Licoricia of Winchester

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today we're going to talk about Lucritia of Winchester, and we got a lot of requests to talk about her back in early twenty two after an article about her went viral and at the time, like, I'll do a basic gut check to see is there gonna be enough information, And at the time it seemed like that answer might be no. But in hindsight, what was really happening was that because of this one viral article, there was a bunch of newly published stuff that was all repeating the same basic points, and it just kind of overwhelmed everything that was more substantive. Lcritia of Winchester was one of a number of Jewish women who was a major financier in medieval England, and her life also spanned just a big part of Jewish history in England during the Middle Ages. And if you're like, wait, Tracy, the Middle Ages lasted for like a thousand years, how can one person's life span most of it, there were only Jewish settlements in England for a pretty brief window during that period, and that very brief window was marked with just increasing antisemitic violence and hostility, and that went on until England expelled its Jewish population in twelve ninety. So we're going to talk about her. We're also kind of talking about the arc of Jewish history in medieval England.

00:01:39
Speaker 1: And we don't know exactly when the first Jewish person arrived in England, but established Jewish communities followed the Norman conquest in the eleventh century. William, Duke of Normandy, also known as William the Conqueror, defeated English King Harold the Second at the Battle of Hastings in ten sixty six. We have covered that back on the show before, and we ran it as a classic back in twenty nineteen. William was crowned as King William the First at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day of that year. In addition to conquering England, William essentially replaced the English aristocracy with Normans, and he also moved Normans into high ranking church and administrative positions. A lot of England's existing merchants and other business people were really opposed to these changes, and that left William in need of both money and new trading partners, so he encouraged Jewish merchants, traders, and lenders from Ruon and Normandy to settle in London to fill some of those needs. Once Jewish people started arriving in England about ten seventy, they were essentially seen as the King's property. In theory, they were serving the king in exchange for royal protection, but in reality that protection only existed when it suited the king.

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Speaker 2: They were going to be talking a lot more about that. Initially, Jews were allowed to live only in London, but by the middle of the twelfth century Jewish communities were established all over other parts of England as well. Although Jewish people had to have permission to live or travel outside of London. These communities were generally self governing, especially in terms of anything that had to do with religion or religious law, and they existed at the King's prerogative. This was outside of the bounds of the rest of the social hierarchy.

00:03:35
Speaker 1: One of the many things that the Normans did after arriving in England was built castles, and most Jewish communities were in a city that had a royal castle. Or if not a castle, at least a headquarters for the sheriff who represented the king. This proximity to the castle was because of the Jewish community's relationship with the King, and the castle had a number of roles. It could be a refuge during an outbreak of violence or some other threat against the Jewish community, but it could also be a prison. For example, at some points, whole communities were imprisoned in the castle until they paid off an enormous tax, so they were basically being held hostage.

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Speaker 2: As tax was known as talage, and for most people in England, the talage was something that lords imposed on their tenants, but for Jewish communities, the talllentge was imposed directly by the king and the amount was totally up to the king's whims. Sometimes it was truly exorbitant, and this was especially true if there was something that the King really wanted money for, like to fund a war, especially if maybe he wanted to fund a war without having to talk to Parliament about anything, or if he was trying to punish or coerce the Jewish community in some way. In terms of language and culture, Jewish people in England tended to have a lot in common with the Norman Aristocracy. Because reading from the Torah and other tech was a central part of Jewish religious practice, Jews were more likely to be literate than Christian commoners were, regardless of how affluent their family was. As was true of the Norman Aristocracy, most Jewish people's first language was Norman French, and most Jewish people went by French versions of Hebrew names. Most also spoke and read Hebrew in religious contexts, and knew at least some Middle English, which is what Christian commoners spoke in their day to day lives. Some may have known a bit of Latin as well. At this point, Yiddish existed as a language, but it was mainly being spoken in central and Eastern Europe, not as far west as England. In France, we have evidence to suggest that Jewish people in England observed Jewish dietary laws, and there were Kosher butchers and bakers working in a lot of Jewish communities. These communities also typically had a synagogue and a mikvah or a ritual bath for the community's use. Sometimes the synagogue was its own free standing building, usually located somewhere unobtrusive and out of the way for both safety and privacy. Sometimes in smaller communities it was more like a room in someone's home. Either way, though the synagogue was at the center of religious and community life.

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Speaker 1: As far as we know, Jews and Christians in medieval England wore similar clothing, although eventually there was one key difference. Starting in twelve seventeen, Jews were required to wear a badge called a tabula, in the shape of two stone tablets, symbolic of the stone tablets bearing the ten commandments described in the Torah and the Christian Bible. This followed a decree from the Fourth lateran council which Pope Innocent the Third had convened two years before, and this decree ordered that Jews living in Christian nations had to be visually distinguished in some way. Some other countries also did this with a badge, and others required Jewish people to wear a pointed or conical hat for a time, though, wealthy Jews in England could pay a fine to be exempted from this requirement, sometimes paying for their whole community to be exempt.

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Speaker 2: By the end of the twelfth century, there were more than twenty Jewish communities in England, they had a combined total of about five thousand people, so for comparison, England's total population was roughly five million people. There were limits on which professions Jewish people were allowed to pursue, but there were Jewish butchers, bakers, teachers, doctors, midwives, and scribes. Since Jewish people were more likely to be literate than Christians of the same status, Jewish scribes tended to be in really high demand. But the job that was most associated with Jewish people in England was lending. There were ten or fifteen very affluent Jewish families that were basically banking families, working as financiers, investors, and business people, and sometimes essentially serving as the King's personal lender. England's wealthiest Jewish lenders could arrange the funds to pay for things like fully outfitted ships and newly constructed buildings. But outside of these few families, most lenders were working on a much smaller scale, making small loans to ordinary people. Many were going to roll that was more comparable to kind of being a pawnbroker today. One reason why Jewish people were associated with lending in England and in a lot of the rest of Europe has to do with religious law. The Books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Ezekiel are part of both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. If you're not familiar, those contain the same books in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, but in a different order, and the interpretations vary a little bit. These include scriptures that prohibit the charging of interest to people in need, as well as charging interest to one's brother. They're varying opinions on how to translate and interpret the word brother, but during the medieval period, Jewish leaders generally interpreted this as a prohibition on Jewish people charging interest to other Jews, but Christian leaders in the medieval period viewed charging interest to anyone as usury because charging interest was seen as avarice and that was a sin. I really don't feel qualified to get into all the theological nuances here, but many Muslims also viewed and still view all forms of interest as usury. So in a lot of places during the medieval period, Jewish lenders filled part of the gap between religious prohibitions on usury and the realities of living in a society that used money. To be really clear, though Jewish lenders were not filling all of that gap. There were Christians who loaned money and charged interest in spite of the religious prohibitions against it, and there were Christian military orders, including the Knights Templar and those essentially worked as banks. When Lucretia of Winchester was living, Italian lenders were also becoming well established all over Western Europe, generally known as Lombards, even though they were not necessarily from Lombardy. In other words, even in England, where the king's policies were really pushing them toward working as lenders, most Jewish people were not lending money, and most people lending money weren't Jewish. The idea of the quote Jewish money lenders was really rooted in prejudicial stereotypes, like just the word money lenders is loaded with connotations that doesn't apply to a word like financier or banker, which was basically the same thing. This association between Jewish people and lending also led to a lot of backlash because of the connection to something that other religions saw as sinful, and because as a whole, working as lenders meant that a lot of Jewish communities were relatively wealthy. This didn't necessarily extend to the wealth of any individual person, though, like an individual Jewish person might be about as wealthy as their Christian neighbor, but like as a group, they tended to be affluent. This also circles back to the community's relationship with the king, like if the king was facing opposition from the nobility over some issue, he might cancel all their outstanding loans from Jewish lenders it was completely within his power to do that, or the king might help pay for a war by canceling the debts of nobles who agreed to serve, rather than directly paying them for their service. Although a series of English kings basically used Jewish lenders as their own personal bank, whether they repaid those loans that could be totally arbitrary. And that brings us to the life of Lucritia of Winchester, who, among other things, the personal financier to King Henry the Third. We'll talk more about her after a sponsor break. We don't know exactly when Lcriicia of Winchester was born, but it was probably in the very early twelve hundreds. At one point she's referred to as Lcarica of Canterbury, so she might have been born there. I also found a source that her father may have been Lombard of Winchester, suggesting maybe she really was born in Winchester. Other sources that her father's name was Isaac was all very unclear.

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Speaker 1: Regardless of where she was born, Lucrisia eventually wound up living in Winchester, which was home to one of England's largest and most affluent Jewish communities. A Jewish visitor from France described the city as quote the Jerusalem of Jews. In those parts. Most Jewish pele in Winchester lived around what was then known as Shoemaker Street, sharing the same neighborhood with Christian merchants, goldsmith's and other business people. Shoemaker Street later became known as Jewbree Street, which is what it is still named today.

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Speaker 2: When Lucretia was born, John known as John Lackland, was King of England. In twelve ten, he ordered the arrest of England's entire Jewish population and commanded them to turn over all of their wealth to him. So this was something that she lived through when she was still a child. She also would have lived through the First Baron's War, which started in twelve fifteen. This is a civil war that started out as an uprising of landowners against the king. The barons sought help from France, and Louis, son of French King Philip the Second, captured Winchester and a lot of the surrounding area, temporarily taking control of roughly half of England. This is something else she would have lived through. This war ended in twelve seventeen, when Lucretia was probably in her mid teens. So in twelve sixteen, as this war was ongoing, King John died of dysentery and his nine year old son, Henry the Third succeeded him. Henry the Third reigned until twelve seventy two, and Henry's overall attitude toward the Jewish population is encapsulated in his Statute of Jewry in twelve fifty three. Quote All Jews, wheresoever they may be, in the realm, are of right under the tutelage and protection of the King. Nor is it lawful for any of them to subject himself to any wealthy person without the King's license. Jews and all their effects are the King's property and if anyone withhold their money from them, let the king recover it as his own. Henry often referred to the Anglo Jewish population as my Jews, and one of his most important sources of royal funds was the talages paid by the Jewish community. At some point, probably sometime between twelve fifteen and twelve twenty, Lcartia married a businessman and financier named Abraham. They had three sons, Isaac known as Cockrell, Lombard, and Baruch known as Benedict. They may have also had a daughter called Bilia. Some sources, though, conclude that Bilia was a daughter in law. A lot of stuff is not totally clearly documented. In twelve twenty five, Abraham and five other Jewish men in Winchester were accused of murdering a Christian child. This was part of a pattern of ritual murder allegations, also known as the blood libel, so false accusations of Jewish people murdering Christian children as part of a ritual or to use their blood for ritual purposes. Although there were.

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Speaker 1: Earlier precursors, the first such accusation is generally noted as happening in Norwich, England, in eleven forty four, after a boy named William was found stabbed to death. The Jewish population of Norwich took refuge in the castle as their entire community was threatened in retaliation for a crime they did not commit.

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Speaker 2: Lcaricia's husband, Abraham, and two other men were found guilty of these allegations, and normally the punishment would have been hanging, but there's no actual record of Abraham being hanged. There's actually no further record of him at all. But in twelve thirty four, which is the first written record we have of Lcaricia, she's described in a way that makes it clear that she was a widow. We don't really know.

00:16:35
Speaker 1: How Lcarsia supported herself and her children after Abraham's death. All of his assets were confiscated after his conviction, but it is possible that their original marriage contract had set aside money for her in the event of Abraham's death. This was a common provision in Jewish marriage contracts. It's also possible that she was supported by Abraham's colleagues or others in the Jewish community. While we don't.

00:17:01
Speaker 2: Know what her original source of funds was, we do know that Lucretia made wise use of those funds. By the end of the twelve thirties, she had become one of the biggest financiers in Winchester, and by the twelve forties she was independently wealthy. In twelve thirty nine, the Royal Council demanded a talage of a third of all the chattels or tangible property of England's Jewish community, including the value of outstanding loans, ultimately calling for a total of twenty thousand marks. This was a truly enormous sum, especially considering that, with only a couple of exceptions, the talage had been between two thousand and three thousand marks per year over the previous two decades. A mark was two thirds of a pound, which would be very approximately five hundred British pounds or six hundred thirty six American dollars in today's money. So this talage was worth millions and millions of dollars. Yeah, that's when I put very approximately in italics here, because like it's almost impossible to make an actual comparison, and it's complicated by the fact that like a mark, what wasn't really a currency that people went around buying things with it was more a figure used to calculate things like uh, so yeah, this was an enormous amount of money, and people started trying to collect the money to pay it in late twelve thirty nine and early twelve forty. By September, though only one thousand marks had been collected. Records of loans by Jewish lenders were kept in both Hebrew and Latin and locked chests that were known as arcae, and at various points the king ordered those chests to be closed so that the royal authorities could like tally up the value of all the bonds that were in there, adjust the total do if they needed to this uh. Sealing these up basically froze the ability for anybody to make new loans or to collect on existing loans, and then that made it harder for people to try to get the money together to pay this talent. During all of this, the King also ordered a census of England's Jewish population.

00:19:12
Speaker 1: Finally, in January of twelve forty one, the King ordered the Sheriff of Northamptonshire to quote cause to come before us at Worcester on the Sunday next before Ash Wednesday. Six of the wealthier and more powerful of our Jews of Northampton, and from each town in Shire in which Jews dwell one or two Jews according to their numbers. If the sheriff did not do this quote, we will so aggrieve you in consequence by your body and by your chattels, that you will forever feel our hand to grieve you immoderately.

00:19:44
Speaker 2: So this meeting was called. It became known as the Worcester Parliament, and more than one hundred Jewish delegates met to figure out how to pay this talent. The results of this meeting also illustrate how much the Jewish community's wealth was really concentrated, with it just a few people. Three men together paid more than half of the total amount. They were Aaron of York, Leo of York, and David of Oxford. Lecarica, interestingly, was one of the wealthiest people in Winchester at this point, but for unclear reasons, she is not listed in the detailed accounts of how this talent was actually paid, aside from ten pounds that she paid in twelve thirty nine, So it's like we don't know if did she contribute to it or these records complete unclear.

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Speaker 1: We don't know exactly when David of Oxford and Lcarica of Winchester met, but it may have been connected to all the activity around trying to pay this talent. David was probably in his fifties and was one of the wealthiest and most influential Jewish men in all of England, and Lcaricia was probably in her thirties and was one of England's wealthiest and most influential Jewish women. So it makes sense that they might have had some things in common, or that they might have wanted to combine their financial assets through a marriage. But also David was already married to a woman named Muriel. David and Muriel didn't have any children, and it's possible that David used this as a justification to divorce her. When a Jewish person died, a third of their estate went to the crown, but if they had no heir, then the Crown got all of the estate. So David may have wanted to try to make sure that part of his wealth stayed within the Jewish community rather than all of it being forfeited to the king, by divorcing his wife and ideally having a child with someone else. Although divorce was not particularly common or accepted in Jewish communities at the time, there was an established process for how it was handled through a bait din or Jewish court. Depending on how large a Jewish community was, the court might be made up of rabbis and lay people, or it could be a panel of rabbis. Only the husband was the one who had to bring the matter before this panel, But the custom at the time was that the wife had to consent to the divorce, so David initially went to the baate Din in England, which approved the divorce. But Muriel either didn't consent to the divorce at all or didn't consent to this settlement that she was given, so she and some of her supporters, one of whom may have been her brother, went to the bake Din in Paris, kind of as an appeal. The Jewish community in England had a lot of connections to the Jewish community in France. We talked in the beginning about how these are mostly folks who had come from France to settle in England, and in general, the Jewish community in France was seen as having like more experienced, more knowledge, and greater authority. David apparently dealt with this by taking the matter to the King, Henry the third issued a decree that rabbis, regardless of whether they lived in England or France, could not force David to quote, take or hold any woman to wife accept at his own free will, and this also wound up having much wider ramifications. Henry also demanded that Muriel and her supporters explain why they had gone to a French court to try to overrule an English one, and he banned the convening of Jewish courts in England. This ban, though does not appear to have been strictly enforced. David's divorce was completed in twelve forty two, and he and Lcaricia married sometime after that. They had a son together, named a Cher, also known as Sweetmen. Some sources describe a share in Sweetman as two different people, but that actually seems unlikely because David died in February of twelve forty four, so he and Lcaricia were married for less than two years. It is possible that she could have been pregnant when he died, but if she had been, this probably have been mentioned somewhere, especially for reasons we're going to talk about in a bit, and it just it wasn't. We don't know much about what happened to Muriel after the divorce was finalized. She doesn't seem to have remarried, and the written record suggests that she struggled financially. Among other things, there's documentation of an unpaid talent. The last written references to Muriel are from twelve fifty three. First, she was ordered to repair the house that she had been living in, which she had gotten as part of the divorce settlement. Then the house was turned over to Licarica and a share. We don't really know what happened here. It's possible that Muriel lost the house because she hadn't made the required repairs, or even that she died. We'll get to what happened to Lcaricia and the rest of her family after David's death after another quick sponsor break. After David of Oxford died in twelve forty four, Lcarta was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and there are several possible explanations for this. Some sources describe it as an almost routine part of the assessment process when a Jewish person was inheriting a really large estate. Since a third of that estate was supposed to go to the king. Others make it sound like an effort to make sure that Lucartia couldn't interfere with that assessment process or remove any of David's property before.

00:25:31
Speaker 2: It was assessed. It's also possible that she was basically being held hostage to try to keep the Jewish community in line. While all of this was going.

00:25:40
Speaker 1: On, six Jewish men were appointed by the king to oversee Lcarica's business affairs while she was in the tower. Her son, a Cher, would have been a baby, so he may have been in the tower with her, but we don't really know. Lacrisia was imprisoned for about seven months, and there's no record of her being pregnant or given birth in the tower, which is part of why some scholars have concluded that a Share and Suiteman were the same person. Ultimately, Licorica seems to have negotiated a deal regarding her inheritance. She paid the crown five thousand marks to keep control of David's whole estate, including all of his outstanding loans, rather than just the two thirds of it that was normally how things were handled. About four thousand marks of that payment was used to build a new shrine to Edward, the confessor at Westminster Abbey at the time was considered the patron saint of England. This shrine was kind of one of the King's pet projects. She also paid an inheritance tax of twenty five hundred pounds, and she was exempt from future talages as long as she paid the crown twenty four marks a year. As we said earlier, really hard to try to convert a medieval currency amount to modern equivalents, but one source that I read approximated that five thousand marks was about two point five million pounds or roughly four million American dollars. This was a ton of money, but it also does not seem to come even close to like a whole third of David's estate. After being released from the tower in September of twelve forty four, Lcaricia kept expanding her business, traveling all over England to do so. Her clients included the King and members of the royal family, as well as members of the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. She also made loans to landowners, farmers, and other less affluent people. She met with the King regularly, most often when he was in Winchester. She became so prominent that her sons were often referred to as son of Lacriicia, rather than by their father's names. This was most striking for a Share, since his father, David, had been even more prominent and powerful than his mother.

00:28:00
Speaker 2: A lot of the records that we have of Lecaricia's later life come from financial and court records. There are court records in which she sued other people for unpaid debts, and records in which she was the one who was sued. Some of these cases sound really dramatic. For example, in about twelve fifty Sir Thomas Charlcoate died after drowning in a lake on his property, and he had alone from Lcarica. Still outstanding. By law, Licarica was allowed to keep control of his estate and earn income from it for a year and a day, but in twelve fifty three his son, who was also named Thomas, took her to court because she had exceeded that time by at least two years. Lecarica then claimed that the younger Thomas had killed his father, or at least arranged his death. Lecarica was held in the Tower of London while this trial was going on, which was one of at least four times that she was imprisoned.

00:28:58
Speaker 1: There.

00:28:59
Speaker 2: When the court we weren't found in Thomas's favor, saying that Lucretia had to vacate this property, she went to the King about it. The King ordered a retrial, mandated that Lucritia could not be penalized any further, and set her fine at half a mark. There's not a lot of money in this context.

00:29:18
Speaker 1: Also in twelve fifty three, Henry the third issued a new statute of the Jewry, the one that we read from earlier on in the show. This statute ordered that no new synagogues be built, and that Jewish people could only remain in England if they served the King in some way. A number of its provisions were focused on separating Jews from Christians and making Jewish people less visible in English society. Like Jewish people had to be quiet in their synagogues so that Christians would not hear them. Relationships between Jews and Christians were forbidden, and Jews were forbidden to have Christian wet nurses working in their homes. In practice, this law all also seems to have ended the custom of allowing Jewish people to pay to be exempt from wearing the tabula. Around this same time, Henry the third also started routinely demanding higher talages, in part because the Worcester Parliament in twelve forty one had documented just how affluent some members of the community were.

00:30:20
Speaker 2: Jewish people in their communities had always faced prejudice, persecution, and at some points violence in England, and this really increased in the mid thirteenth century. This included Jewish people being falsely accused of crimes. In twelve fifty eight, another lender named Billia of Bedford gave Lecaricia a gold ring to give to the king as a gift. This ring disappeared, and Lecaricea's neighbor, Ivetta, accused her of stealing it. It turned out that Ivetta herself was the one who had taken it. The Second Baron's War started in twelve sixty four and continued for three years. Like the First Baron's War, this was a civil war that grew out of an uprising of barons against the king in many areas. The barons and their allies saw Jews as agents of the King, and some people use this as a justification for persecution and violence, which became even more widespread. People also stole or destroyed the ark containing all the loan documentation, meaning that lenders had no way to recoup their money. Shortly after the Second Barons War ended, Lcaricia's son Benedict was elected to the Merchant's Guild, making him the first and only Jewish person in medieval England to become a guildsman. This also made him a full citizen of England, and Christians in Winchester rioted over it to the point that the king had to dispatch guards to try to protect the Jewish community. Lcritia was probably in her sixties as all this was happening. One court document in twelve seventy describes her as failing to appear when she was summoned, saying she was too ill to leave her home. In twelve seventy two, Henry the Third died and was succeeded by Edward the First. While Henry's attitudes toward Jewish people had been fickle and self serving, and increasingly stringent in later years, Edward was devoutly Christian and took an immediate anti Jewish stance. He ordered a talage of a third of all Jewish assets, and in twelve seventy five he authorized towns around England to start expelling their Jewish populations. He also issued a new statute of Jewry that barred Jewish financiers from charging interest. This also specified that the amount repaid could not be more than the original amount of the loan, so, for example, lenders couldn't use late fees to try to deter people from missing payments. And this statute also replaced the tabula with a yellow badge in twelve seventy seven, So just about two years after that, Lucaricia was murdered in her home along with her made out of Bicton. Lcaricia's daughter or possibly daughter in law, Bellia, found them stabbed to death. Authorities treated this as a robbery gone wrong, and they focused mainly on the goods that had been removed from the house. That part was really not uncommon, like the fact that Jewish people's goods were described as the king's goods meant that a lot of times, if a Jewish person was the victim of a crime, the only thing people were really focused on was the king getting his property back. There's a lot of speculation though about whether this was really a hate crime. Lcarica was extremely wealthy and prominent. One of her sons was the only Jewish guildsman in the country and had been named as cheater for the Jewish community and keeper of the Queen's Gold. Alice of Bichden was a Christian, so it was illegal for her to have been working in Lcarice's home. This crime also happened in broad daylight, so it may have been meant as some kind of threat or warning to the rest of the Jewish community. Some ask sspects of this crime are weird and confusing. Lcarice's house was supposed to be sealed up until assessors could go through all her assets, but two of Benedict's sons were accused of breaking in with the help of two of the sheriff's men and stealing much of what was inside. The sheriff himself was initially accused as well, but he apparently proved that he was in London.

00:34:23
Speaker 1: At the time. One of Benedict's sons, Abraham, had already been accused of other crimes. But we really don't know what was going on here or why two of the sheriff's men may have been involved, the fact that these were Benedict's sons also reflected not just on him, but on the entire Jewish community.

00:34:42
Speaker 2: A saddler named Ralph of Chisol was accused of the murder, but he had fled from Winchester. He was outlawed, but he was never tried for the crime. Laricia's sons, a Share and Cockrell, thought this man was a scapegoat, and they tried to bring charges against two other men who they thought were more likely culprits. There's no record of anybody ever being tried or punished for this, though, a year after Lcaricia's death, Benedict was charged with coin clipping. At the time, coins were made from pure metal, so people could shave or clip small pieces from their edges to melt down for profit, and it seems that both Christians and Jews did this in roughly the same proportions, but Jewish people were accused and convicted of it far more often. Benedict's arrest was part of an enormous crackdown on coinclipping. It is likely that coinclipping really was on the rise. Edward the First's predecessors had really set up a system that encouraged Jewish people to work as lenders, but then Edward had made it impossible to actually earn a living that way. But this crackdown was effectively a pogrom. England's entire Jewish population was imprisoned. Three times more Christian than Jews were accused of coinclipping, but ten times more Jews than Christians were executed. At this point, the Jewish population of England was only about three thousand people, and it's estimated that three hundred or ten percent were executed for suspicion of coinclipping. One of these was Lcarica's son Benedict, who was executed in twelve eighty This.

00:36:26
Speaker 1: Was not the last time England imprisoned its entire Jewish population. In twelve eighty seven, the king imposed a tallage of twelve thousand marks and imprisoned the whole community after only five thousand pounds of it was raised. Lcoricia's son A Sher, was imprisoned at Winchester Castle and scratched graffiti into the wall there in Hebrew, which was discovered in the seventeenth century. Only a piece of the inscription survived, which noted the date that everyone had been imprisoned by referencing the scripture that had been read for the Sabbath that week. Along with I A Share inscribed this.

00:37:03
Speaker 2: In twelve ninety England expelled its entire Jewish population at that point, numbering about two thousand people. A share in any of Licoricea's other surviving children and grandchildren were driven from England. At this time. People were allowed to take their possessions with them, but their houses and anything they couldn't carry was forfeited to the king. Although they were supposed to be allowed safe passage, a lot of people still faced violence as they tried to leave, including multiple truly horrifying accounts of ship passengers being left to drown as they tried to get to continental Europe. This was the first of a series of expulsions all across Europe, including from Spain in fourteen ninety two. We covered that expulsion on the show before The prohibition on Jewish people in England remained in place until sixteen fifty seven.

00:37:58
Speaker 1: The Licorica of Winch Appeal is a charity that was established in twenty seventeen to educate the public about the medieval Jewish community in Winchester. The organization raised funds for a life size statue of Lcaricia.

00:38:13
Speaker 2: This statue is now complete. It is a thing that prompted these articles that went viral last year. In this statue, she's walking along with a young a share She's holding his hand and carrying a talig roll. In the other he has a dradal. This statue was sculpted by Ian Rank Broadly and it was unveiled on Jury Street in Winchester on February tenth of twenty twenty two. King Charles the Second, who at the time was still Prince Charles, was supposed to be part of this unveiling, but he had COVID so he had to visit about a month later. The Lecarica of Winchester Appeal also commissioned a book which came out in twenty twenty two as well. That's titled Lecarica of Winchester, Power and Prejudice in Medieval England, and that's by Rebecca Abrams.

00:39:02
Speaker 1: Do you have listener mail today?

00:39:04
Speaker 2: I do have some listener mail. This listener mail goes back to our Square Dancing episodes. This person signed their message as Annex eight thousand and said hello you briefly mentioned that in the Caribbean, there are variations on the quadrill as well as ring dances and colin response. In fact, in the nineteen fifty something emerged that has become a present day Cuban version of square dancing that has spread through the US and beyond. We dance it here in Los Angeles. It's called ruete that's wheel dancing, and it started in the pre revolutionary casinos of Havana. While this particular dance is clearly modern, it likely has some connection to those earlier influence you mentioned. It has a caller who tells the group as a whole which passos to dance. Usually a retta group will develop its own passos as it develops its own identity. The music is better than square dancing music. Two. There are then some links to learn more about this, and then on a related note, the Cuban mambo is a descendant of the English country dance as well. Thank you so much for this email. I did not know that. Apologies for me not being able to say read it very well. I feel like I have lost some rolling my ursibility from my childhood. Uh. And also I've I don't know, I stumbled over that. So thank you so much. I did not know any of this and if you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, We're a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media. Miss in History. That's where you'll find out Facebook and our Pinterest and our x thing and Instagram. That's the other one. You can subscribe to our show also on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.