13th–14th centuries
Bristol Ransom
1210·Angleterre
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
general arrest of the Jews of the kingdom, torture and ransom of 66,000 marks demanded by John Lackland; fiscal persecution that ruined the communities
Pressed by war and by his conflict with Rome, John Lackland ordered the general arrest of the Jews of the kingdom and demanded of them a levy that chroniclers put at sixty-six thousand marks. Those detained were held until payment was made; the account of a moneylender from Bristol from whom a tooth was pulled each day until he paid gave its name to the episode.
The event marked a turning point in the status of the communities of England: protected by the crown because they were useful to it, they became a fiscal reserve to be squeezed. The progressive ruin that followed prepared the ground for the measures of exclusion in the following century.
- Period :
- 13th–14th centuries
- Type :
- Persecution
- Region :
- Western Europe
- Country :
- Royaume-Uni
Roger de Wendover, *Flores Historiarum* ; Matthieu Paris, *Chronica Majora* ; Robert Stacey, *Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III*.