13th–14th centuries
First application of the distinctive sign in Europe
1218·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.
the rouelle imposed by Henry III after the Fourth Lateran Council; legal persecution that subsequently spreads throughout Christendom
England was the first kingdom of Christendom to apply the distinguishing sign decided at the Lateran. Under the minority of Henri III, the regency council ordered that Jews wear on their clothing a piece of white cloth depicting the Tablets of the Law, distinct from the rouelle badges that would be imposed elsewhere.
The measure was at first irregularly enforced and could be bought off for a fee, then hardened over the course of the century. It inaugurated a practice that would spread to France, the Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula, and whose logic — making membership immediately legible in the street — would find in the twentieth century an extension that its medieval authors had not imagined.
- Period :
- 13th–14th centuries
- Type :
- Persecution
- Region :
- Western Europe
- Country :
- Royaume-Uni
*Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III* ; Cecil Roth, *A History of the Jews in England* ; Robert Stacey, *Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III*.