The Anatomy of Medieval Anglo-Jewry

The time is a winter's day at the turn of the year 1289-1290. The scene: a street in the Jewish quarter of Oxford, just south of Carfax. A group of Jews are assaulting a Christian cleric, whose mission is primarily the collection of money but also, indirectly, of statistics. The Jews of medieval England were sometimes more bellicose than is commonly believed. But in this case they had special reasons for their pug? nacity. The cleric, William by name, had come to collect the poll tax levied on all Jews of 12 and upwards. He was, as his name le Convers implied, himself a convert from Judaism and the poll tax he was collecting was intended to support the house for converted Jews in London; although the returns for the poll tax also provide us with invaluable statistical informa? tion about medieval Anglo-Jewry. And, thirdly, William le Convers was himself by origin a Jew of Oxford, so he was collecting this particular tax from his former neighbours and coreligionists.1 This story indicates that the collection of material on medieval statistics can be a risky occupation; and, although I have not to run the peculiar hazards of William le Convers, it is with some trepidation that I begin this attempt to assemble the statistics and portray the social structure of medieval Anglo-Jewry. To form an idea of the numerical strength of medieval Anglo-Jewry we need first some general idea of the total population of England in the Middle Ages. Yet even this is very difficult to estimate with any degree of accuracy. There are only two sources which present information covering the country as a whole: Domesday Book in 1086 and the Poll Tax returns of 1377 ?one too early and the other too late for our purpose, which is to study the population of Anglo-Jewry between the early twelfth century and the Expulsion in 1290. As Austin Lane Poole wrote: 'It is an idle task to attempt any? thing like an exact estimate of the population during the Middle Ages. ... If a census of the population had to be taken in any year of the twelfth century, it would probably have ranged, at a rough guess, around the two million mark. The natural tendency to grow was to some extent counteracted by unsanitary conditions, by plague, pestilence and famine; and though there are perceptible signs of increase during the period [i.e., to 1215], the population can scarcely ever have exceeded 1 million souls'.2 For the remainder of the thirteenth century the increase would no doubt have continued at a fairly steady rate. The major check to population growth was not to come until the Black Death in 1348.3

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