by Simon Schama
The biggest bonanza of all was in 1186, with the death of the super-magnate Aaron of Lincoln. Aaron had built a stupendous fortune around the newly expansive needs of both Church and state. He had funded Becket and Henry II; had lent money to the Bishop of Lincoln (secured, naughtily, on the diocesan plate) so that the bishop might build himself a splendid palace, and had in fact made the cathedral itself possible, just as his money had built Peterborough Cathedral not far away. When he died, Aaron was, in liquid assets, the wealthiest man in England, which made his estate irresistible for the constantly embattled Henry II. The entirety of his estate, including the massive ledger of debts owing, was confiscated by the Crown. Its gold and silver was sent immediately to France where Henry was at war with Philip Augustus – and, in a providential act of justice, was lost when the ship carrying it to Dieppe sank. The remaining assets were a vast pile of loans owed by 450 debtors from the king of Scotland to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The estate was of such staggering and complicated fortune that a separate department of state – the Saccarium Aaronis, the Exchequer of Aaron – had to be created to manage it. It took the Aaron Exchequer five years to sort out its details before exploiting the gold mine.28
Aaron was hardly typical. Before the Jews became restricted to a particular number of towns, they spread throughout the kingdom and many were lenders to much smaller fry than Aaron’s grand clients: local knights and squires, modest convents, abbeys and churches, burghers of the market towns. Many were in the ancillary businesses – gold- and silversmithing, gem-trading and jewellery-making – but there were also wine sellers (another business that profited from family connections in France), traders in wool, salt and spices, as well as the usual professions of doctors and apothecaries. It is known, too, that kosher cooks and caterers supplied food for non-Jews, and there were even more surprising occupations. The second Lateran Council of 1139 had attempted, optimistically, to ban the use of the crossbow by Christians against fellow Christians. But no warlord worth his salt was going to do without them, so Jewish crossbowmen were trained as a special corps for the king, and became famous for specialising in the weapon throughout the kingdom. In the reign of Henry III there is at least one recorded instance of being required to pay for the upkeep of a particular crossbowman known as Seman or Simon who may have been a convert but who was kept in livery and weaponry by David of Oxford. And it is hard to know who would have been more offended by a Jewish painter of holy images, especially the Virgin: the rabbis who might have taken it as a violation of the Second Commandment, or Christians who were regularly treated to stories of Jews desecrating images of the Madonna. Perhaps our painter squared it all by telling himself that it could be no sin to paint another religion’s idolatrous icons?29
But it was the great moneylenders, specialising in mighty clients and taking the corresponding fall, who were the potentates of England’s Jews: Aaron of Lincoln; Benedict Crespin of London, whose beautiful mikvah bath in green sandstone was excavated in 2002 and can be seen in the Jewish Museum; Moses of Bristol; and David of Oxford. They built themselves stone houses (with an eye both to grandeur and defence), which, like many of the Jewish quarters and their small synagogues, were sited sufficiently close to the town castles and jails in case they needed sudden shelter from rioting mobs, which was often the case. Many of them had multiple properties in several towns including London, and some like another Benedict, Licoricia’s son, even acquired country manors – in his case, thirty-nine acres in Northamptonshire, containing tenant farms, parkland and hunting forests, and ample livestock, including, shocking to relate, ‘young porkers’. Some of the Jewish grandees evidently had a thing for fine mounts.
One of these palfrey-fanciers was David of Oxford. Like the rest of the town’s Jews he had somehow survived the relentless depredations imposed on them by both Richard (departing for the Crusades and then ransom money to get him back) and his notoriously insatiable brother John, who in 1217 had levied a crushing tax, and then simply let his Magna Carta barons lay their hands on absolutely anything they wanted from the Jews who could be accused of being in arrears. David emerged from the rack and ruin and rebuilt his fortune lending to expensively inclined clients from Northamptonshire and Warwickshire to Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. Locally it was his funds that built both Oseney Priory and Oxford Castle, a stronghold the Jews had an interest in seeing built even if they became, from time to time, involuntary residents. One document records a quittance from the ‘hard hand’ of David, but there was every reason for him to drive a hard bargain in his loans since he could never be quite sure whether he would see the money again. Richard had been in the habit of bribing noble followers to crusade with him by altering, at will, debts incurred to such as David: sometimes reducing or waiving the interest; sometimes just forgiving the debt altogether. The tactic was too successful to be abandoned after the abortive Crusade, for John was as much at war as his brother, and the boy-heir Henry III was overseen by nobles who got similar dispensations for sundry military services to the Crown. David endured thirty such loan wipeouts in less than fifteen years. The insurance against bearing the entire burden of such disasters was going into partnership with other money men he could trust and spreading a little, both profits and losses.30
Hard-handed or not, David prospered. He built a fine stone house in the Oxford Jewry south of Carfax, the very street known to dons and undergraduates forever as St Aldate’s, and another round the corner in St Edward’s Lane. David’s fortune was evidently grand enough for him to become anxious about the lack of heirs from his marriage to Muriel. And then sometime around 1242 he ran into his destiny: Licoricia of Winchester.
Licoricia was a widow with three sons by her first husband, Abraham of Kent, who had been implicated but not executed in yet another child-murder trial seven years before. Like so many wives as well as widows (such as Belia, the shrewd daughter-in-law of the even more famous and formidable monied widow, Chera of Winchester), they acted as partners in their husband’s business while the men were still alive, signing contracts and quittances for them in Hebrew (hence they were literate as well as numerate). Licoricia had come of age in the Winchester dominated by Chera and her clan, and doubtless learned a great deal from her example, for in short order she became a powerful operator in her own right, and perhaps with that name she had to be. When she met David she was already well off, but it is improbable, given David’s already colossal fortune, that making it even bigger with an alliance could have been a motive for what followed. More likely he just fell for her. The travelling widows must have been irresistible. They journeyed on business in much style; often had spectacular wardrobes – we know of ‘bluet silk’ and ‘blood red gown trimmed in rabbit fur’.
If Pope Innocent III had had his way, there would have been one sartorial blemish on their costume: a badge shaped like the twin tablets of the Ten Commandments, ‘four fingers by two’. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Pope had demanded this distinction, precisely because it had become impossible, by dress demeanour and language alone, to tell who was who, thus risking in the Pope’s view the danger of intermarriage. The Pope’s action may well have been prompted by cases such as the notorious affair of an unnamed deacon in Oxford who, according to the chronicler Matthew Paris, became passionately infatuated with a Jewess and so ‘ardently desired her embraces . . . that he agreed to her demand that he convert and showed his seriousness by self-circumcision. When he had done what she bade him he gained her unlawful love. But this could not long be concealed and was reported to [Archbishop] Stephen of Canterbury.’31 In 1222, Archbishop Langton summoned a council in Oxford which degraded the impenitent deacon who is said to have repudiated what he called ‘the new fangled law’ and offered into the bargain some choice comments on the subject of the Virgin Mary. This was unlikely to appease the archbishop, much less the notoriously ferocious Sheriff Fawkes de Bréauté, who sent the deacon straight into the flames. Nothing more was heard of the Jewess other than she
escaped both the scandal and the stake, doubtless without donning the tabula on her gown.
Despite the apostate deacon in Oxford, the requirement of the distinguishing badge of the tablets of the law seems to have been unenforced for most of the reign of Henry III, so it is unlikely to have much bothered Licoricia and her travelling sisters of the money trade. They were entirely accustomed to dealing with the Christian world, were independently minded, could read, write and banter and hold their own arguing with the roughest, toughest barons and bishops, some of whom clearly went weak at the knees when they had an interview with the likes of Belaset or Licoricia. Since they, too, needed to work in partnership with other Jews all over the country, they clearly went well beyond the domestic and religious preoccupations of a Doulcea of Worms, though this did not mean they would necessarily have been worldly at the expense of their faith. Licoricia seems to have been a stickler for kosher food. But nothing much could daunt these women. They travelled with armed escorts, sitting high in the side-saddle or in a basic form of carriage cart, dismounting en route to stay the night with Jewish communities before going on their way, often to destinations that might have intimidated the less confident. Licoricia regularly met high and mighty customers in the Great Hall at Winchester Castle, much visited by Henry III.
Whatever it was that attracted David – and it might just have been Licoricia’s proven fertility – it was powerful enough to make him act with shocking abruptness and announce a divorce from Muriel, more or less by unilateral fiat, and probably without telling her himself. But since the reforms introduced by Gershom ben Yehudah of Mainz and his contemporary rabbis, not only was polygamy strictly forbidden, it had also become unlawful to divorce a wife without her consent, except in the scandalous circumstances in which she had committed adultery. That was clearly not the case with Muriel and she had no intention of going quietly. Even the Muriels of this world knew their rights and were not shy of asserting them. Other Jewish women of this period appear in marital disputes and wrangles over the fate of dowries when they are widowed, fully aware of the law. One Milla, for example, fought off a predatory Samuel, wanting to get his hands on her dowry by claiming they were married ‘by virtue of the commerce and contract they had between them’, meaning the sexual kind. Milla snorted, went to law and won the case. Another independently minded woman, Gentilla, belied her name by forking over a tidy sum to the royal officials in order to avoid marrying a designated match. Muriel was evidently cut from the same strong cloth, if not quite a match for her rival from Winchester, but then few were. Muriel’s Lincoln family were mobilised and her brother Peytevin, himself a man of substance who had built his own synagogue and was clearly practised in both Jewish and Gentile law, took over the case. He submitted it first to a group of French rabbis safely beyond the reach of any strings David might pull, and to whom their English counterparts often deferred, as the disciples of the great Rashi of Troyes. The French responded in Muriel’s favour and with the wind at her back Muriel and Peytevin organised a beth din rabbinical court at Oxford which followed the French opinion, and nullified the divorce.
David and Licoricia regretted taking Muriel for granted but now they went on the offensive, even if it meant appealing not to a Jewish but a Christian authority, no less than the Archbishop of York. Among those beholden to David was none other than the king himself, to whom David had tendered at a sensitive time a sweetener of a hundred pounds. After that, as far as Henry was concerned, David could do no wrong. For his part the archbishop resented the presumption of any rival courts of religion, and after summoning Muriel’s side, in turn quashed the decision of the Oxford beth din and decreed the divorce valid. More seriously the Close Rolls have a letter directly from the king to the ‘masters’ who had adjudicated the dispute forbidding them ‘to distrain’ David ‘to keep that wife [Muriel] or any other’. Doing otherwise, the letter warned, would ‘incur grave punishment’.32
So now there was nowhere else for Muriel or her brother to take their case. For the time being, and in keeping with the halakha religious laws she was provided for in the shape of David’s smaller house at the corner of St Edward’s Lane and Jury Lane. And perhaps she got some grim satisfaction from the fact that Licoricia and David got to enjoy their marriage for a mere two years before David died in 1244 – long enough, however, for Licoricia to produce the heir he had desperately wanted, whom they called after David’s father, Asser or Asher, but who would be known throughout his life (and in keeping with the confectionery of his mother’s name) as Sweetman or Sweteman.
But instead of being able to enjoy her late husband’s fortune, Licoricia, along with the infant Sweetman, was clapped in the Tower of London, while David’s estate was subject to the scrutiny and appropriation of the Crown. Normally the king was entitled to a full third of such estates, but the worrying example of Aaron of Lincoln was on everyone’s mind when big legacies came up. Locked away in the Tower of London (though doubtless paying to be able to walk about, have kosher food brought in and the like), Licoricia was held hostage to the Crown’s satisfaction while King Henry perused David’s magnificent library, ostensibly to reassure himself it contained no items injurious to either Christianity or Judaism but actually coming away with some choice items like a psalter. Even more satisfactory to the king was the confiscation of David’s fine house at the top of St Aldate’s and its transformation into the royal domus conversum: a house to accommodate converts who, taken to Christ’s grace, could be provided for from David’s kitchen and eat off his plate, use his utensils and avail themselves of his and Licoricia’s wardrobe. The settlement of the estate to the satisfaction of the Crown’s agents took many months, but in the end the king took possession of the immense sum of 5,000 marks, more than £3,000 of the day. Since £100 would build and fit a fully equipped ship, this was a formidable amount and it was earmarked for Henry III’s pet project of rebuilding Westminster Abbey and in particular creating the shrine to Edward the Confessor that is there to this day. Much of the heart of the abbey where royalty is crowned comes from the estate of Licoricia the Jewess and her husband David of Oxford, a detail the guidebooks mysteriously manage to omit. If you want to see what became of a Jewish fortune, take a look at the spectacular Cosmati ceramic tile pavement paid for (along with much else in that part of the abbey) by David and Licoricia. The shrine was not just an incidental item: it became the sacred heart of the abbey, the mausoleum of the Plantagenet kings and queens including, to be sure, those of Henry III’s son, Edward I, who a half-century later after much suffering and distress, unceremoniously got rid of the Jews altogether from his kingdom.
III. Destruction
On a spring morning in 1277 Licoricia’s body was found on the floor of her house in Winchester along with her maid Alice, both of them dead from stab wounds. Jews were not supposed to have Christian maids, but then there were a lot of things Jews weren’t supposed to do and Licoricia did most of them. After David’s burial in the Jewish cemetery at Oxford where Jews now kick up the daisies, it being the University Botanical Garden, Licoricia had taken Sweetman back with her to her old stalking ground of Winchester where she again played the role of the great queen of money and sometimes overplayed it. When one of her many debtors, Thomas Charlecote, was found floating face down in a pond on his Warwickshire manor, Licoricia moved in to collect on the estate. Charlecote’s debt had indeed been secured on his land, but protocol required she wait until his son and heir, Thomas, had had his portion duly settled. Licoricia was not the waiting type, nor was she especially forgiving. She seems to have had Muriel turned out of her Oxford house and now she took possession of the Charlecote land and proceeded to asset-strip it down to the bone – livestock, hunting forest, tenancies all sold off.
So like Poulceline of Blois, Licoricia would have had enemies even though she seems to have retired from active business by the 1270s. Did those enemies kill her? An inquiry pinned the crime on a saddler called Ralph, in which case the murder would hav
e been a matter of almost random robbery which certainly happened to Jews. But Ralph may have been a scapegoat for someone of more consequence eager to get rid of his debt by getting rid of the creditor. The times and their refreshed hatreds killed Licoricia and many more Jews who followed. For their fate had been closely linked to Henry III, who, however opportunistic and unscrupulous in the random descents he made on their fortunes through suddenly imposed taxes and confiscations, did at least largely fulfil his end of protection. Yet that very favour was one of the prime grievances laid at the feet of the king during the baronial wars led by Simon de Montfort, both a debtor to and a hater of the Jews. Though de Montfort was eventually defeated, Henry’s successor, Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272, shared many of his prejudices, reinforced by his time as a Crusader.
The 200-year-old arrangement – by which the Jews rendered money-lending services in return for protection and freedom of travel around the kingdom – was torn to shreds. The first sign was the sudden enforcement of the wearing of the badge of difference, the tabula. Now they were marked people. Then, the towns in which they were allowed to reside were limited; whole communities now moved elsewhere. When Edward got back from the Crusade it got worse. A statute on the Jews in 1275 forbade moneylending, the essential activity, whatever its odium and perils, that supported what would otherwise be indigent communities. Official fantasies were spun about the Jews learning and practising new crafts and trades but without any real means for them to do so, especially since the guilds were still to be closed. By a small miracle it had been Licoricia’s son by her first marriage, Benedict, who had been close enough to the mayor of Winchester, Simon Draper, as to allow the mayor to admit him to the city guild – an astonishing breakthrough which almost immediately brought down uproar and obloquy on the head of the offending mayor who hastily had to amend the measure to some sort of honorary status.