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The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England (Presidential Address)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Barrie Dobson
Barrie Dobson*
Affiliation:
Christ’s College University of Cambridge
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In devoting its attention to the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the Ecclesiastical History Society has self-evidently addressed a theme as fundamental as it is often distressing to the practitioners of both religions. For many historians of the English Church, as for many of this Society’s members themselves, that relationship presents the additional irony that it would have been almost impossible actually to encounter a Jew in this country during those three centuries which tend to interest them most. As it is, Edward I’s expulsion of all his Jewish subjects from his realm on 18 July 1290 (‘without any hope of ever remaining there’) not only aborted a still inconclusive experiment in religious co-existence, but for centuries relegated the lives of the Jews and Jewesses of Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet England to the obscurity of the historically irrelevant. No longer in 1991 does that seem at all so obvious; and one supposes that nothing would have surprised Henry III and Edward I more than that their treatment of the Jewish minority within their realm should now often seem more ‘relevant’ to the churches of the modern world than any other feature of their respective reigns. For that reason, above all, there must be every prospect that the relationship between Jews and Christians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England will soon be subjected to more detailed analysis than ever before. Nor, for similar reasons, has it ever been quite so obvious as it is today that the study of medieval Anglo-Jewry is too important to remain the exclusive preserve of historians who are themselves Jews.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 29: Christianity and Judaism , 1992 , pp. 145 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992

References

1 Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds, 1212-1301, ed. Gransden, A. (London, 1964), p. 61.Google Scholar

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4 Rabinowitz, , Social Life, pp. 164–5.Google Scholar It might still be argued that most Jewish women of the eleventh and twelfth centuries seem to have escaped the so-called ‘family revolution’ which allegedly did so much to depress the status of prominent Christian women in north-western Europe at this period: see , F. and Gies, J., Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages (New York, 1989), pp. 121–32 Google Scholar; Duby, G., The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: the Making of Modem Marriage in Medieval France (New York, 1983 Google Scholar); Brooke, C. N. L., The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989 Google Scholar); and (for a very different perspective) Biller, P., ‘The Common Woman in the Western Church in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries’, SCH, 27 (1990), pp. 127–57.Google Scholar

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7 Ibid., pp. 17-18.

8 The long-awaited fifth volume in the series of Calendars of the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, inaugurated by J. M. Rigg in 1905 [hereafter Cal. Jewish Plea Rolls], appeared too late to be consulted for the purposes of this paper.

9 PRO, E. 9/4, memb. 4d; Rigg, J. M., ed., Select Pleas, Starrs and other Records from the Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, 1220-1284 - Selden Society, 15 (London, 1902 Google Scholar) [hereafter Rigg, Select Pleas], pp. 11-12.

10 Cal. Jewish Plea Rolls, 1, pp. 103-4; Adler, ‘Jewish Woman”, p. 36.

11 PRO, E. 9/4, memb. 4d; Rigg, , Select Pleas, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar No member of the Jewish community at Warwick in 1244. can have been particularly secure: only ten years earlier all their predecessors had been temporarily expelled from the town and county there: see Roth, C., A History of the Jews in England, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1978), p. 58.Google Scholar

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18 PRO, E. 101, 249/3; printed in Stokes, H. P., Studies in Anglo-Jewish History (Edinburgh, 1913), PP. 252–75.Google Scholar

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21 The reasons why so many English Jewesses bore French rather than Hebraic first names, and why so many of their sons were identified by their mothers’ rather than their fathers’ names, are only two examples of issues which deserve much further consideration. For a very incomplete list of ‘Names of Jewesses in England’, see Adler, Jewish Woman, p. 21; and cf. the brief account of ‘Nomenclature’ in Mundill, R. R., ‘The Jews in England, 1272-1290’ (D.Phil. thesis, St Andrews, 1987), pp. xviii–xix.Google Scholar

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25 This problem is largely unaffected by the recent argument that after 1275 the English Jewry experienced a fundamental ‘change from moneylender to credit agent’: Mundill, R., ‘Anglo-Jewry under Edward I: credit agents and their clients’, TJHSE, 31 (1988-90), pp. 1–21.Google Scholar

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32 Ibid., 1, pp. 43-4; CCR, 1272-79, p. 487.

33 For the plausible suggestion that pledging of chattels to the Jews was not only very common indeed, but led them into contact with ‘all classes of society, from clergy and knights down to thieves’, see Richardson, , English Jewry, pp. 76–8.Google Scholar

34 Rigg, , Select Pleas, pp. 8–9.Google Scholar Cf. ibid., p. 11; Cal. Jewish Plea Rolls, 1, p. 73, for examples of Jewesses being accused of coin-clipping.

35 For some unusually explicit examples of the purchase and sale of town houses by several Jewesses of Canterbury in the early thirteenth century, see Adler, , ‘The Jews of Medieval Canterbury’, in Jews of Medieval England, pp. 68–9, 72.Google Scholar

36 See Comitissa of Gloucester’s explicit declaration before the Justices of the Jews in 1220 that she would ‘prove as Jewess against Jew’ the conspiracy whereby her late husband had been thrown to his death from the walls of Gloucester Castle: Cal. Jewish Plea Rolls, 1, p. 45; Hillaby, cf., Worcester Jewry, pp. 91, 100 Google Scholar; and for examples of Jewesses’ appearances before the Beth Din, see Adler, , ‘Jews of Medieval Canterbury’, p. 73 Google Scholar; Davis, , ed., Shetarolh: Hebrew Deeds of English Jews (1180-1290) (London, 1888) [hereafter Shetarolh], pp. 5, 29, 40.Google Scholar

37 Roth, , Jews of Medieval Oxford, pp. 136–50.Google Scholar

38 Rigg, , Select Pleas, p. 114.Google Scholar

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41 Shetaroth, p. 60; Adler, , ‘Jewish Woman’, p. 19.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., pp. 39–40; Koth, Jews of Medieval Oxford, pp. 55-6. More characteristic of the fines imposed upon Jewish widows to receive delivery of their husbands’ moveables and houses is the 400 marks paid by Floria on the estate of Master Elias of London: Rigg, , Select Pleas, pp. 131–2 Google Scholar; cf. ibid., pp. 35, 42, 61.

43 Rabinowitz, , Jews of Northern France, pp. 140–57 Google Scholar; Agus, , Urban Civilization, pp. 554–95.Google Scholar For the argument (quite probably applicable to thirteenth-century England) that diametric oppositions between the elite culture of Jews and Christians could nevertheless coexist with similar perceptions of marriage, see Cohen, E. and Horowitz, E., ‘In search of the sacred: Jews, Christians, and rituals of marriage in the later Middle Ages’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20 (1990), pp. 225–49.Google Scholar

44 For ‘the most famous divorce of the period’, of Muriel of Oxford from her husband David, see Adler, , Jewish Woman’, pp. 28–9 Google Scholar; Davis, cf. M. D., ‘An Anglo-Jewish Divorce, A.D. 1242’, JQR, 5 (1893), pp. 158–65 Google Scholar; Rabbinowitz, , Jews of Northern France, p. 163.Google Scholar

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46 Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield episcopi Herefordensis, A.D. 1283-1317, ed. Capes, W. W., CYS, 6 (1909), pp. 120–2.Google Scholar The local context of this wedding is interestingly discussed in Hillaby, ‘Magnate among the Marchers’, pp. 74–5.

47 Abrahams, , Jewish Life, pp. 186–210 Google Scholar; , T. and Metzger, M., Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (New York, 1985), pp. 227–33 Google Scholar, including a photograph of the only illustrated Kethubah (from Krems in Austria, dated 1392) known to have survived from the medieval West.

48 Shetaroth, pp. 32, 43-6, 94.

49 Ibid., pp. 298-302, tr. in Adler, , ‘Jewish Woman’, pp. 43–5.Google Scholar

50 Cal. Jewish Plea Rolls, 1, p. 192; Shetaroth, p. 136.

51 For the principle that Jewesses ‘ought not to be distrained after the death of their husbands in the dowers they have of tenements, goods and chattels for any fines due from their late husbands’, see CCR, 1279-88, p. 47; Adler, ‘Jewish Woman’, p. 30.

52 Lipman, , Jews of Medieval Norwich, pp. 137–40 Google Scholar, provides an exceptional insight into the marriage relationships which characterized this ‘typical Jewish middle-class family’.

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56 Henna, regularly called widow of Aaron of York throughout the 1270s, seems to have died soon after she received—in 1280—a royal licence (as Henna, daughter of Leo de Eboraco and mother of Elias) to sell one of her houses in Coney Street: CPR, 1272-81, p. 380. Licoricia’s murder was investigated by a specially appointed Winchester jury in 1277: Cal. Jewish Plea Rolls, 3, pp. 248, 293.

57 Cal. Jewish Plea Rolls, 1, pp. 181, 186, 210-11; Paris, Matthew, Chronica Majora, 5, p. 136 Google Scholar; Adler, , ‘Aaron of York’, in Jews of Medieval England, pp. 127–73.Google Scholar

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61 Henry III’s personal intervention on Licoricia’s behalf in her complex plea against the Charlecote family in 1253 is well documented in Rigg, Select Pleas, pp. 19-27. For the ‘inexplicable absence’ of Licoricia from the tallage of 1239–42 see Stacey, R., Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III, 1216-1245 (Oxford, 1987), p. 151.Google Scholar

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63 Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, RS, 82 (1884-9), 1, pp. 322-4; cf, the translation by Dr Biller, P. P. A. in Clifford’s Tower Commemoration (York, 1900), p. 38.Google Scholar

64 Keene, D., Survey of Medieval Winchester–Winchester Studies, 2 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 76–9, 385–6, 324–5, 384–7, 1034–5 Google Scholar; Hillaby, , ‘Hamo of Hereford’, pp. 74–5.Google Scholar

65 Rigg, , Select Pleas, p. xlix.Google Scholar

66 Ibid., pp. 33, 38, 108-9. Such cases can sometimes be hard to distinguish from instances of Christian males borrowing from Jews on the security of items of household equipment or of their wife’s clothing (see CCR, 1261-64, PP. 19–20).

67 The nurse in question later migrated to Normandy with her ward ( Rigg, , Select Pleas, p. 75 Google Scholar).

68 Cal. Jewish Plea Rolls, 3, p. 293.

69 CCR, 1234-37, P. 13; Rigg, Select Pleas, pp. xlviii, lv; The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, ed. Jessopp, A. and James, M. R. (Cambridge, 1896), p. 89.Google Scholar The long-standing canonical denunciation of unduly close propinquity between Christian and Jew reaches its English climax with Edward I’s 1275 Statute of Jewry, forbidding Christians to live in Jewish households: see Watt, J. A., ‘The Jews, the law, and the Church: the concept of Jewish serfdom in thirteenth-century England’, SCH.S, 9 (1991), p. 163.Google Scholar

70 Rigg, , Select Pleas, p. 104.Google Scholar

71 It seems less than clear whether Edward I’s famous mandate of 1280 instructing his sheriffs to ensure that Jews should attend the new conversionary sermons to be preached throughout the realm by the Dominican friars were meant to apply to women as well as to men: see CPR, 1272-81, p. 356; Tovey, D’Bloissiers, Anglia Judaica (Oxford, 1738), pp. 215–16.Google Scholar

72 Adler, Jews of Medieval England, pp. 350-2.

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75 Adler, , Jews of Medieval England, pp. 67–8.Google Scholar

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