–Christian lending. (Elman, ‘The economic causes of the expulsion of the Jews in 1290’, 150).
16 It is dif.cult to identify the .rst national Jewish tallage. Although the Northampton ‘donum’ of 1194 is the .rst for which we have substantial evidence, including lists of contributors and their contributions, it was more than probably based on earlier collections. (Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin kings, 161–2).
17 For a clear narrative of this crisis and the events leading up to it, see R.B. Dobson, The Jewsof medievalYork and the massacre of March1190 (Borthwick papers, 45, York, 1974).
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
The national network of of.cially maintained deposit chests (archae) and recording clerks (chirographers) for bonds of loan and account (chirographs), .rst noted in the mid-1190s, was probably created in direct response.18
It was in both the king’s and the Jewish lender’s interests to make formal, legal records of lending transactions. As far as the monarchy was concerned a properly sealed chirograph turned the potential wealth tied up in a bond into a taxable asset, and as far as the Jew was concerned it made the capital recoverable through the archa system’s judicial arm: the Exchequer of the Jews. This was initially an administrative venue for debt recovery and account adjudication, but eventually became a forum speci.c to all Jewish concerns.19
Stationed close to Westminster, it functioned along similar lines to the main Exchequer, having its own seal, meeting in termly sessions and hearing cases from across the country in its court.20
Dominated by pleas for repayment or restitution between Jewish lenders and their Christian clients, the extant records are the obvious starting point for any historian looking for evidence of interfaith interaction in thirteenth-century England.21
Survey work on the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews suggests that the court, as it functioned between 1218 and 1280, was exceptional in its treatment of women, both Jewish and Christian and whether plaintive or defendant.22
In common with the equity courts of the later fourteenth and .fteenth centuries, the Exchequer of the Jews allowed the participation of women independent from their husbands, fathers or male kin.23
It further made no effective distinctions based on a woman’s life cycle status d she might come to the court as a single woman, a wife or a widow, or in her capacity as a daughter or a mother. It accepted pleas from married women concerning their own credit interests, and also pleas from women concerned with the credit interests of their husbands or sons.24
That many women of both faiths were implicated in money-lending through the Exchequer is undeniable. At the top end of the market were women like the dowager queen Eleanor of Provence, who was deeply involved in the trade in debt bonds, and Licoricia of Winchester, one of the most successful Jewish .nanciers of the thirteenth century. Moving across the social scale we .nd women of all statuses, right down to poor urban widows and single-women borrowing and lending small amounts on domestic securities. All of these women were operating within .nancial markets, be they local or national.
This state of affairs must have followed partly from the already high status of Jewish women as business people in their own rights, and partly from the ubiquity of Christian borrowing. Continental evidence is unambiguous about the importance of women in the operation of Jewish community life and in the day-to-day procedures of Jewish family business.25
Clearly, for example, women were active in the communities of northern France in the tenth and eleventh centuries, like that at Rouen from which the London community originated.26
Jordan has further emphasised their involvement in lending in mid-thirteenth-century France.27
However, it is only with the survival of the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews after 1218 that the extent of Jewish women’s lending and .nancial operations in England becomes apparent. Such integral involvement of Jewish women in the .nancial arena necessarily led to frequent contact with their Christian counterparts.
There are 641 references to 310 distinct and individual Jewish women (all but 23 of whom are named) in the published plea rolls. Although the appearance of male individuals signi.cantly outnumbers these references, the differential is not as marked as one might expect. Full data on the number
18 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, xiv.
19 Brand, ‘Jews and the law in England, 1275–90’, 1139.
20 Mundill, England’s Jewish solution,6.
21 Paul Brand, ‘The Jewish community of England in the records of the English royal government’ in: Jews in medieval Britain,
ed. Skinner, 73.
22 See Hoyle, ‘Negotiating the margins’.
23 Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Women, credit and family relationships in England, 1300–1620’, Journal ofFamily History: Studies in
Family Kinship and Demography, 30 (2005), 151.
24 See Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 80 and I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 26 for respective examples.
25 For a survey, Judith R. Baskin, ‘Jewish women in the middle ages’ in: Jewish women in historical perspective, ed. Baskin,
109–14; more speci.cally, Jordan, ‘Jews on top’; Cheryl Tallan, ‘The economic productivity of medieval Jewish widows’, Proceed
ings of the eleventh world congress of Jewish studies, 9 vols (Jerusalem, 1994), division B, vol. 2, 151–8. 26 See particularly Golb, The Jews in medieval Normandy, xvi. 27 William Chester Gordan, ‘Jews on top’.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
and individuality of male Anglo-Jews is unavailable for comparison, but of the 320 cases of debt, account or coin clipping involving Jewish individuals recorded between Michaelmas Term, 1275 and Trinity Term, 1277, 88 of them (or 27.5%) were brought or defended by at least one woman, either independently or in consort with a male relative. A further 10 women appeared to pay .nes to the Exchequer. Three of the 88 cases involved more than one women d for example, Ermina and Rose, both daughters of Deudone Crespin of York, were joint defendants in a plea of account in 1275 and .ve women were listed amongst those arrested in York for coin clipping in 1277.28
The majority of these cases concerning Jewish women involved male Christian defendants or plaintives. This should come as little surprise d Christian men were the predominant actors in England’s borrowing markets. However, Christian women do persistently appear in the record, often in cases involving male Jews but also in actions brought or defended by Jewish women. In total they appear opposite each other in 40 cases of debt, account and petty crime, a number that is relatively low but remains signi.cant.
We can con.dently assume that it represents only the tip of the iceberg of women’s .nancial contact with each other. The Exchequer of the Jews functioned at the highest levels of bureaucratic administration. Consequently, the vast majority of disputes over debts of a small or middling nature must have been resolved elsewhere, probably by local chirographers or by negotiation between the parties themselves. Equally, we must consider that, although the Exchequer of the Jews was unusually fair (or, one might say, indifferent) in its treatment of women, cases between two women were still less likely to appear than those involving one or more males. Further, evidence from the Plea Rolls has suggested that female .nanciers were more successful and in.uential in the geographical margins of their community and thus away from the centralised Exchequer.29
Those cases that did reach London and the court must have been extraordinary, both in their import and in the determination of the women involved.
Finally, we should consider that all of the cases in the rolls represent credit agreements gone wrong and sour. Amiable borrowing and repayment does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Exchequer of the Jews, and the majority of a woman’s .nancial transactions must have been just that. Even disputes stem from an initially equitable and reasonable negotiation between creditor and borrower. Thus, although our evidence is largely for Jewish and Christian women in con.ict, we might remember that acrimony cannot have been the norm. These 40 cases represent only a tantalising snapshot of the intersections of Jewish and Christian women’s lives over the matter of money lent and borrowed.
Causes between two female parties were nearly always associated with the demand, made by the Jewish woman, for the repayment of a debt by the Christian woman (or, occasionally, her heirs). Alternatively, but less frequently, a Christian woman might complain about the unfair distraint of her goods by her creditor. Such a dispute occurred most commonly along simple lines between two individuals. In 1220, for example, Belina of Bedford, the young daughter of the Gloucestershire magnate Mirabel but already a signi.cant lender in her own right, made a demand of debt against Dionisia of Bedford, a widow.
Belina was Mirabel’s eldest daughter, and a married woman .nancially independent of her husband.30
It seems clear from the opening of the case that she had .rst made attempts to recover her capital in the locality, without immediate recourse to the court. Instead, it was Dionisia who .rst brought their business to the attention of the Exchequer when she complained about Belina’s ‘unlawful demand’ for the repayment of a debt.31
The plea rolls do not record her reasons for complaint – most commonly plaintives claimed the debt had been previously acquitted – but we know that Belina subsequently presented her copy of the chirograph bond in her own defence. It had been drawn up between her, as principle creditor, and Henry de Bedford (presumably Dionisia’s husband) and was worth £8, plus interest. Unfortunately, we do not know how the case ended because, in common with many medieval court records, the rolls rarely note settlements or judgements. It seems quite
28 See Plea Rolls, III: EdwardI,1274–1277, ed. Jenkinson, 20; IV: Henry III,1272 and Edward I,1275–77, ed. Richardson, 277.
29 See Hoyle, ‘Negotiating the margins’, 41–8.
30 Joe Hillaby, ‘Testimony from the margin: the Gloucester Jewry and its neighbours, c. 1159–1290’, Jewish Historical Studies,37
(2002), 41–112.
31 Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 37.
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likely, however, that Belina was able to enforce at least part of her claim d a chirograph obligation, even inherited, was binding.
The case demonstrates clearly how two women of different faiths might engage oppositionally in the .nancial arena, both taking active roles in the legal and administrative process. Neither woman appears to have employed a proxy or attorney to present their case and Belina, at least, appeared in court in person to deliver her chirograph as evidence. Dionisia, for her part, acted as the catalyst that brought the dispute to the court’s attention in the .rst place. Thus, although they belonged to different religions and held divergent cultural allegiances, they shared the world of credit relationships in common and the Exchequer of the Jews as a forum for the expression of their respective rights.
Whether the women had ever met is debatable and we simply do not know enough about the workings of the Exchequer Court to make pronouncements about their interaction during proceedings, but they must have been hyper-aware of one another. The interests of Belina, the rising star of a dynasty of powerful lenders, whose family through marriage and blood dominated the economy of the marcher lands, intersected closely with those of Dionisia.32
For Dionisia the outcome of the dispute may have been crucial to her future .nancial security; whereas for Belina the point at issue was more probably the reputation and well-being of her business. She was already familiar with disputes in the Exchequer of the Jews and with the use of the chirograph system to assume a position of authority over her creditors. Her mother, Mirabel of Gloucester, had inherited a burgeoning family .rm from her husband and was repeatedly active in the court herself.33
Dionisia had been drawn into intimate contact and con.ict with this economic and legal expertise through her husband’s credit obligations and, although we have no way of gauging her level of personal knowledge or preparedness, it was unlikely to be on a par with Belina’s professional skill set. Undoubtedly, disputes of this kind must have affected the tenor of personal interface between Jewish and Christian women.
Christian women were most frequently drawn into credit relationships during their widowhoods. This appears to have been true in 25 of the 40 cases under discussion, and was often the case for Jewish women as well. A recent statistical analysis of the plea rolls in their entirety found that half of all cases involving Jewish women were brought or defended by a widow.34
However, it is much more dif.cult to establish how and why women became implicated in these cases d did they inherit the bonds via their deceased husbands’ or other family members, or did they contract them independently between themselves? Both circumstances appear to have been relatively common, but although in some cases the plea records the partners of the original debt under dispute it does not always do so. The problem is further complicated by the fact that Jewish wives frequently made loans independently of their husbands during their marriages, and by the fact that the ownership of any one bond could be .uid. It might pass from one family member to another during their lifetimes, and might even be purchased by a third party, Jewish or Christian.35
Some were clearly drawn up between two male relatives and subsequently inherited: Belya, widow of Manser of York and Amice, widow of Richard Maunsel came to the court over a debt between their late husbands in 1273, although they subsequently settled their disagreement between themselves.36
In another case the original debt had apparently been agreed independently between the two women d in 1274 the rolls state that the widow Isabella de Albiniaco had ‘bound’ herself to Maydin, the widow of Jacob Crespin for the sum of £10.37
One assumes that, in such cases, the women must have met and negotiated with one another. In others, where they inherited the debt from their husband, they may have been previously unknown to each other. Either way, it was the .nancial market that eventually brought them into personal contact.
Christian and Jewish women might equally become involved in a credit dispute via other kinship obligations. For example, Jewish women often made demands against the wives of their living male
32 Hillaby, ‘Testimony from the margin’, 94–99.
33 For example, in the same year, Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 43.
34 Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 24.
35 The trade in Jewish bonds is fascinating but incredibly complicated and beyond the scope of this discussion. For an intro
duction, H.G. Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin kings (London, 1960), 67–82.
36 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 80.
37 The debt was subsequently sold to Master Samuel de Lohun. (Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 257).
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debtors d this is true in 30% of the cases in the plea rolls involving two or more women. It is not entirely clear why this should have been the case, or whether this was a re.ection of the obligations recorded on bonds of debt. The plea rolls do not make clear whether couples borrowed co-dependently or whether women were only implicated by conjugality at the point of repayment. However, it may well be more of a re.ection of the traditions of Jewish families and business practise than of the .nancial status of Christian wives.
Jewish couples frequently made bonds and brought cases together; 72.4% of the married Jewish women who appear in the plea rolls do so in consort with their husband. I have previously argued that this was indicative of a Jewish family’s shared economic assets: men, women and their children were often active together in the money market, forming close ‘consortia’ of kin. Thereby they shared obligations, pro.ts and credit reputations. Should one family member die or become unable to sustain their .nancial agreements, their place could immediately be .lled by an associate, be it a wife, son or daughter, nephew or niece.38
This was particularly important in a .exible credit economy where the only permanent .xture of a debt was the archa bond itself, and in which the involved parties, the gages or securities and the amount owed could all change over time. Shared responsibility for .nancial transactions was one way by which the security of returns could be protected and kept within the familial group.
It seems possible that this state of affairs was mirrored in Jewish dealings with Christians d by implicating a woman in her husband’s debts, either on the bond itself or during a court case, the creditor staked their claim on compensation from the family unit and not just from an individual borrower who might die, default or become bankrupt. An early case plea roll is instructive.
In 1220 Chera of Winchester came to the Exchequer to demand the repayment of a debt agreed between her late husband, Isaac the Chirographer and Simon de Craye. The bond she presented was for 16 marks. During the same hearing Margeret de Craye, Simon’s wife, made an independent complaint: namely that Chera had already caused her to be unlawfully disseised of her land in lieu of repayment of the debt. Margaret went on to claim that the land in question was her own and thus not relevant to the case. Chera whom, we must assume, was present at court, answered ‘that she demands the debt, not of Margaret, but [.] of Simon of whom the chirograph speaks’.39
The case is important not only because it demonstrates the familial implications of debt, but because it focuses on the rights and interactions of the two women involved. Chera staked her claim as a creditor, having inherited the debt from her husband, while Margaret questioned her own culpability for repayment as the debtor’s wife. It is notable that Chera does not make a demand against husband and wife at the court, although she appears to consider both responsible for compensation in the .rst instance. Margaret’s claim that she had already been disseised of property is also interesting. Firstly, it con.rms that disagreements about debt could already be well advanced by the time they reached the attention of the Exchequer of the Jews, and that women (and men) must often have met about their credit disputes before they escalated into formal proceedings.
The Exchequer of Jews also had the power to enforce payment of debt from non-family members and frequently did so. Culpability for the repayment of debt not only lay with blood relatives but with all the debtors’ social and .nancial dependents: tenants, for example, were frequently distrained for sums on which their landlords had defaulted. Such a case, involving a total of three women, was brought by Belassez, widow of Leo, son of Preciousa in 1278.40
She appears to have held the bond for a large amount for which Isabelle de Berdestaple was responsible, but the case does not state how much was owed. Isabelle had defaulted or was unable to pay and subsequently her tenants, Peter and Johanna de Stanford, were distrained. Neither Isabelle nor the Stanfords appeared to defend themselves in court and, on the second occasion, were ordered disseised of the amount.
On another occasion a Jewish woman attempted to take advantage of the tenant-landlord obligation in the opposite direction, but without success. In 1275 Genta, daughter of Cresse, son of Genta moved to
38 Hoyle, ‘Negotiating the margins’, 25–6. 39 Plea Rolls, I:1218–1272, ed. Rigg, 26. 40 Plea Rolls, Vol. V, 60, 93.
V. Hoyle/Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008)119–129
distrain Emma Oliver for her tenant’s debts.41
What subsequently appears in the plea rolls is tantamount to a statement of failure: Genta was forced to issue a quitclaim in favour of Emma in which she admitted that nothing could be claimed from the land rented by the debtor, William Poinz of Little Blanford, because it did not belong to him and was not his to offer as security at the time the loan was made. In keeping with Jewish business traditions, Genta’s father Cresse and her husband Samuel also issued quitclaims d this meant that they could not pursue the debt further in the interest of the family consortia. Clearly, although a debt could .lter down through family networks and be exhorted from the debtor’s dependents, the obligation for repayment did not extend up the social ladder.
Jewish and Christian women might also come into con.ict over more material wealth and property. In 1274 Slema, the daughter of Isaac of Southwark was in dispute with Elice, widow of Nicholas le Taylur regarding a messuage with appurtenances in Southwark.42
There followed a long and protracted dispute in which the Exchequer was heavily involved – the messuage in question had apparently fallen into the hands of the king through default earlier in the same year, after which Slema had sued for replevin.43
In the next term of the court she was making more demands against Elice, even though she was legally underage; and in early 1275 she returned to court again.44
Such persistence was apparently typical of pleas between women d 15 of our 40 cases appeared at court twice or more.
This .nal appearance, however, reveals plainly how Jewish and Christian womens’ interests were complicated by family relationships. Elice had inherited the house in Southwark from her husband Nicholas and argued, therefore, that Slema had no claim on it; Slema, on the other hand, had inherited ‘a moiety of the said messuage through an agreement of her fathers’.45
The women were brought into contact and dispute via this agreement. It seems that Nicholas Taylur had made a bond with Slema’s father Isaac under the terms of which he mortgaged part of his Southwark property. Their respective deaths subsequently confused the right of ownership and brought the women’s interest into direct collision.
As they both resided in Southwark at the time of the dispute, and given that they were claiming something as substantial and practical as a house, it seems likely that they knew each other, perhaps quite well. They must have shared the same public spaces, and have met concerning their joint claims to the Taylur house. It is possible that they had quarrelled verbally or even physically with one another.
We know of at least one such quarrel between a Jewish and a Christian woman in a public space, although we do not know precisely what lay behind it. In 1278 Agatha, the wife of Robert Nemek of Nottingham impleaded Henna, the wife of Solomon, son of Bonenfaunt, a Jew of the same town ‘touching contumelious blasphemies in contempt of the Christian faith against the said Agatha.’ Agatha went on to explain how Henna had ‘assaulted’ her in the public market, assailing her with abusive words and ‘scandalising the Christian people standing about’. Henna had ended by spitting in her face.46
We should not necessarily interpret Henna’s actions as part of a .nancial dispute, but it does suggest the close proximity in which Jewish and Christian women in con.ict could .nd themselves.
To what extent Henna and Agatha’s relationship was typical of interfaith relationships is arguable. Open hostility must have been a relatively rare facet of women’s interactions. Certainly we have circumstantial evidence from the plea rolls for more positive meetings between women of different faiths, both within the economic sphere and in their homes. In 1277 it was recorded that Licoricia of Winchester’s Christian servant was murdered alongside her mistress in their home.47
Further, in 1272 ‘Dame Abigail’ of Canterbury paid a signi.cant .ne for dispensation to employ and house a Christian wet nurse.48
These domestic arrangements were apparently made despite the frequent promulgations against the employment of Christians by Jews, or vice-a-versa. That Christian and Jewish families were also neighbours and friends is clear enough: in 1280 the bishop of Winchester
41 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 237.
42 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 124.
43 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 175.
44 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 197, 215–16.
45 Plea Rolls, II: Edward I,1273–1275, ed. Rigg, 215–16.
46 R.R. Mundill, The Jewish Entries in thePatent Rolls,1272-1292, 60–1.
47 Plea Rolls, III: Edward I,1274–1277, ed. Jenkinson, 293.
48 Plea Rolls, IV: Henry III,1272 and Edward I,1275–77, ed. Richardson, 146.
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was thoroughly incensed when large numbers of Christians attended a .amboyant Jewish wedding ceremony in Gloucester, complete with a procession and dancing. We can readily imagine Jewish and Christian women sharing the atmosphere and excitement of the nuptials, as well as recognising and conversing with one another.
Finally, in periods of persecution or acute taxation Jewish families often lodged their valuables with Christian neighbours. It is true that we only now know of the cases in which the return of such valuables was contentious but they must represent a larger number of friendly exchanges. A poignant case from 1280 is demonstrative: Flora, widow of Isaac of Berkhamstead gave 20 marks of silver, a silver bowl and a red super-tunic into the safe keeping of her neighbour and, possibly, friend Agnes le Call-ester. When Agnes died suddenly the items were passed to her son-in-law, Hugh de Boulogne, who denied that they were Floria’s and refused to return them.49
These, and similar interactions must have normalised the relationships between Christian and Jewish women, bringing them together as members of neighbourhoods and townships.
Money lending must have both fostered and complicated such intimacies, driving a wedge of con.icted .nancial interests between otherwise amiable clusters of women. One case in particular, perhaps the most detailed and interesting of all the cases between women in the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, reveals both sides of interfaith contact d the daily tolerance, negotiation and friendship of the community and the acrimony of the .nancial dispute. Importantly, its participants are members of the Jewish and Christian urban community in London and are involved in a negotiation of the kind of small-scale ‘consumption’ loan that William Chester Jordan has previously highlighted.
Small-scale economic transactions are not ordinarily the stuff of the Exchequer of the Jews. As previously noted, the plea rolls represent the top tier of money-lending cases, those that involved very large sums or that had escalated into immutable con.ict. The debts that appeared before the court were usually large, old or contentious in some other way. The original debtor was often dead or had disappeared or had defaulted on their security. It is very unusual to come across evidence of low-end lending, the kind which occurred without argument through the archa chest in the locality or which took place at an even more informal level. Unfortunately, these are precisely the kinds of transactions that historians of women .nd most interesting, as low-end lending activities d pawn-broking and pennies loaned on domestic sureties d must often have been the preserve of women.
There is only occasional and oblique evidence for such activities in the rolls. The brothers of Mount Carmel in Oxford, for example, had probably dealt with Margarina of Oxford (whose family associations are lost) in the guise of a pawnbroker. Needing small advances of cash in the locality, they had gone to a female lender. In 1278 Henry de Wimpole came before the court in the name of the brotherhood and demanded she return three books she had from them: St Paul’s epistles with glosses, St Matthew’s gospel with glosses and the Sentences with glosses, all together worth 57s. Although Margarina claimed she had never had them, witnesses testi.ed and the jury .nally ruled, that she had had them for over the agreed two-year period and had subsequently sold them, as was her right as a pawnbroker.50
Incidentally, borrowing small amounts on the surety of books was apparently a regular occurrence in the university town. In 1281 two converts to Christianity, Belasez and Hittecote, had in their combined possession a small library of books, all of them student texts and including two Grammars, a book on ‘ancient Logic’ (possibly Porphyry’s Isagoge), a law textbook and a book ‘on Nature’. The combined value was signi.cant and they were sold towards their upkeep in the Domus conversorum, the house founded especially for Jewish converts by Henry III.51
It is not possible to ascertain whether the women had worked and converted together, or whether their brokering of the books had been independent.
The arrangements surrounding such small loans must have frequently been negotiated privately between women in the urban environment. The following case may well be representative. In 1284
49 Select Pleas, ed. Rigg, 108–9.
50 Plea Rolls, V: Edward I,1277–79, ed. Cohen, rev. Brand, 66.
51 Select Pleas, ed. Rigg, 114.
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a Christian woman, Matilda le Megre, brought a case of detention of pledge and usury against Bona, the wife of Moses of Dog Strete. Bona’s own lending partner Belasez (no familial identi.er is given) stood as Matilda’s chief witness, giving testimony, in person, that: ‘on one occasion she was asked by Matilda to lend her 5s upon 7 ells of cloth and that, not having the said money, she asked Bona to join her in lending each a moiety of the 5s. And that Bona then lent 2s 6d and Belasez lent the same, and that on another occasion the women lent Matilda another 12d on the same pledge so that in the whole she had 6s, 3s from each of them.’52
The case arose because, although Belasez was pleased to return the pledge on the receipt of her original outlay, Bona was intent upon extracting the original amount plus 10s, an extortionate cumulative rate of interest. Given the legislative conditions of the Statute of the Jewry of 1275 and on account of her usurious demands Bona was committed to the Tower until she made amends.53
The case is intriguing not only because it shows Bona and Belasez acting together in the locality to lend a Christian woman a small amount of money in the short term, but because it highlights the con.icts that could arise from shared economic interests. That Matilda, Belassez and Bona knew each other is self-evident; it is equally likely they lived in close proximity, perhaps on the same street. Belassez in particular appears to have been close to Matilda, so much so that she was prepared to stand as a witness against her co-religionist and lending partner. Indeed, closely examined, her part in loaning the money is that of a friend: having been approached for a small loan and being unable to render it from her own capital, she actively sought a partner in Bona. Apparently, she did not do so in pursuit of pro.t. When Matilda repaid the original amount of money, Belassez was prepared to give back her pledge in full. She testi.ed that she believed that these were the terms that the three women had agreed upon. Bona, however, had understood their contract differently. For her the loan had been a business transaction and meant to be pro.table.
It is notable that whereas Belassaz was disassociated from her family members during the proceedings, Bona emphasised hers and defended the case in partnership with her husband, Moses. Whether she had originally lent out of her own money or out of capital that she shared with him is impossible to determine from the rolls. What is important, however, is how her family unit vigorously mobilised to defend what it perceived to be the terms of the .nancial agreement. For Belessaz the transaction was personal, for Bona it was business. It stands to reveal two vitally different sides to Jewish women’s interactions with their Christian counterparts d on the one hand, they were friends and neighbours, on the other individuals in competition for resources and pro.t.
Additionally, the particulars of this case, including Belasez’s testimony, hint that no of.cial bond was ever made or deposited in one of London’s archa chests. At no point did either party produce a chirograph or written agreement concerning the loan, which explains why Belassez’s testimony was entered into the rolls at all d ordinarily the archae or chirographer would have provided the necessary evidence. Unlike their wealthy and in.uential sisters, women like Belassez and Bona did not record their business through of.cial channels. Women’s lending, but especially small-scale consumption lending to other women, must often have been unof.cial in this way, not just hidden from the record of the plea rolls but also from the local archa system. It seems likely that, as in this case, they lent as and when the opportunity presented itself, alone or in partnerships, to their neighbours, friends and acquaintances.54
Jewish historians, and women’s historians too, have traditionally made an unnatural distinction between economic activities and socio-cultural and familial life, which is only just beginning to break down.55
Isolating the interactions between women of different faiths, and particularly their involvement in the strategies and structures of money-lending, is a sure way of demonstrating the falsity of such a dichotomy. It is important for us to remember, when approaching such issues, that family was the foundation of Jewish and Christian social life; further, that it was the stem unit of many lending transactions and the basic building block of Jewish business. As a result both Jewish and Christian
52 Select Pleas, ed. Rigg, 116.
53 Select Pleas, ed. Rigg, 131–2.
54 Jordan, ‘Jews on top’, 45.
55 For example, Golb, The Jews in medieval Normandy, xiv.
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women functioned economically around the narratives that de.ned their family lives: marriage, divorce (for Jews at least), education, employment, property and inheritance.56
We have seen how Jewish and Christian women’s marriages and widowhoods, combined with their .nancial obligations, affected the way they interacted and communicated with one other. We have also noted how normalised interfaith relations evident within the community and between neighbours and friends could become complicated in the light of disputed .nancial resources and obligations. Evidence points to complex skeins of association that existed between and within faiths and families in order that such obligations might be ful.lled and capital recovered.
Thus money lending is the shibboleth to understanding interfaith interaction between women in high medieval England. While culture, religion and tradition separated and demarcated their lives, even despite shared community and space, the economy of money lending brought them together as they pursued strategies of .nancial necessity and competed for .nite resources. Drawn into communication and con.ict by credit relationships, either in their own names or through kinship networks, they became intimate with each other’s .nancial interests. The cycle of credit and repayment bound them together, closely and densely, even as it forced them apart. The plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews go some way to revealing the ways in which women negotiated this dangerous terrain of cross-faith interaction.
Victoria Hoyle received her MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York and plans to pursue doctoral research into the interaction of Jewish and Christian women in thirteenth and fourteenth century Europe. She currently works at The Borthwick Institute for Archives and Historical Research.
56 Brown and McCartney, ‘David of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester’, 1.
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