Gone Medieval - Jews in Medieval England

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

Medieval England’s relationship with the Jewish community was complex and, at times, brutally violent and cruel. In 1290, the entire population of some 3,000 Jews was expelled from the country by King Edward I. In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Dr. Dean Irwin, whose research into Jewish moneylending activities sheds a fascinating light on the life of Jews in Medieval England, and the outbreaks of persecution against them. This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Medieval Jewish history is something I've wanted to explore on Gone Medieval and something that listeners have contacted me on social media to ask for more coverage of. Medieval England's relationship with Jewish communities was complex and frequently brutally violent and cruel, eventually leading to the expulsion of all Jews from England

by Edward I was delighted when I accidentally bumped into Dean Irwin on Twitter one day while we were involved in discussions about something else. His PhD looked at records of debts owed to Jewish moneylenders in medieval England and I'm very grateful to Dean for taking the time to come and speak to us today about this fascinating part of medieval history in England. Thank you very much for joining us Dean. Thank you for having me. I guess first question, what do we know about when and why Jewish communities begin to arrive into Europe and then into England? To some extent, we know

that by around the year 1000 there's a Jewish presence in Europe which probably started about a century or two earlier. In the south from Spain they come with the monthly conquests of the second half of the first millennium and settle in places like Spain, Toulouse and southern France where all the

nice wine is. And then in the north and Germany they come up through Italy. There's probably a Jewish presence in Italy by the 10th century and then they seem to go up north into Germany and the Rhineland to places like Mainz by the end of the 10th century or possibly a little earlier. And they also settle in northern France as well in places like Normandy. And that's really where the Jews come into England. But they seem to follow the main silver

route. There's a large silver trade by the end of the first millennium. So Jews settle along those paths most obviously with the wealthier merchants going first and then other Jews following and settling and establishing communities around them. And in terms of England, so 1060s, is usually remembered for distasteful business involving men hitting each other with swords. Actually, it's much more important in an English context because it allowed the establishment of a Jewish community. That's really the product of the Norman conquest, and they're here for two centuries after that. So all across Europe by a thousand and then really starting to grow, even if they are always a numerically small minority, grow into the centuries which followed.

And is there any known causality? Why were they migrating into Europe? is it driven by any specific event or a specific trade? You mentioned they followed the silver routes. Is that significant? Yeah, I think it probably is. So just go back to the south and Spain, that's obviously following military conquests, to some extent, at least to begin,

and Jews stay, even after the V conquest goes south, which I know embarrassingly little about, but certainly there are Jewish communities in Spain, the south of France. Then certainly mercantile activities, and Germany and Italy and northern France do tend to at least spur on the day, development of communities and encourage them to settle in specific areas.

They do tend to settle in places which are also incidentally economical. But also we get them just generally trying to find protection as well. Protection is a big thing for the Jews. He obviously have no homeland anymore. And to some extent they're just after a lord who will look after them because they're always beholden really on an overlord to protect them. They're not generally an armed minority. Although we get lots of anti-Semitic violence, actually fundamentally Jews aren't really

best place to protect themselves in the way that we would think of other minorities. And equally, Jews can't necessarily hire mercenaries to protect them for exactly the same reason. It wouldn't go down well in a Christian context if Jews just started paying mercenaries to protect them. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to think what chronicle sentences would follow the arming of the Jews or the pain of mercenaries. It would be a quick massacre one expects. Yeah. You mentioned then that Jews sort of no longer had a homeland. What happened there? Why were they forced to leave their original homeland? fundamentally they've been driven out of Judea, the modern area of Israel, in the early centuries of the first millennium.

They go north through what would become Byzantium and the East Roman Empire and south through North Africa and then up through Spain. So they're driven out quite violently and begin to settle in other parts of Europe. Though there is still a Jewish community in the east as well. And what was the medieval Christian view of Jews? I certainly have a perception that it was kind of almost unrelenting hatred. But is it more nuanced than that? Are there times when the communities get on well, or are they almost constantly hostile to each other? I think constant hatred and constant hostility is incredibly difficult to maintain. It doesn't matter how much you really want to hate someone. Actually, often these things are sparks in the pan, which cannot be sustained either emotionally or physically over the long term.

So in that respect, we just have to be careful about thinking that it was constant hate, just in that sense. And I think the image of the Jew is nuanced and it is complicated. It always depends on context but also chronology. There isn't a consistent idea of the Jew over the course of the Middle Ages. It develops throughout the period. And Sarah Lipton has argued that from about the year 1000, an image of the Jew emerged in art whereby we get the Jewish hat, the nose, the various cliches and stereotypes which we associate with Jews and Jewish caricatures.

They're starting to emerge in art around 1,000. and so in many ways that's the image of the Jew that most people who aren't intellectuals will engage with across the latter half of the Middle Ages, as it were. Literature and intellectual thought it is slightly later, develops increasingly from the 12th and 13th centuries. So more works of anti-Jewish polemic are written in the 12th century than all of the preceding centuries put together.

That is a trend which is maintained in the 13th century and the hardening of attitudes towards the Jews across that period. The 12th and 13th centuries really see the Jews become known as the Christ killers. They're seen as guilty of the act of deicide, so they effectively move from being witnesses to to participants in Christ's crucifixion. And again, we see this in art. Earlier in the period, depictions of the crucifixion mainly focused on Christ. Later in the period, we get more of a panorama which show Jews witnessing. It perhaps shows Christ being stabbed in the side.

All of these things just developed towards an anti-Jewish image. and I think also the idea that the crucifixion of Christ happened in biblical times is also turned on its head in the 12th and 13th centuries, particularly in England with the emergence of the ritual murder allegation, the suggestion that Jews annually abduct a Christian child, torture and murder him in parody of the crucifixion of Christ. So crucifixion is not something which is necessarily a thousand years ago and never happens again.

actually, to some people, this is what is happening here and now, and that can be really scary for some people. But what I would also say is actually a lot of people don't believe this. Obviously, we now know that these are works of fiction, false allegations, there's no truth to them. But actually, there's very little evidence that the communities in which Jews lived in the 12th and 13th centuries believe them either. It's always easier to spin a yarn about someone if you've never met them.

So in that respect, we should think about the perceptual. of the Jews and the image of the Jews based on whether someone has actually met a Jew. Now obviously, with the Jews being a minority in urban dwellers, actually, most people in medieval England will never have met a Jew, so they'll have quite a specific interpretation of what a Jew is through the Bible, through the teaching in the poor pits or what have you. In monasteries, you've also got that very specific intellectual idea about the Jews, and this is hardening across the 12th and 13th centuries. But if you live with Jews in an urban sense, as a neighbour, actually, you know,

them, you live alongside them. So these things are much more difficult to believe if you actually know someone. And I think there's lots of parallels with migration history across the epochs, actually fundamentally, if you know someone, you know what they are capable of, broadly speaking, what they're not capable of. Does the declining Christian view of Jewish communities relate at all to the crusading? Or is that too simple a parallel to draw? As crusading, ardor grows, dislike and hatred towards the Jews is kind of built into that narrative of going and retaking the Holy Land and avenging Christ and that kind of thing? There are certainly attacks which accompany the launch of the Crusades.

Why go and kill Infidel a thousand miles away when you can, there are still the infidel at home effectively? This is a real concern and then we see attacks in the end of the 11th century in 1096 at the Vinlander in northern France at the time of the first crusade, 1145 for the second crusade in France in particular. not on the whole in England, largely because England isn't terribly involved in these acts, but certainly in the Third Crusade, which the first goes on,

there's a series of anti-Jewish massacres which start after Richard's coronation, Jews are massacred at London on the 3rd and 4th of September. And in Richard's defence, and I hate doing this, because Richard is my least favourite medieval king, he issued orders of protection to the Jews, which did stand up, one attacked the Jews while Richard was in England. But in December he left the Normandy and really with him went the protection of the Jews

although he could in theory have come back that would have been politically difficult given that he was actually destined to go on crusade with Philip Augustus actually leaving and returning would probably have scuppered the entire enterprise so he's pretty much committed as soon as he leaves England although he doesn't leave on crusades until July 1190 in that February, March 1190 period

there are attacks on Jews in sort of East Anglia at Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Yeah, I think Norwich and York are two are the most famous ones that I'm aware of that are recorded. And I guess some of this, we need to be aware that we know of the moments of violence or the acts of violence that are recorded, but there are obviously long periods

where these things aren't recorded. So we need to be wary that we see flashpoints, but that doesn't mean it's happening all the time. It's just reported when it does happen, I guess. Also, actually, if we think of the big anti-Jewish massacres, actually, you've got 1189 to 1190, and then you've got 70-year gap between the next big set of massacres. Attacks on the Jews and allegations are what tend to happen every 10 to 15 years.

So the Jews are here for perhaps two and a half centuries, of which a few weeks would have been explicit violence directed towards the Jews, which is not to denigrate the impact of those events, or to say that there wasn't anti-Jewish sentiment across those two centuries, which ebbed and flowed. But to get to these really big attacks, they aren't common at all. And perhaps so much of the scholarship has focused on these attacks. But it's the gaps in between which are also interesting.

And actually where we see Jews and Christians being much more living together, amicably, if not as friends, it's always difficult to tell us a distance of 800 years. But certainly amicably, for five or six, seven, eight. And were some places more accepting, more friendly to Jewish communities than others? I mean, I think England has a reputation, at least, for being particularly, hostile to the Jews, but Poland at one point offered strong protection and refuge for the Jews. Were there places within Christianity and within Europe that didn't have that kind of poor opinion of Jewish communities? Jews were accepted, broadly speaking, in towns. These urban

centres are actually really good places for Jews to live on the whole. Generally, they're accepted there and towns are much more tolerant of Jews. And this is based roughly on the fact that towns tend to be made up of lots of different minorities in that sense. They are diverse places. Although you do have urban groups, actually these tend to be merchants and craftsmen and guildsmen and butchers and bakers and candlestick makers and Jews. And if we think of towns as a loose conglomeration of minorities,

which work together towards a common interest, actually it makes sense that the towns are the places where Jews are going to be the best place to live. If we take the question in the direction that it was intended, effectively, chronology really matters there. As we've said, there's a heightening of anti-Jewish sentiment across the period. And the reason that the eastern countries in particular, places like Poland and Austria and Eastern Germany,

get such large concentrations of Jewish populations because of the national expulsions from places like England. In England's defence, the Jews are permitted to leave with all of their movable goods and cash, which is more than can be said for other countries. France repeatedly expels the Jews. The Kings of France do it in 1182, but also at the beginning of the 14th century,

there are just a series of expulsions. It's effectively like a yo-yo. They're expelled, and then a decade or so later they come back, and so on and so forth. At least England just does it the once, which is not good thing, but at the same time it isn't as exploitative of other national expulsions. Prior to 1,200, it's these Western countries,

and then with a hardening of attitudes, Jews go east. And then later in the medieval period, obviously they go north because of the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in the 1490s. It entirely changes the Jewish geography of Europe from the North-South divide to an East-West divide, which is very interesting, but also just a feature of chronology. And I guess if we think about those Jewish communities in England, they're normally, I think, most commonly associated with money lending. Is that fair? Is that reasonable? Does that represent what Jewish communities were doing in England? or is that just kind of a skewed vision that we have of what they were doing? It's a legitimate interpretation of the extant sources relating to the Jews. The sources were specifically set up to monitor money lending in particular.

So in that respect, the fact that we see Jews as money lenders in them is no accident. Actually, the Crown had a vested interest in tracking those. And those sources are really important. And I work on money lending, so I have no complaints about the disproportionality of those. though I recognise that others who aren't working on money lending might not share the same view. But broadly speaking, the Jews need everything you need to sustain a community. So we have wonderful evidence, for example, of Jews as ritual slaughterers for the production of meat in the Jewish style, i.e. kosher in Canterbury and Gloucester.

We also have wonderful evidence of wine imports from Bordeaux. Two Jews in 1280 imports a massive amount of wine. I once worked out that it equated to about 6,000 bottles. Also, Jews tend to be associated with wine merchants in the Christian community as well, so we see lots of working together there, and it's always interesting to think, is the business relations here that we can't quite see, but are inferred by the sources. We also have evidence of doctors, Jewish doctors, are relatively common, and seem to be very skilled.

There's a case of the nephew of the Count of Flanders, writing for advice from an English rabbi in the 1280s as well. And although he doesn't seem to go, he does at least have a written, correspondence and he does seem to get better after the intervention of this Jew. So I'd quite like to think that the nephew of the Count of Flanders was cured by a Jew. We also have rabbis and intellectuals and there's a wonderful corpus of legal decisions from England which survive. So basically everything that you need to support a community will be in the Jewish community. It's just that the evidence for this is often fleeting and inferred rather than direct. Why is finance and money

lending an area that Jews are particularly active in or associated with? Why are they doing something that perhaps Christian communities aren't doing? Again, this is a perception from the end of the 12th century. Christians weren't supposed to lend money at usury or they were not supposed to get caught lending money at usury. That isn't the same thing as not lending money. It just makes them more unscrupulous lenders, as far as I can see. At least Jews were regulated as lenders, whereas Christian lenders do really nasty things. I often liken it to the old payday lenders where you see the interest rates at the bottom of the screen in really small writing. Actually, Christian lenders probably charged exorbitant amounts of interest purely because they had increased risk. So the higher the

risk, the higher the interest rate. So in that respect, Christians continued to lend money through the 13th century. It's just that they try the best not to get caught. So they tend to be people like royal clerks and people with connections to the crown. So even if they are caught, they've got the protection of the crown to do it. And Adam Distratton is a wonderful example of that. It was one of the most horrible men in English history. He was the chief of the under-exchequer, the ex-chequer of the receipt. And in order to do that job, you have to be particularly devious. And he just becomes fabulous with wealthy and ends up getting tried by the crown when he falls out of favour. His trial includes the most wonderful range of allegations from money

lending and various other things to witchcraft. So Christians are lending money too. It's not fair to say that Jews aren't. Jews certainly, though, are the sort of reputable lenders in that sense. Although it's only a minority of a minority who lend money, certainly they are the only regulated marketer lender in England prior to the 1275 statute of expulsion when usury was outlawed for Jews. And again, chronology matters here too. Up until the 1250s, it was all levels of society who borrowed from Jews. And then the top levels, the Crown, the royal family, the great barons, stop lending from the Jews because it's just too risky because the Crown keeps taking the debts. So it's knights and the middle classes

which are borrowing. And they're less able to lend money as the century goes on for various reasons. But certainly there are reasons to borrow money from Jews and not Christians. Did you know that the earliest condoms were made of animal guts and they were designed to be reused? Or that beans were once considered to be an aphrodisiac? Join me, betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a new podcast from history hit where I, Kate Lister, ask the questions about the stuff we didn't learn in history lessons, or sex ed. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods, from ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages, to Renaissance and early modern, right up to now.

Listen and subscribe to Betwixt the Sheet Now, wherever you get your podcasts. When we see those moments of violence against Jews in England, that ultimately lead up to the expulsion of all Jews. I mean, a statute that was in place for kind of 350-odd years that Jews weren't permitted to be in England. What do you think motivated these attacks? So I think I am probably guilty of thinking that this is largely centered around the money lending trade.

So people owe debts to Jews and a great way to not have to pay your debts is to not have the person there anymore that you owe money to. From what you're saying, that sounds like I've got that completely wrong and that perhaps my view of that is skewed. So what do you think was driving this violence? Who was committing it? Are we talking about neighbours or nobles or are we talking about outsiders to these town communities?

And was it linked, do you think, to the money lending activities or not? Is that a red herring? There is certainly evidence to support the suggestion that money lending was the reason that Jews were targeted. So in 1190, for example, the massacre of York, where 150 Jewish men, women and children died, all of the Jews die first and then the attackers go to York Minster where they burn the records of Jewish credit in the Minster Church.

Equally, in 1264, when London is attacked by the forces of Simon de Montfort, one of the leaders of that attack, John Fitzjohn, seeks out one of his creditors and kills him with his own hands. So clearly there's no smoke without fire. But it's also useful just to think about all of the explanations which have been put forward by historians for the expulsion and they range from a parliamentary taxation. The largest parliamentary subsidy of the entire Middle Ages was granted shortly after the expulsions.

People have suggested that might be one explanation. It's also been suggested that the indebtedness of knights of the Shire might have been an explanation. Equally, people have suggested that it might have been a precurs to the formation of national identity. If we're thinking of Christian England, actually the inclusion of a Jewish minority, however small, It's problematic for people's souls. It's just really difficult for some people to get their heads round. Equally, Jews may have to be tolerated, but they don't necessarily have to be tolerated here,

let them go and convert somewhere else and let us be God's own country, as it were. Their loss of the raison d'etra, as a cast of the Crown has been put forward, anti-Semitism, and my personal favourite is the weather, which is the most brilliant British explanation. This is a serious scholarly article which suggested that there's links with persecution of minorities.

But equally, this makes sense, particularly in the divine will context, actually, if you've got a series of failed harvests, why is God angry at us? Or particularly bad weather for a few years, actually, divine will, why is God angry at us? Yeah. And your PhD, your thesis focused on the records of the debts owed to Jewish moneylenders in England. What did they tell us? And in particular, do they give us an insight into the communities? You talked a bit about the kind of the implied activities that were going on amongst the Jewish communities outside of money lending. Did you find more about that than you thought you would?

So my PhD was effectively an exercising pedantry and it explored 348 records of debt. And they think these are really important because they show Christian-Jewish relations in a totally different light than we usually think of them. They show them at precisely the point that a Christian had just received a bag of cash from a Jew. And a lender is always your best friend on the day.

day that they are giving you that money. It's only later in the process that things tend to sour and change into anti-Jewish massacres, etc. But the fact is best friend when lending and worst enemy when it comes time to repay. That's the same for all things. So actually, it's a really useful entry point into Christian-Jewish relations. It doesn't always have to start at the end when attacks have happened. Actually, there's a point when Christians really like the fact that a Jew has lent them money. But all of the record, broadly speaking, include the same information. They include the name of the debtor and the creditor, which is enormously useful for working out who everyone is and who's lending to whom.

They all include how much money was borrowed, so it is useful for the scale of those activities. Did that tend to be a lot of money, or were they generally small sums? It's proportionate to the class of the debtor, effectively. I argued in my thesis based on the Lincolnshire evidence, for example, that debtors very rarely borrowed outside of their means to repay. So they've usually got the lands and rents and chattels to cover the outlay that they are taking. So in that respect, people aren't borrowing and they're not burdened under a yoke of Jewish debt. So that's really important.

Equally, all debts include a profit clause prior to 1275. If you don't pay on the date that we've just specified, it will accumulate interest. It will accumulate profit at the rate of two pennies in the pound per week. And this is a form of compensation for the fact that you've not going to be. got the money back by the specified date. Now, if you repay at any point before that, there's no interest paid. And that's what I think a lot of people don't necessarily get. And the Bishop of Lincoln on his deathbed tells us that's exactly how Jewish money

lending transactions functioned, as opposed to the transactions of Italian merchants, for example. They also tell us that debts are secured on the debtors' lands, rents and goods. So again, this is a really useful working out whether a Christian can or cannot afford to take the debt that they are taking. And equally, from the 1220 years onwards, all debts are dated, which again is just a wonderful source for us being able to reconstruct lending activities. And although about 350 debts survive plus another thousand or so in other forms, this is much

more than for anywhere else in Europe at such an early date. So we're incredibly lucky to be able to do this for England in a way which isn't possible for elsewhere in Europe. Also, when I started that project, I thought of a money lending. transaction as a discrete act between a Jew and a Christian. And actually what I found was it wasn't that at all. It was a communal act in a sense. And in order to write the history of these documents, you have to write the history of local

communities because a Jew cannot lend money to a Christian and a Christian cannot borrow from a Jew without the consent of the entire urban community, the leading members of the Christian community, but also the leading members of the Jewish community. And they all have to act in concert to facilitate the... Act. And just one final point, because of the regulation of these records, we can do so many fun things with them and they use fun in a slightly weird and masochistic sense. So, for example, only two scribes in each community were allowed to write a debt. So in that respect, it's relatively easy to go through and analyse the handwriting. So my favourite one is Jonathan and Thelmo in London

who wrote 90 debts between 1254 and 1272. And he's just a wonderful impression of a local clerk who was writing along that period. And then if we look in other documentary sources, we see exactly the same clerk writing non-Jewish sources. So we get this impression of a documentary culture within a community of which Jews are parts, but a part, and it's everyone working together. And I think that's a really lovely thing to work on rather than just focusing on the end of transactions where people are being massacred and not liked. Yeah, it's fascinating. It sounds like, you know, a really kind of responsible sense. sensible, well-structured, well-thought-out system of doing it that actually benefited everybody,

and that potentially isn't the cause of lots of hatred that's going around. Did the records tell us how good the borrowers were at paying back? They don't tell us that, and it'd be really useful to know. But I think we'd see evidence of it in other forms. So, for example, Magna Carta or the Articles of the Barons or the provisions of Oxford, actually, although they target interest, they do it in very specific contexts, they targeted in the Crown's abuse of interest and Jewish debts rather than the interest itself.

And I think we would see evidence of the animosity towards Jews and Jewish creditors if people weren't able to pay things on time. I think we'd see evidence that Christians were trying to get rid of it to much earlier date than they actually did. I think we'd see evidence in Magda Carter. We'd see it in the provisions of Oxford. And the fact that we don't is really significant. But fundamentally, most of the evidence which we have

comes from the start of the transactions or at the time when people are being massacred at the end of it or equally from the plea rolls of the exchequer of the Jews where a legal case has been brought against accredited to enforce repayment but what we always have to remember is although these are important sources actually these are only a minority of cases anyway

it's incredibly expensive to go to court in any historical period people don't pay money they don't like going to London and they certainly don't like having to fund a court case or a series of court cases if you've got multiple debtors. Actually, it's much better to force them locally, if at all possible. And actually, wonderful work has been done on southern France about the stigma of debt. Being indebted wasn't necessarily a good thing. From a moral and social point of view, you could be just pushed out of the community in a sort of quasi excommunication until you repaid. And actually, that's one of the things that I really

regret about my own work, is that I called them acknowledgements of debt. For various valid reasons, I'm not the only person to have called them acknowledgement of debt, but actually over the course of the last year, I've been looking at the records which we produced after the expulsion, and these lists them not as debts but obligations. And sort of in a sociological context, when does an obligation become a debt? And that's, broadly speaking,

when they've defaulted for too long, where you can't get payment and where ultimately you do have to go to court as the only example. So I think, broadly speaking, people do repay money. we'd see evidence of it elsewhere if they hadn't. And fundamentally, actually, because people are borrowing within their means, it makes it more likely that people will repay anyway. And I imagine, as I say, if it's a useful service that works well,

there's actually an incentive to want to keep it there because it gives you access to cash that you're going to struggle to get from anywhere else, and as long as you can afford to repay it, it's actually a very useful service to have kind of on tap on your doorstep if you ever need it. Actually, we see creditors lending money to the same debtors year after you, year and generation after generation. And you wouldn't do that if you weren't sure you were going to be repaid at some point. Now, it might take longer than you'd like to get your money back,

but actually, in these familial and social context and social networks, actually, it's much easier to lend to people and trust and continue to do that if you know you're going to get paid. And actually, if you know you're not going to get paid, you just don't lend to someone. There's no obligation to lend money to someone. It is an explicit act and it requires consent from both parties, both to lend and to borrow. And actually, We see these structures over centuries. Yeah, that's a really interesting kind of long-term relationship there. I was going to ask, just to end on, what was the most surprising thing that you learned from the records?

But I don't know whether you've already said it, but was there something that particularly surprised you that you came across? It's worth reiterating that actually, in order to write the history of these records, you actually have to understand the process from start to finish. And as soon as you do that, lots of assumptions stop making sense. Lots of people make lots of assumptions about money. lending. Doesn't matter whether it's Jewish money lending or not. Actually, there are practicalities that you can't avoid, that you have to go through certain steps to lend money and to repay money. So in that sense, we need to understand the whole journey. And I hadn't appreciated how

detailed we could reconstruct that process. When I started, I thought these were very simple documents. So naturally, it must be a simple explanation for how they were produced, but actually lots of really complicated structures go into these. And this tends to be why the records are never challenged in court ever. There's just no evidence for it. The records are produced in such a way that they are incredibly difficult to evade or to argue against. And in that respect, it puts Jewish credit as an incredibly strong position when it comes to repayment. Because actually, if the debtor knows they're going to go to court, they know they're probably going to lose.

The crown is going to judge in the Jews' favour. not because the Jews are protected and the crown's got a vested interest, but the record is effectively beyond reproach. And it's just that one little thing that actually makes a lot of what happens in the anti-Jewish massacres of the 1190s and the 1260s make sense. It's the thing that they go for most explicitly is the records of debt, not the Jews themselves. Although the Jews are attacked and they are collateral damage,

fundamentally, if the debtors who are attacking them can do one thing, it's attack the records, because that's much more. powerful and basically can't be evaded. That's absolutely fascinating. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dean. It's been incredible to talk through some of this stuff. I feel like it's shed new light on an aspect that I had not had a great understanding of. So thank you very much for sharing that with us.

And I hope listeners have found that interesting and helpful. Yeah, I hope they have too. And you should have more Jewish history on your podcast, I agree. Very happy to. I mean, if anybody is listening who has a Jewish topic they'd like to come on the podcast and talk about, please get in touch. I'm very, very happy to do more of any kind of history at any time. You can join Dr Cat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode.

Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help to signpost new listeners to us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then please do subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. You can follow the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I've better let you go.

I've been Matt Lewis. And we've just gone medieval. with history hits.