CHAPTER 3
We will and grant that all cities, boroughs, towns and ports shall have all their liberties and free customs.
Magna Carta, Clause 13
‘The king to all who wish to have burgages in the town of Liverpool, greeting. Know that we have granted to all who take up burgages at Liverpool that they shall have all the liberties and free customs in the town of Liverpool as enjoyed by any other free borough on the seacoast in our land. And so we command that you may travel there safely and in our peace in order to receive your burgages and to live there. In testimony of this we send you our letters patent. Witness Simon de Pateshull, at Winchester, 27 August in the 9th year of our reign.’
With these few words, in a document known as a letter patent drawn up in 1207, King John announced his foundation of Liverpool, a newly planned town alongside a tidal creek known as ‘le pool’ in the Mersey estuary. Liverpool was to have a remarkable future, but there was nothing at all remarkable about its foundation. Between 1066 and 1230 more than 125 towns were founded in England, with Arundel, Boston, Chelmsford, Devizes, Egremont, Harwich, Kingston-upon-Hull (later called Hull), Lynn (later King’s Lynn), Morpeth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Okehampton, Portsmouth, Reigate, Salisbury, Truro, Uxbridge, Watford and Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight, among them. The number had doubled since the Norman Conquest, which represents a faster rate of town foundation than in any other period of comparable length in English history. Looking back from post-industrial Britain we might think that medieval England was an overwhelmingly rural country. That is not how they saw it at the time.
Comparing England with Ireland, the twelfth-century English historian William of Malmesbury wrote: ‘Whereas in Ireland the cultivators of the soil are so poor, or rather so unskilful, that the people live in rustic squalor, the English and the French, with their more cultivated way of life, live in towns and carry on trade and commerce.’ William’s contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, wrote that England was richer even than Germany and saw its cities, ‘glittering on the banks of fruitful and very beautiful rivers’, as among the country’s greatest assets. This same period saw the beginnings of urbanisation in both Wales and Scotland. The towns that grew up then included, in Wales, Cardiff, Carmarthen, Cardigan, Neath, Pembroke and Swansea; and in Scotland, Berwick, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, Aberdeen and Perth. In the history of urbanisation in Britain this is the most important period before the Industrial Revolution.
The beginnings of King John’s Liverpool are typical of many medieval town foundations. In the short and businesslike letter patent of August 1207 the words ‘free’ and ‘liberties’ are prominent. Liverpool was to be a ‘free borough’. The king’s letter was, in effect, its first borough charter. Its burgesses, those people who took up the king’s offer of burgages – plots of land in the new town – were to enjoy certain ‘liberties and free customs’. They were to be free to sell, sublet, mortgage or pass on their burgage to heirs. They were to be free from having to pay servile dues or perform labour services, from paying toll at the borough’s weekly market, as well as at other markets owned by the same lord. Where, as at Liverpool, the lord was the king this was an extremely valuable privilege since he was lord of most of the oldest and biggest towns in England. Burgesses could have their own oven and handmill: unlike servile tenants they were not compelled to use, and pay for using, their lord’s. The law came to recognise the custom that a serf who managed to live in a borough as a burgess for a year and a day was thenceforth to be regarded as a freeman. Hence the medieval saying: ‘Town air makes you free.’ All this was clearly designed to attract settlers, as was the fact that in new towns burgage rents were set at a low level, typically a shilling (12d) a year.
Liverpool was planned on an empty site. Elsewhere lords issued charters that turned pre-existing villages into boroughs by ‘enfranchising’ them. In 1196, for example, the bishop of Worcester turned his village of Stratford-upon-Avon into a borough. Within fifty years Stratford had grown into a market town of some seventy acres in extent with a population of about a thousand. Burgage rents alone brought in £12, at least ten times as much as the rents of a seventy-acre rural manor. Even a small borough with just eighty burgage plots paying a shilling each brought in £4 just from rents, more than the property would have been worth as farmland. Adding in market and mill tolls, plus income from the borough court, it could bring in as much as £10.
Founding a town on a new site involved the lord in major capital outlay, in the case of Liverpool the building of a castle and a chapel for the settlers, since it was situated three miles from the parish church of Walton on the Hill. By granting special freedoms to his burgage tenants the lord gave up some profitable rights, but clearly in the expectation that the market would flourish, bringing in a higher rent income from new settlers, more money from the tolls paid at the weekly market by non-burgesses and from fines levied in the borough court. Alternatively once the town was off the ground its lord could guarantee himself a useful sum, known as the ‘farm’, with virtually no effort on his part, by leasing to the burgesses the right to collect revenues and administer their town. By 1229 Liverpool was paying a farm set at £10. King John’s new town was already doing well.
The rate of new foundation was at its height in the fifty years between 1180 and 1230 when no fewer than fifty-seven new towns were founded in England. Before the Norman Conquest the majority of new English boroughs had been royal foundations, but most of those established in the two centuries after 1066 were founded by wealthy landowners, bishops, abbots and, above all, secular nobles. Maurice Paynell, for example, created a new borough at Leeds by the bridge over the river Aire; and Richard de Argentein was responsible for Newmarket in Suffolk. Some boroughs attracted so few settlers that they remained villages – there were to be many of these ‘rural boroughs’ in Ireland – but the majority did well. Portsmouth was originally founded by a noble, Jean de Gisors, and was then taken over by Richard I in 1194 and developed as a naval base. Other successful new towns of this period included Honiton, founded by the earl of Devon; Chelmsford, founded by the bishop of London; Salisbury, founded by its bishop; Harwich, founded by the earls of Norfolk. One thing is crystal clear from the story of town foundation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The aristocratic landowners of the age were far from being contemptuous of the profits of trade. The Clare family, for example, as earls of Hertford and Gloucester, came to possess more than twenty boroughs.
Of course the urban boom was very far from being solely the creation of royal and aristocratic enterprise. These lords were riding a wave of rising population and rising production. As settlements grew in number and size more and more people were able to specialise as artisans, craftsmen or shopkeepers, making and selling goods in exchange for the agricultural production of the countryside or raw materials from the forest, quarries and mines. Markets proliferated. There were just two markets in Oxfordshire in 1086, but ten more by the 1220s. Everyone lived close enough to a market to be able to walk there and back in a day. Markets could and did spring up as spontaneously as car-boot sales today, but then, as now, they functioned better with some degree of regulation. Ensuring that markets had to be held on different days in different places, for example, allowed itinerant traders to adopt a circuit that kept them in business throughout the week. Even though a few places, such as Stowmarket, became market towns without ever being granted borough status, chartering a borough proved the most effective way of regulating – and promoting – a market.
Although a successful urban foundation depended upon lord and burgesses co-operating as shareholders in a joint enterprise, their interests were by no means identical, and as time went by they were increasingly likely to diverge. Bury St Edmunds was one of the earliest post-1066 urban developments. Abbot Baldwin (1065–97) laid out five new streets and a market place to the west of the abbey. The Domesday Book of 1086 noted that the abbey now had 342 houses on land that had been under the plough in the time of King Edward ‘the Confessor’ (1042–66). After a century of urban growth the monks felt that they were not making as much profit from St Edmund’s town as they should have been. Early in Richard I’s reign they went to see their formidable abbot, Samson, and complained that the income they derived from Bury had remained at its customary level of £40 a year, while ‘revenues from all the better towns and boroughs in England were rising to the advantage of the lords who possessed them’. These were monks with an eye on national economic trends. The burgesses of Bury, however, could not be budged: they looked to the king to protect what they called their ‘liberty’ – which often meant something more like ‘privilege’.
The monks of Bury were, however, right about the economy. Trade was booming. One of the principal engines of the growth of commerce was the increase in the money supply. At this time the only coin minted in north-west Europe was the silver penny, so the discovery in the 1160s of silver bearing ores in the Alps, in Tuscany and, above all, at Freiberg, near Meissen, in Germany, was of huge importance. In 1180 a new English silver penny was designed, now known to collectors and numismatists as the Short Cross penny. The cross design on one side of the coin simplified life for those who wanted to cut it into two or four pieces in order to have money of lower denomination, halfpennies or farthings (fourths). Thanks to the influx of new silver, especially German silver, numismatists estimate that after 1180 English mints were striking at least six times as many pennies as in the previous decades. By the 1220s, when surviving mint records allow accurate statistics of coin production to be compiled, over 4 million silver pennies were being minted annually at Canterbury and London, and mint production continued to rise during the thirteenth century. Indeed not until the nineteenth century was the weight of silver minted each year in later thirteenth-century England regularly exceeded.
By 1215 London was the second largest town, after Paris, in north-western Europe. The Londoner William FitzStephen prefaced The Life of Thomas Becket which he wrote in the early 1170s with an enthusiastic description of his city:
Among the celebrated and noble cities of the world, the city of London, the throne of the English kingdom, is more widely famed than any other, and sends its wealth and merchandise further afield. It is blessed in the strength of its defences, the honour of citizens, and the chastity of its wives. The inhabitants of other cities are called citizens, but of London they are called barons. They are known everywhere for the elegance of their manners, dress and cuisine.
Here was a great international market, where goods of all kinds could be bought, both basic commodities such as grain which, in times of harvest failure, could be cheaper here than anywhere else in England, and also a great range of luxury goods. Just thinking of these exotic items so inspired William that he turned from prose to verse:
Gold from Arabia, from Sabaea spice
And incense; from the Scythians arms of steel
Well-tempered; oil from the rich groves of palm
That spring from the fat lands of Babylon;
Fine gems from Nile, from China crimson silks;
French wines; and sable, vair and miniver
From the far lands where Russ and Norseman dwell.
It was not just a poetic flight of fancy: all these items could be bought in the London of his day.
So great was the attraction of the city’s market that, by 1215, it had pulled the focal point of national administration into its orbit. Earlier kings of England had looked just as much, if not more, to Winchester, but by the later twelfth century Winchester had been overtaken by Westminster. The palace of Westminster, at its centre the magnificent hall built for William Rufus over a century earlier, became increasingly the heart of government. It was here, even during the prolonged absences of the royal court, that you could find the exchequer and the central law courts. By 1215 the English élite realised they could not do without London and Westminster. Many of them possessed, in addition to their country houses, a residence in London or in one of its two main suburbs, Westminster and Southwark. We have an account, for instance, of how Abbot Walter (1174–1211) of Waltham Abbey took the decision to build a stone house just north of Billingsgate. It was intended to be a place where the canons of Waltham or their servants could stay when they were in London, a warehouse for the goods they bought, and a garage for their carts. London was now England’s capital city.
A few important towns, such as Norwich and Bristol, had developed in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but generally speaking the richest towns were the oldest ones, dating back to Roman times, like York, Winchester, Lincoln, Canterbury, Colchester and, of course, London. According to William FitzStephen, however, London was older even than Rome itself, being founded after the fall of Troy by the Trojan exile Brutus, long before Romulus and Remus founded Rome. Indeed, it was Londoners, William explained – in another flight of fancy – who had repulsed Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain. He counted 139 churches, thirteen major ones and 126 parish churches, within the city and its suburbs; seven gates piercing the great wall that enclosed it on the north, linking the king’s massive Tower of London in the east with Baynard’s Castle and the Tower of Montfichet in the west. Two miles further west, joined to the city by a continuous line of development, lay ‘the incomparable royal palace’, which was Westminster. It is clear that, just as they are today, London and Westminster were already seen in combination, as the commercial and political capitals of the nation.
William drew attention to three springs famous for their healing waters in the northern suburbs: Holywell, Clerkenwell and St Clement’s Well. He described how: ‘Beyond the walls to the north lie arable fields, pasture and meadows, with brooks flowing between them and the happy sound of mill wheels turning. Beyond is the forest, where well-wooded copses and the lairs of wild animals can be found: stags and does, wild bulls and boars.’ Among the city’s amenities of which he was particularly proud was a shop selling ready-cooked meals at all hours of the day and night. Situated on the riverbank, amid the premises of the wine importers, it catered for travellers no matter how early or late they arrived or departed. Besides, William pointed out, if an unexpected guest suddenly turned up on your doorstep, you could pop down to the bankside shop and have a meal before them in no time. Its impressive menu offered a wide range of fish, meat, venison and poultry, either roast, boiled or fried – convenience food to suit all tastes and all pockets. It was this kind of thing, William emphasised, that made city life truly civilised.
He mentioned London Bridge only in passing, which shows that he was writing before the magnificent new stone bridge was built. It was begun in 1176 and took some thirty years to complete. Over a thousand feet long, it remained until 1831. Soon after its completion it survived a disaster that would have destroyed any of its Roman and medieval wooden predecessors. In 1212 a fire broke out on the south bank in Southwark. Crowds crossed the bridge either to view the scene or help put it out but were then surrounded by flames when the fire, driven by a south wind, took hold on the north bank too – presumably via the timber or thatched roofs of houses on the bridge. Boats went to rescue those trapped on the bridge, but so many jumped in them that they sank. Some reports spoke of 3000 dead, others of 3000 badly burned bodies washed up on the banks of the Thames, with an unknown number totally consumed by the flames. Three days after the fire a city ordinance was issued against thatched roofs. From then on London would be a timber city but one in which roofs were tiled. An ordinance issued on the same day ordered that ‘scot-ales’ (in effect, bring-a-bottle parties) were not to be held except by licence, which suggests that the fire started at a party. In William FitzStephen’s view, the two plagues of London were the frequency of fires and the excessive drinking of fools.
A year or two later, William might have added a third plague: a rash of muggings and murders were carried out by gangs of youths, often the sons of rich citizens such as the Bucuinte family, a thoroughly respectable city dynasty – despite their name, which means ‘greasy mouth’. As these well-heeled robbers grew in confidence, they broke into the houses of the wealthy and looted them. On one occasion they even used crowbars to break into a stone-built house, but this time a well-armed home owner was waiting for them. Their leader John Old, reputedly one of the city’s ‘richest and noblest’ citizens, was hanged for his part in this wave of violent street crime. News stories such as this may well have encouraged a Winchester author, the monk Richard of Devizes, writing in the 1190s, to adopt a view of London very different from FitzStephen’s.
Whatever evil or malicious thing can be found anywhere in the world can also be found in that city. There are masses of pimps. Do not associate with them. Do not mingle with the crowds in the eating-houses. Avoid dice, gambling, the theatre and the tavern. You will meet more braggarts there than in the whole of France. The number of parasites is infinite. Actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, Moors, flatterers, pretty boys, effeminates, pederasts, singing and dancing girls, quacks, belly-dancers, sorcerers, extortioners, night-wanderers, magicians, mimes, beggars, buffoons.
After this list, some of it borrowed from the Roman poet Horace, his advice is predictable if prosaic: ‘Do not live in London.’
Like nearly all the major towns and cities in England, London ‘belonged’ to the king. But such was its wealth that at times even he had to bid for its support. By 1200 the Crown had conceded a considerable degree of self-government to the city: from 1191 it was administered by a mayor and aldermen. The first mayor of London, Henry FitzAilwin, remained in office from 1191 until his death in 1212. Where London led, other cities and towns followed. Winchester had a mayor by 1200, Exeter by 1205, Lincoln by 1206, Barnstaple, Oxford, Lynn, York, Northampton, Beverley, Bristol, Grimsby and Newcastle-upon-Tyne by 1216. In 1215, in political trouble, John tried to win the city’s support by giving ‘his barons of the city of London’ a charter confirming their liberties, and adding the right to elect a mayor every year. But only ten days later the city opened its gates to the rebels against him, and then besieged the Tower. It was the loss of his capital city that persuaded the king he must negotiate.
Little of the London and Westminster of 1215 can still be seen today. Westminster Abbey – in which John, like all his predecessors since the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold, had been crowned – was rebuilt by his son Henry III. None the less, despite all the destruction and rebuilding that has taken place over the centuries there are some amazing survivals, none more so than the great monuments of the first two Norman kings: the White Tower, built by William the Conqueror, and Westminster Hall, built by his son, William Rufus. North of the Alps these two were the most impressive buildings of their kind to be raised since the fall of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately little of the rest of the medieval palace of Westminster survived the great fire of 1834.
Some parts of a few churches remain. Of the priory and hospital of St Bartholomew’s, the choir of the church still stands. The Temple Church was dedicated in 1185 by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, come to England to beg King Henry II to go to the aid of the Holy Land, sore beset by Muslim forces led by Saladin, one of Islam’s greatest champions. It was in this church that William Marshal, regent of England after King John’s death, was buried in 1219. There is also the crypt of St Mary-le-Bow, the scene of a controversial incident in 1196. A London citizen, William FitzOsbert, known as Longbeard, led a protest movement against the unfair distribution of taxation. One contemporary described him as ‘the champion of the poor’, but according to another,
He plotted great wickedness in the name of justice, a conspiracy of the poor against the rich. By his fiery eloquence he inflamed both the poor and the moderately well-off with a desire for limitless freedom and happiness and with a hatred for the arrogance of the rich and noble which he painted in the blackest colours. At public meetings he proclaimed himself the king of the poor, and their saviour.
Although, said this author, he kept a list of the names of 52,000 supporters, there was no mass rising when the king’s chief minister, the justiciar Hubert Walter, sent officers to arrest him. Longbeard killed one and then fled for sanctuary to St Mary-le-Bow, accompanied by a number of friends who refused to desert him. Hubert’s troops set fire to the church and Longbeard was forced out. After a rapid trial in the Tower of London, he and nine friends were tied to horses’ tails, dragged to Tyburn and hanged. The justiciar’s disregard of sanctuary shocked some, and all the more since he was archbishop of Canterbury. Soon Longbeard was looked upon as a martyr. The gibbet was secretly removed and venerated as a sacred relic; the earth below it was believed to have healing powers, the place of his death became a shrine. Hubert sent troops to disperse those who watched over it, imprisoned others and set an armed guard there. He also spread scandal: it was alleged that Longbeard had polluted the church of St Mary-le-Bow by having sex there with his concubine and that – even worse – he had invoked the aid of the devil when it became plain that no help could be expected from God. Longbeard’s adherents claimed that these reports were lies, but the embryonic martyr’s cult withered away – a victory for government news management.
In John’s reign London was far from being the only centre of international trade. The king imposed a duty on goods entering and leaving the country, and the records of customs revenue for 1203–4 from the ports of the south and east coasts – all that survive – show that 17 per cent of the total came from London, 16 per cent from Boston, 14 per cent from Southampton, 13 per cent each from Lynn and Lincoln, 7 per cent from Hull, 4 per cent from York and 3 per cent from Newcastle. (The rest came from a number of other ports.) These statistics are intriguing. Although they certainly underestimate London’s share of the trade, it is striking none the less to discover just how busy ports such as Boston, Lynn, Hull and Newcastle – all new towns – had become.
The prominence of east-coast ports on this list reflects the rise of another new phenomenon: the international fair. For three or four weeks every year after Easter the little country town of St Ives in Cambridgeshire, for instance, was transformed into a major commercial emporium. Wooden stalls were set up; the front rooms of town houses were rented out as shops; cart parks were full to overflowing. Quite extraordinary quantities of food and drink, oats and hay were brought in to provision the influx of buyers and sellers and their horses. This was the ‘great fair’ of St Ives. People came here not only from all over eastern England, but also from overseas – from Flanders, Brabant, Norway, Germany and France. Many English towns enjoyed the right to hold an annual fair, but most served a local or regional market and lasted for only two or three days. The ‘great fairs’ which developed in the later twelfth century at Boston, Winchester, Lynn and Stamford as well as at St Ives were different. They lasted for several weeks. The fair held around St Giles’s church outside the walls of Winchester lasted for sixteen days beginning on 31 August. They were open for business to all comers, free from the restrictions of trade that towns normally imposed to protect their own merchants and shopkeepers. This made them very attractive to foreigners of all sorts, including those who came from overseas. This enabled English producers of, say, wool and cloth to trade directly with foreign importers without going through London middlemen. St Giles’ Fair was worth £100 or more a year to its lord, the bishop of Winchester, and a businesslike bishop such as Peter des Roches often got royal permission to extend it by a week – to the irritation of the townspeople.
Another distinctive feature of the towns of 1215 was the presence in them of a number of Jews. So far as is known no Jews lived in Anglo-Saxon England. After 1066 French-speaking Jews from the flourishing community of Rouen crossed the Channel and some settled in London. The modern street name Old Jewry serves as a reminder of the medieval Jewry, not a ghetto in the strict sense of the word but a synagogue and a cluster of properties belonging to Jews, situated close to the busiest market in England, Cheapside; the Jewish cemetery lay outside the city walls, at Cripplegate. By 1215 there were small Jewish communities in at least twenty other English towns, the most important being in York, Lincoln, Canterbury, Gloucester, Northampton, Cambridge and Winchester. In total there may have been approximately 5,000 Jews in England, and until 1177 their bodies, no matter where they had lived, had to be brought to London for burial. In that year Henry II gave permission for Jews to create cemeteries outside the walls of every city in England. The cemetery at York, at a site still called Jewbury, was excavated in the 1980s, and the evidence recovered suggests that a community of about 250 had lived there.
In practice Jews were restricted to one economic activity: money-lending. With interest rates set at a penny, twopence or, occasionally, threepence per pound per week (i.e. 22 per cent, 44 per cent or 66 per cent per annum) this brought them great profits and, at times, even greater unpopularity. A Norwich monk, Thomas of Monmouth, accused the Jews of Norwich of the ritual murder of a young boy called William. His book on the subject launched the ‘blood libel’ against the Jews that was to leave a terrible scar on subsequent European history. William became a saint, much like the thirteenth-century boy ‘martyr’ ‘Little St Hugh’ of Lincoln. As a small, wealthy, exclusive and culturally distinctive minority, the Jews needed protection. The abbey of Bury St Edmund’s had borrowed large sums from Jewish, as well as from Christian, money-lenders – this was in the feckless days before Samson became abbot – and in consequence when danger threatened the Jews, they were allowed to take shelter within the abbey – much to Jocelin of Brakelond’s dismay.
‘They came and went as they liked, going everywhere throughout the monastery, even wandering by the altars and shrine while Mass was being celebrated. Their money was deposited in our treasury. Most unsuitable of all in an abbey even their wives and children were allowed in.’
By far the most important protector of the Jews was the king. In legal terms they were ‘in the king’s peace’ and, as King John observed in a letter of 1203, ‘If we had given our peace to a dog, it should not be violated.’ In return kings, certainly from Henry II onwards, exacted a heavy price, regulating Jewish business dealings closely and at times taxing them very harshly. In 1210 John demanded the staggering sum of £44,000 from the Jews, employing mass arrests and other brutal measures to enforce payment. According to one author, he extracted £6,666 from a rich Jew of Bristol by removing one of his teeth every day until he paid up. Since Jews themselves were in no position to enforce payment of debts owed to them, they had to rely on royal officials to do this for them. Debts owed to Jews who died intestate were taken over by the Crown. ‘Jews are the sponges of kings’, wrote an English theologian of the time. All this meant that landowners in debt to Jews constantly found themselves caught up in burdensome financial dealings with the Crown – an obvious cause of friction between king and barons that left its mark on Magna Carta. In Clauses 10 and 11 John was forced to promise that he would deal sympathetically with the widows and children of any landowner who died in debt to the Jews.
The king, however, could not always give the Jews the protection they bought at so high a price. In an anti-Semitic riot in London in 1189 several Jews were killed, while the houses of others were plundered and burned down. Richard I punished the rioters, hanging three, and he allowed a Jew who had pretended to convert to Christianity to escape death, to return to the faith of his fathers. But after the king left England for France, with the crusade as his goal, more anti-Semitic riots and murders occurred in 1190 in Lynn, Stamford, Norwich and Bury St Edmunds. Crusades, with their reminders of Christ’s crucifixion, tended to stimulate anti-Jewish sentiment; a crusading vow was an expensive commitment and the plundering of Jews sometimes seemed an all-too-appropriate way of raising the cash. The killings of 1190 reached a climax at York. Jews took refuge, as they often did, in the royal castle, Clifford’s Tower. A mob led by some of the local gentry, crusaders among them, and urged on by a fanatical hermit, mounted an assault on it. When the Jews realised they could hold out no longer, most of the men killed their wives and children, then committed suicide. Those families who did not opt for the ancient Jewish tradition of self-martyrdom surrendered when they were promised that their lives would be spared if they accepted Christian baptism. Once they left the castle they were killed. The mob then rushed to York Minster where the records of debts owed to Jews were stored and there, in the nave of the cathedral church, they made a bonfire of them. ‘As for these people who were butchered with such savage ferocity’, said the Yorkshire historian William of Newburgh, writing in the nearby priory of Newburgh, ‘I unhesitatingly affirm that if they had truly wished to be baptised, then baptised or nor, they found acceptance in God’s eyes. But whether their wish for baptism was genuine or feigned, the cruelty of those who murdered them was deceitful and utterly barbarous.’ As far as it could – which wasn’t very far – the government punished those responsible for the York massacre, and over the next few decades Jews returned to the city until, once again, it contained one of the richest communities in England.
Anti-Semitism and religious discrimination meant that the position of the Jews remained vulnerable everywhere in Latin Christendom. Philip II of France (usually known as King Philip Augustus) began his reign in 1180 by expelling Jews from Paris and confiscating their property. When he returned from crusade in 1192 he had eighty Jews found guilty of ritual murder and burned at the stake in Brie. In 1215 Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome decreed that Jews and Muslims were ‘to be publicly distinguished from other people by their dress’. In 1218 the council governing England on behalf of the boy-king Henry III ordered ‘all Jews to wear on the outer part of their clothing two strips on their breast made of white linen or parchment so that Jews may be distinguished from Christians by this visible badge’. This, it was argued, was to stop a person of one faith from unwittingly having sex with someone of another. A ‘certain deacon’, name unknown, certainly knew what he was doing, however, when he fell in love with a Jewish woman; he circumcised himself for her sake. He was defrocked on the orders of a Church council chaired by Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, held at Oxford in 1222, then taken outside the city walls and burned. In practice, the pope’s rules on distinctive dress for Jews were commonly set aside in England. In return for money the king was happy to exempt individuals or communities from the obligation to wear the Jewish badge. On this and related matters his view was that churchmen ‘have nothing to do with our Jews’. Before the end of the thirteenth century, though, the Crown’s financial demands had pressed its Jewish sponges so hard that little more could be squeezed out of them. In 1290 Edward I expelled them from his kingdom, to general English applause. It was not until England had a new kind of ruler, in the shape of Oliver Cromwell, that they were allowed to return.