The Expulsion of the Jews, 1290

A Community in Royal Hands

The Jewish community of medieval England arrived after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and lived under direct royal protection. Successive kings used Jews as a financial resource: only Jews were legally permitted to lend money at interest, a practice the Church called usury. In return for this protection the king could tax Jews directly, without parliamentary consent, through a special levy called tallage. By 1272 the Jewish population was perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 people, concentrated in towns such as London, York, Lincoln, Norwich and Oxford.

Centuries of Persecution Before 1290

Persecution did not begin with Edward I. In 1144 the murder of a boy in Norwich produced the first blood libel in Europe — the false accusation that Jews killed Christian children for ritual purposes. The cult of ‘Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln’ in 1255 followed the same pattern, and nineteen Jews were hanged. In 1190 a violent pogrom at Clifford’s Tower in York saw 150 Jews killed or driven to suicide. From 1218 English Jews were forced to wear a yellow badge, and after 1255 Henry III sold his rights over the Jewish community to his brother Richard of Cornwall to settle royal debts.

The Statute of the Jewry, 1275

In 1275 Edward I issued the Statute of the Jewry. Its terms transformed Jewish life. Lending money at interest was now banned outright; existing debts were to be reduced. Jews were ordered to take up trade, farming or skilled crafts — occupations from which Christian guilds had long excluded them. Every Jew over the age of seven had to wear a larger yellow felt badge in the shape of the Tablets of the Law, and those aged twelve and over paid three pence a head in tax. Synagogues were restricted to a small list of named towns.

The Statute placed an impossible burden on the community. Cut off from their traditional livelihood and locked out of Christian craft guilds, many Jews fell into poverty. Some turned to coin clipping — shaving silver from the edges of pennies — for which 269 Jews were hanged in London in 1278. The community that remained was poor, vulnerable and visibly marked.

The Edict of Expulsion, 18 July 1290

On 18 July 1290 Edward issued the Edict of Expulsion. Every Jew in England was ordered to leave the country by 1 November, the feast of All Saints. Those who remained could be killed without penalty. Royal officials were instructed to allow the exiles to take portable goods and small sums of money, but their houses, debts and synagogues passed to the Crown. Around 2,000 to 3,000 people were forced into ships at the Cinque Ports; some captains, paid by the head, robbed and drowned passengers in the Thames estuary.

The expulsion was not a sudden whim. It was announced in Parliament alongside a grant of taxation worth roughly £116,000 — the largest single grant of Edward’s reign. The grateful Commons were trading money for the removal of a community their leaders had long resented. Edward had also been pressed by his mother Eleanor of Provence and by the friars, and had practised the policy first in his lands in Gascony, expelling Jews there in 1287.

Aftermath and Significance

England was the first European kingdom to expel its Jewish community. France followed in 1306 and Spain in 1492. The English ban lasted 366 years — Jews were not formally readmitted until Oliver Cromwell allowed their return in 1656. For Edward’s reign the immediate effect was financial: a one-off windfall, a popular taxation grant and the symbolic image of a Christian king cleansing his realm. The longer effect was a country with no openly practising Jewish community for over three centuries, which shaped English religious culture into the modern period.