13th–14th centuries
Statute of the Jewry of Edward I
1275·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.
interest-bearing loans forbidden, distinctive sign expanded, exclusion from trades — the community is ruined and then expelled in 1290
The Statute of Jewry of Edward I forbids the Jews of England to lend at interest, the only activity that the guilds and prior prohibitions had left to them, and invites them to live by trade and craftsmanship — access to which remains, in practice, closed to them. It extends the wearing of the distinctive badge and imposes a poll tax.
The community, already exhausted by half a century of levies, finds itself without any legal resource; the trials for coin-clipping that follow strike hundreds of families. Fifteen years later, the king will order a general expulsion, the first of its kind in Western Europe, and England will remain without a declared Jewish community until Cromwell.
- Period :
- 13th–14th centuries
- Type :
- Persecution
- Region :
- Western Europe
- Country :
- Royaume-Uni
*Statutes of the Realm* ; Cecil Roth, *A History of the Jews in England* ; Robin Mundill, *England's Jewish Solution*.