The Story of the Jews: The Women of Ashkenaz

It was the great moneylenders, specialising in mighty clients and taking the corresponding fall, who were the potentates of England’s Jews; Aaron of Lincoln; Benedict Crespin of London, whose beautiful mikvah bath in green sandstone was excavated in 2002 and can be seen in the Jewish Museum; Moses of Bristol; and David of Oxford. They built themselves stone houses (with an eye both to grandeur and defence), which, like many of the Jewish quarters and their small synagogues, were sited sufficiently close to the town castles and jails in case they needed sudden shelter from rioting mobs, which was often the case. Many of them had multiple properties in several towns including London, and some, like another Benedict, Licoricia’s son, even acquired country manors – in his case, thirty-nine acres in Northamptonshire, containing tenant farms, parkland and hunting forests, and ample livestock, including, shocking to relate, “young porkers”. Some of the Jewish grandees evidently had a thing for fine mounts.

One of these palfrey-fanciers was David of Oxford. Like the rest of the town’s Jews he had somehow survived the relentless depredations imposed on them by both Richard (departing for the Crusades and then ransom money to get him back) and his notoriously insatiable brother John, who in 1217 had levied a crushing tax, and then simply let his Magna Carta barons lay their hands on absolutely anything they wanted from the Jews who could be accused of being in arrears.

David emerged from the rack and ruin and rebuilt his fortune lending to expensively inclined clients from Northamptonshire and Warwickshire to Berkshire and Buckinghamshire.

Locally it was his funds that built both Oseney Priory and Oxford Castle, a stronghold the Jews had an interest in seeing built even if they became, from time to time, involuntary residents. One document records a quittance from the “hard hand” of David, but there was every reason for him to drive a hard bargain in his loans since he could never be quite sure whether he would see the money again. Richard had been in the habit of bribing noble followers to crusade with him by altering, at will, debts incurred to such as David: sometimes reducing or waiving the interest; sometimes just forgiving the debt altogether.

The tactic was too successful to be abandoned after the abortive Crusade, for John was as much at war as his brother, and the boy-heir Henry III was overseen by nobles who got similar dispensations for sundry military services to the Crown. David endured 30 such loan wipeouts in less than 15 years. The insurance against bearing the entire burden of such disasters was going in partnership with other money men he could trust and spreading a little, both profits and losses.

Licoricia was clapped in the Tower of London with her baby son Sweetman

Hard-handed or not, David prospered. He built a fine stone house in the Oxford Jewry south of Carfax, the very street known to dons and undergraduates forever as St Aldate’s, and another round the corner in St Edward’s Lane. David’s fortune was evidently grand enough for him to become anxious about the lack of heirs from his marriage to Muriel.

And then sometime around 1242 he ran into his destiny: Licoricia of Winchester.

Licoricia was a widow with three sons by her first husband, Abraham of Kent, who had been implicated but not executed in yet another child-murder trial seven years before.

Like so many wives as well as widows (such as Belia, the shrewd daughter-in-law of the even more famous and formidable monied widow, Chera of Winchester), they acted as partners in their husband’s business while the men were still alive, signing contracts and quittances for them in Hebrew (hence they were literate as well as numerate).
Licoricia had come of age in the Winchester dominated by Chera and her clan, and doubtless learned a great deal from her example, for in short order she became a powerful operator in her own right, and perhaps with that name she had to be.

When she met David she was already well off, but it is improbable, given David’s already colossal fortune, that making it even bigger with an alliance could have been a motive for what followed. More likely he just fell for her. The travelling widows must have been irresistible. They journeyed on business in much style; often had spectacular wardrobes – we know of “bluet silk” and “blood red gown trimmed in rabbit fur.”

If Pope Innocent III had had his way, there would have been one sartorial blemish on their costume: a badge shaped like the twin tablets of the Ten Commandments, “four fingers by two”. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Pope had demanded this distinction, precisely because it had become impossible, by dress, demeanour and language alone, to tell who was who, thus risking in the Pope’s view the danger of intermarriage. The Pope’s action may well have been prompted by cases such as the notorious affair of an unnamed deacon in Oxford who, according to the chronicler Matthew Paris, became passionately infatuated with a Jewess and so “ardently desired her embraces… that he agreed to her demand that he convert and showed his seriousness by self-circumcision. When he had done what she bade him he gained her unlawful love. But this could not long be concealed and was reported to [Archbishop] Stephen of Canterbury.”

In 1222, Archbishop Langton summoned a council in Oxford which degraded the impenitent deacon who is said to have repudiated what he called “the new fangled law” and offered into the bargain some choice comments on the subject of the Virgin Mary. This was unlikely to appease the archbishop, much less the notoriously ferocious Sheriff Fawkes de Bréauté, who sent the deacon straight into the flames. Nothing more was heard of the Jewess, other than she escaped both the scandal and the stake, doubtless without donning the tabula on her gown.

Despite the apostate deacon in Oxford, the requirement of the distinguishing badge of the tablets of the law seems to have been unenforced for most of the reign of Henry III, so it is unlikely to have much bothered Licoricia and her travelling sisters of the money trade.

They were entirely accustomed to dealing with the Christian world, were independently minded, could read, write and banter and hold their own arguing with the roughest, toughest barons and bishops, some of whom clearly went weak at the knees when they had an interview with the likes of Belaset or Licoricia. Since they, too, needed to work in partnership with other Jews all over the country, they clearly went well beyond the domestic and religious preoccupation of a Doulcea of Worms, though this did not mean they would necessarily have been worldly at the expense of their faith. Licoricia seems to have been a stickler for kosher food. But nothing much could daunt these women. They travelled with armed escorts, sitting high in the side-saddle or in a basic form of carriage cart, dismounting en route to stay the night with Jewish communities before going on their way, often to destinations that might have intimidated the less confident. Licoricia regularly met high and mighty customers in the Great Hall at Winchester Castle, much visited by Henry III.

Whatever it was that attracted David – and it might just have been Licoricia’s proven fertility — it was powerful enough to make him act with shocking abruptness and announce a divorce from Muriel, more or less by unilateral fiat, and probably without telling her himself.

But since the reforms introduced by Gershom ben Yehudah of Mainz and his contemporary rabbis, not only was polygamy strictly forbidden, it had also become unlawful to divorce a wife without her consent, except in the scandalous circumstances in which she had committed adultery. That was clearly not the case with Muriel and she had no intention of going quietly. Even the Muriels of this world knew their rights and were not shy of asserting them. Other Jewish women of this period appear in marital disputes and wrangles over the fate of dowries when they are widowed, fully aware of the law. One Milla, for example, fought off a predatory Samuel, wanting to get his hands on her dowry by claiming they were married “by virtue of the commerce and contract they had between them”, meaning the sexual kind. Milla snorted, went to law and won the case.

Another independently minded woman, Gentilla, belied her name by forking over a tidy sum to the royal officials in order to avoid marrying a designated match. Muriel was evidently cut from the same strong cloth, if not quite a match for her rival from Winchester, but then few were. Muriel’s Lincoln family were mobilised and her brother Peytevin, himself a man of substance who had built his own synagogue and was clearly practised in both Jewish and Gentile law, took over the case. He submitted it first to a group of French rabbis, safely beyond the reach of any strings David might pull, and to whom their English counterparts often deferred, as the disciples of the great Rashi of Troyes. The French responded in Muriel’s favour and with the wind at her back Muriel and Peytevin organised a beth din at Oxford which followed the French opinion, and nullified the divorce.

David and Licoricia regretted taking Muriel for granted but now they went on the offensive, even if it meant appealing not to a Jewish but a Christian authority, no less than the Archbishop of York. Among those beholden to David was none other than the king himself, to whom David had tendered at a sensitive time a sweetener of £100. After that, as far as Henry was concerned, David could do no wrong.

For his part the archbishop resented the presumption of any rival courts of religion, and after summoning Muriel’s side, in turn quashed the decision of the Oxford beth din and decreed the divorce valid.

More seriously the Close Rolls have a letter directly from the king to the “masters” who had adjudicated the dispute, forbidding them “to distrain” David “to keep that wife [Muriel] or any other”. Doing otherwise, the letter warned, would “incur grave punishment”.

So now there was nowhere else for Muriel or her brother to take their case. For the time being, and in keeping with the halacha, she was provided for in the shape of David’s smaller house at the corner of St Edward’s Lane and Jury Lane. And perhaps she got some grim satisfaction from the fact that Licoricia and David got to enjoy their marriage for a mere two years before David died in 1244 — long enough, however, for Licoricia to produce the heir he had desperately wanted, whom they called after David’s father, Asser or Asher, but who would be known throughout his life (and in keeping with the confectionery of his mother’s name) as Sweetman or Sweteman.

But instead of being able to enjoy her late husband’s fortune, Licoricia, along with the infant Sweetman, was clapped in the Tower of London, while David’s estate was subject to the scrutiny and appropriation of the Crown. ...Locked away in the Tower of London... Licoricia was held hostage to the Crown’s satisfaction while King Henry perused David’s magnificent library, ostensibly to reassure himself it contained no items injurious to either Christianity or Judaism but actually coming away with some choice items like a psalter.

Even more satisfactory to the king was the confiscation of David’s fine house at the top of St Aldate’s and its transformation into the royal domus conversum: a house to accommodate converts who, taken to Christ’s grace, could be provided for from David’s kitchen and eat off his plate, use his utensils and avail themselves of his and Licoricia’s wardrobe....

In the end the king took possession of the immense sum of 5,000 marks, more than £3,000 of the day. Since £100 would build and fit a fully equipped ship, this was a formidable amount and it was earmarked for Henry III’s pet project of rebuilding Westminster Abbey and in particular creating the shrine to Edward the Confessor that is there to this day. Much of the heart of the abbey where royalty is crowned comes from the estate of Licoricia the Jewess and her husband David of Oxford, a detail the guidebooks mysteriously manage to omit.

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