A Hospitaller and the Jews: Brother Joseph De Chauncy and English Jewry in the 12705^ ZEFIRA ENTIN ROKEAH
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A Hospitaller and the Jews: Brother Joseph de Chauncy and English Jewry in the 12705^ ZEFIRA ENTIN ROKEAH Among themany entries touching on matters of Jewish interest in thememoranda a rolls of the English exchequer in the late-13th century1 is pair of entries dating fromDecember 1273. They record orders issued by the treasurer, Brother Joseph were to de Chauncy,2 and sent to various sheriffs.The sheriffs have itproclaimed that all Jews resident in their shires were to come to, and remain in, the principal (or possibly, the archa) town of each shire fromDecember 1273 until the following as Easter (1 April 1274). The reasons for their forced migration and residence, are not for the penalties with which any Jews who did not obey were threatened, to given in the memoranda roll.3 It is likely, however, that the treasurer wished facilitate the collection of the 'great tallage' of one-third of the Jews' movable goods, which Roth indicates had been imposed by 'the Council of Regency during the new king's [Edward Fs] absence, with the severe methods that had become recognized as normal',4 by forcing the Jews to remain within easy reach of the - collectors acting on the principle that a flock may be more efficientlyfleeced if gathered together before the shearers arrive.The texts of these consecutive entries read roughly as follows: (King's Remembrancer's Memoranda Roll, E 159/48,m. 4 [1273-4]):5 The sheriffof andHuntingdonshire has been ordered, as soon as he shall Cambridgeshire - - in see these letters, to have it proclaimed franchises notwithstanding every city, borough, are to come to and vill/town where any Jews abide in his bailiwick, that all the Jews Cambridge and remain thereuntil the comingEaster [1April 1274].No Jew ofCambridge or of the vills [towns] outside of Cambridge is to leave Cambridge within this period, unless he wish to forfeithis life or members, as well as all his movable and immovable property. Should any Jew flee or absent himself from Cambridge after this proclamation, the sheriffis to seize him and detain him in the king's prison. He is also to take into the as the king's hand all of that Jew's goods and chattels, movable and immovable, being etc. receive further orders about the king's forfeit, and is to safeguard them until [he prisoner and the disposition of his property].Witnessed by brotherJoseph [de Chauncy] on 9 December [1273]. Similar orders have been sent to the sheriffsof Kent, Hampshire, Somerset [and] Dorset, Nottinghamshire [and]Derbyshire, Essex [and]Hertfordshire,6 Surrey and Sussex, Warwickshire and Leicestershire, Yorkshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire,Norfolk and * Paper presented to the Society on 7 December 1995. 189 Jewish Historical Society of England is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Jewish Historical Studies ® www.jstor.org Zefira Entin Rokeah Suffolk, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire [and] Buckinghamshire, Worcestershire, Cornwall,7 Devonshire, Lincolnshire, and Gloucestershire.8 Let us consider the background of these orders. Henry Ill's son, the Lord Edward, had set forth on crusade in 1270, with his father's blessing, and with a systematically organized fighting force, the funds forwhich had been raised, inter alia, from English Christians and English Jews for the purpose.9 When Henry died on 16 November 1272 Edward was in Sicily on his way back to England. It - - took him nearly twomore years until August 1274 to reach England, passing through Rome, Orvieto, Savoy, Burgundy, Paris and Gascony, and dealing with the excommunication of the murderers of his cousin, Henry of Almain, slain at Viterbo; with the homage due from him to King Philip III of France; and with a serious rebellion in Gascony. Apparently news he received from England before his return, both written and oral, kept him fromworrying about the state of affairs at home and allowed him tomake his dispositions on the Continent in an unhur? ried fashion.10 Before he left for the crusade Edward had appointed agents to look after his children and his interests at home.11 Among their other activities, these agents sentmoney toAcre forEdward's use during the crusade.12 The royal - - finances were in a 'wretched' even 'pathetic' state in these last years ofHenry Ill's reign, and Edward and his advisers found money for his crusade only with great difficulty,finding themselves obliged to resort to various moneylenders when it became clear that the income of the crusading and other taxes was insufficient to cover costs.13 It was in these circumstances that steps were taken to collect tallages imposed on the Jews in the late 1260s and early 1270s, and their arrears.14 The details of these tallages are beyond our scope here; various attempts have been made to clarify their timing and amounts, but much spadework remains to be done. What is clear is that there were ceaseless efforts in the early 1270s to extract as much money as possible from an increasingly impoverished Jewish community. Such efforts included the 'great tallage' referred to above, which the exchequer's personnel optimistically hoped would yield 25,000 marks (?16,666 13s 4d) for the hard-pressed king. It seems that their hopes were not realized.15 A table of income from various Jewish tallages of the 1270s compiled recently by Robin Mundill indicates that payments recorded in the Jewish receipt rolls between 1272 and 1275 were between ?1200 and ?1500 per annum, and then dropped drastically until after September 1276, when nearly ?1000 was received (possibly indicating a new tallage imposed in that year). If the years 1274 and 1275 are seen as the main years for the payment of the 'great tallage', only a - - disappointing ?3000 or so some 4500 marks of the anticipated 25,000 marks, less than one-fifth,were collected.16 Cecil Roth commented that this tallage's 'arrears were so great that, on 1 November 1274, itwas found necessary to appoint a special commission to exact them', and that Jews 'unable to pay were banished, in conformitywith the old idea that Jews were tolerated in England only if they could be of merit to the 190 A Hospitaller and the Jews Crown'.17 The patent rolls show that Jews were granted licences to sell their houses and rents in February 1274, so that theymight then be able to pay their tallage.18 H. G. Richardson, in his The English Jewry underAngevin Kings, says that the order for this Callage of extraordinary severity, unknown since 1241' seems to be absent from the records, until the February 1274 entries in the patent rolls which mention the tallage.19No specific orders for the imposition of this 'great tallage' of one-third of the Jews' movable property are known to exist today. However, the ambiguous orders in the memoranda roll of 1273-4, which we noted at the outset, seem to be part of the missing materials about this tallage, although they do not specify the size of the tallage imposed nor, indeed, even mention a tallage at all. There is no imaginable justification for the sheriffsbeing told to round up all the Jews in December 1273 if not to provide for a more efficientmulcting of the Jews. One might think that this related to anti-usury activity, but the anti-usury legislation of 1275 was still two years in the future. Similarly, one might suggest that this action was related to alleged coinage viola? tions, but the trials of English Jews on charges of money-clipping and other coinage violations were five years in the future, in 1278-9.20 It seems that only the levying of money from the community can explain this action. We indicated above why so much money had to be raised: we mentioned Edward's crusade of 1270, which may have cost as much as ?100,000, to which must be added his father's chronic inability to reconcile his income with his expenditure. - - Let us consider the orders themselves including the explicit threats in them and their issuer, Brother Joseph de Chauncy, the treasurer of King Edward I. It was quite usual in 13th-century England for the imposition of a tallage on the Jews to be preceded by an examination or 'scrutiny' of the contents of the archae.21This enabled the king's officials to know what resources the Jews had, at least potentially, and facilitated the assessment of any proposed tallage. In the time of Henry III, Jews were sometimes imprisoned in order to force them to agree to pay their shares of the tallages by certain dates; on other occasions those failing to pay on time were imprisoned in order to 'encourage' them to pay.22 However, threats of torture or of the loss of life or of body parts such as eyes, limbs, or teeth, seem to have been employed in the time of Henry's father,King John, rather than in that of Henry himself.23 Apparently there is a return to early-13th-century threats in these December 1273 orders for the enforced resid? ence, one might even say house arrest, of the Jews in the principal (or archd) towns of England. It is tempting to try to explain this threatened reversion to the harshness of the reign of King John by guessing at the character of theman who sent the orders, Brother Joseph de Chauncy, who was prior of theHospital of St John of Jerusalem in England, and royal treasurer, from early October 1273 until mid-June 1280.24 I have deliberately used the term 'guessing', since so very little is known about the life of Joseph de Chauncy.