Thomas de Cantilupe (d. 1282) and the Last Jews of Medieval England ^†

Abstract

Thomas de Cantilupe (d. 1282) is one of the last medieval English Catholics to have been canonized as a saint, following a remarkable career in which he twice served as the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, as the Chancellor of England, and as Bishop of Hereford. This paper examines reports of his anti-Judaism and its potential influence in England in the period before the English crown expelled the entire Jewish community in 1290.

1. Biographical Introduction

Thomas de Cantilupe (d. 1282) had a remarkable career in England during the second half of the thirteenth century. Born ca. 1218 in Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, Thomas was descended from one of the great Anglo-Norman baronial families. He had three sisters and was the third of five sons born to Millicent de Gournay and William II de Cantilupe (d. 1251). Thomas’s father was an Anglo-Norman magnate whose own father, William I (d. 1239), had risen to become King John’s (1199–1216) steward of the household; William II held the same post under King Henry III (Carpenter 1996, p. 203). Although at an early age Thomas wanted to become a knight, his uncle Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester (r. 1236–66), encouraged him instead to become a soldier for Christ under the banner of the martyr, St Thomas Becket.1

In 1237, Thomas went to study at Oxford where his chief tutor was the Dominican scholar Robert Kilwardby (d. 1279; archbishop of Canterbury, r. 1272–1278) who had just returned to England from his studies in Paris. By 1242, Thomas had himself departed for Paris to study in the Arts faculty to become a Master of Arts. In 1245, he attended the First Council of Lyons in Bishop Walter de Cantilupe’s entourage, where Pope Innocent IV appointed Thomas a papal chaplain. Next, Thomas embarked on the study of civil and canon law in both Orléans and Paris. In about 1255, he returned to Oxford to teach canon law and incepted as a doctor in that faculty. He was the chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1261 to 1264, when, like his predecessor Robert Grosseteste (Callus 1945, pp. 48–49), he likely oversaw relations between the Oxford Jewry and the university’s scholars and students. Thomas served briefly as Chancellor of England in 1265, during which time he had authority to regulate the affairs of the London Jewry and, at the king’s order (Griffiths 1907, p. xvi), imposed a tallage upon the Jews.2 Soon after, he left for Paris once more to study theology under the Franciscan John Peckham (d. 1292; Archbishop of Canterbury, r. 1279–1292). In 1272, under King Edward I (r. 1272–1307), he returned to Oxford where he obtained a doctorate in theology, with his inception ceremony in the church of the Dominicans. He was reinstalled as university chancellor from 1273 to 1275. In 1274, not long after he became the Oxford University chancellor for a second time, Pope Gregory X called him to the 2nd Council of Lyons. On 14 July 1275, Thomas was elected bishop of Hereford and was consecrated on 8 September 1275.

Despite excellent and very expensive academic preparation, no record of books, lectures, or lecture notes survive Thomas’s lengthy academic career. Although he had studied in Paris surrounded by luminaries in philosophy and theology—e.g., Paris’ Bishop William of Auvergne, Albertus Magnus, Saint Bonaventure (who received the Master of Arts in 1243), Alexander of Hales, and, by 1245–46, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas de Cantilupe never achieved distinction in the academic disciplines and apparently made no original contribution to the study of law or theology.

Likewise, although he had studied with distinguished Dominican and Franciscan scholars both in France and in Oxford, his relationship with the Franciscans would become strained. Just before his death, the Franciscan archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham, excommunicated Thomas in a dispute over Canterbury’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction and even refused to allow Thomas to be buried in his see in Hereford, even though Pope Martin IV had lifted the excommunication. After his death and during his canonization proceedings initiated in 1307, as Susan Ridyard has demonstrated, the Franciscans showed little enthusiasm for promoting him to sainthood. Nor did Thomas share their commitment to apostolic poverty. Instead, papal dispensations permitted him to retain a plurality of benefices that brought him great wealth: in addition to positions as archdeacon of Stafford, precentor and canon of York, and canon of London, he held many parochial livings, although often residing in London, before becoming Bishop of Hereford (Martin 1982, p. 17). Despite his election as Bishop of Hereford, he never fully anglicized: he employed his Franciscan confessor Henry de Bellington to preach in English, because “Norman-French came more naturally to him [Thomas] than English… (Ridyard 2017, p. 366)”. As Bishop of Hereford, Thomas showed some talent for administration: he would create the earliest surviving, although still incomplete, episcopal registry for the diocese (Smith 1982, p. 83).3 In sum, however, Thomas gives the impression of a Churchman devoted to law, administration, and politics.

2. Political Reformer and the Baron’s Rebellion

During the Barons’ Rebellion led by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, against King Henry III’s ‘excesses’, Thomas de Cantilupe had become a supporter of de Montfort’s call for reform. In 1258, the great English magnates, with support from the Church and from many Oxford magistri, forced Henry to accept the Provisions of Oxford, which established that the king must govern with advice and consent from a council of fifteen. These restrictions lasted only until Henry fully recovered power in 1261, however. Two years later a group which included Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, called Simon de Montfort back to England from France to act as their leader and in July 1263 they forced Henry to reaffirm the Provisions. When some of de Montfort’s allies deserted his side, however, Henry reasserted his independence and by December 1263 the country was on the brink of civil war. The parties sought out Louis IX of France as an arbiter and in December 1263 de Montfort sent Thomas de Cantilupe, who had previously established a friendly relationship with Louis IX while a student in Paris, with the baronial delegation to France to plead the cause of the Provisions (Carpenter 1996, pp. 293–94). As David Carpenter notes, the case presented to Louis IX pointed to aspects of Henry’s misrule: “He had denied free elections to bishoprics and abbeys, had ruthlessly exploited ecclesiastical vacancies and secular wardships, had refused justice to those complaining against his foreign relatives and other favourites, and had taken without payment far more than the customary prizes from foreign merchants… (Carpenter 2023, p. 293)”.

When de Montfort’s forces achieved a remarkable victory at the Battle of Lewes on 14 May 1264, taking both King Henry and Prince Edward captive, de Montfort formed a shadow government in Hereford. In a parliament of June 1264, three electors were chosen (Simon de Montfort, Gilbert de Clare, and the Bishop of Chichester Stephen of Berkstead) to nominate a king’s council of nine; the council included Thomas de Cantilupe. But by early 1265, the new government, rent with dissension, had been condemned by the papacy, which excommunicated both de Montfort and his supporters. On 28 May 1265, Prince Edward escaped from his prison and quickly formed an alliance with Gilbert de Clare, the Earl of Gloucester. In June, Edward and the Earl broke down the bridges over the Severn River, trapping de Montfort on the Welsh side of the river. When de Montfort was killed at Evesham on 4 August 1265, his reform efforts began to collapse.

Although de Cantilupe supported the baronial cause, he was perceived to be a moderate and on 25 February 1265, Henry III appointed him Chancellor and Keeper of the Privy Seal (Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1910, p. 410), although surely not without de Montfort’s approval.4 Once his predecessor, John de Chishull, returned the seal to the king, the king entrusted it to de Cantilupe, and, according to an entry in the Charter Rolls from 5 March 1265, “Master Thomas de Cantilupo … forthwith sealed with it (Calendar of Charter Rolls 1906, p. 54)”. By 26 March de Cantilupe, “elected to be chancellor of the realm by the king and the magnates of the council (Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1910, p. 416)”, obtained an increased salary of 500 marks a year for himself and his clerks, to eliminate corruption from his office. As Chancellor, Thomas insisted that no charters would be issued in the king’s name alone, so that “he could refuse consent to concessions he considered ‘excessive and unreasonable’ (Carpenter 2023, p. 352)”.

Nevertheless, de Cantilupe will retain the title of chancellor only briefly. On 6 May, he returned the king’s seal to Ralph de Sandwico, keeper of the wardrobe, until Thomas should return to the court (Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1910, p. 423). The purpose behind his absence is unclear, although Carpenter suggests that by this time Thomas was perhaps becoming disenchanted with conciliar rule and that he may have left England to travel to France for a renewed diplomatic mission to Louis IX (Carpenter 2023, p. 430). Still, he had not resigned the chancellorship, and he remained chancellor as of 30 May, when court was at Hereford, and a letter was sent to officials there to collect a tallage from the Jews, on the authority of Chancellor Thomas de Cantilupe (Carpenter 1996, p. 304). Nonetheless, within weeks of de Montfort’s death at Evesham on 4 August 1265, Thomas’ status changed. By late August, Thomas was no longer chancellor, but rather King Henry III guaranteed “Safe-conduct … for Master Thomas de Cantilupo, archdeacon of Stafford, in going where he will in England”.5 Despite his earlier support for the reform movement, Thomas seems to have avoided serious repercussions: on 10 February 1266 the Calendar of the Patent Rolls (1910, p. 443) extends “Remission to Master Thomas de Cantilupo, archdeacon of Stafford, sometime chancellor, of all the king’s rancour and indignation of mind conceived against him by the occasion of the disturbance had in the realm; and admission of him to the king’s grace (Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1910, p. 549)”. Thereafter, “The ex-Chancellor … went back to his books again…(Griffiths 1907, p. xvi)”; Thomas went again to Paris to study, only returning to Oxford in 1272.

3. Thomas de Cantilupe and English Jewry

What was Thomas’s attitude toward England’s Jews? Much of the evidence for Thomas’s attitude toward English Jews appears only decades after his death in testimony presented during his canonization, whose investigatory process lasted from 1307 to 1320, rather than from his own written records stemming from his administration. As such, this evidence is not unproblematic since his canonization procedure was seemingly “fast-tracked”, making Thomas one of the last medieval English Catholic saints.6 His canonization was promoted as early as 1290 by Thomas’s episcopal successor Richard de Swinfield (r. 1283–1317), with an ardent appeal to Pope Nicholas IV (r. 1288–92). De Swinfield’s appeal received support subsequently from numerous English bishops and abbots, as well as from King Edward I. The canonization investigation itself was initiated in the same year as the death of the monarch Edward I and likely sought both to satisfy political interests in England and to provide additional justification for Edward’s expulsion of England’s Jews in 1290.7 The reliability of the witness statements seems all the more plausible because of some remarkable dissenting voices: namely, those of a small group of Franciscans that included Brother Hugh of London—identified as a converted Jew—who expressed doubt concerning miracles attributed to Thomas and who also reported the doubts of the late brother John de Clare. John had been Thomas de Cantilupe’s steward and an executor of Thomas’s will before entering the Franciscan order.8 Seeing that the petition from de Swinfield to open the canonization process had been addressed to the first Franciscan Pope, Nicholas IV, these Franciscan dissenting voices seem to endow the testimonies recorded in the canonization documents with even greater credibility.

Although most witnesses—typically Thomas’ contemporaries—addressed reports of posthumous miracles attributed to Thomas, two of the 205 witnesses attest to Thomas’ anti-Judaism, as if this too were evidence for his sanctity. In one deposition, the layman William Laudre reported that Thomas addressed everyone with gentleness and humility, “except for the Jews” (exceptis Judeis). The Hereford baker John Bute remarked that Thomas frequently preached against the evils the Jews had committed in England, and he claimed that he had himself witnessed 500 Jews offer payment to Thomas so that he would cease to persecute them.9 It is possible that these testimonies sought to lend de Cantilupe’s support post hoc to Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews in 1290, but the fact that these witnesses did not themselves explicitly endorse Cantilupe’s anti-Judaism may lend their testimony even greater credibility.

In addition to the canonization testimonies, one may infer from Thomas’ close association with de Montfort that he supported de Montfort’s own anti-Judaism. It is clear, for example, that as Earl of Leicester, de Montfort had expelled that city’s small Jewish community in 1231, to banish them to the ends of the world. Robert Grosseteste, who was archdeacon of Leicester from 1229 to 1232 and likely de Montfort’s confessor, allowed that at least the Jews’ lives should be spared, although he cautioned de Montfort’s great-aunt, Margaret de Quincy, the countess of Winchester, who was inclined to allow Jews to be resettled on her lands, that Christian rulers who allow Jews to profit from usury are equally complicit in sin.10 Although de Montfort may have expelled the Jews from Leicester for his own spiritual reasons, and not principally as an attack upon the Jewish policies of the crown, their expulsion still enhanced de Montfort’s popularity with churchmen and townspeople for having attacked usurious lending among the city’s Jews (Dorin 2023, pp. 68–71). Despite de Montfort’s own foreign birth, he became a leader of a broadly xenophobic movement that targeted Jews as both usurers and foreigners, and which had also targeted Christian usurers and moneylenders from abroad, namely, “Cahorsin” and “Lombards”. The Bishop of London, Roger Niger (r. 1228–1241), sought to excommunicate and expel the latter from London about 1235 in “the first recorded expulsion of foreign usurers in medieval Europe (Dorin 2023, p. 44)”.

When de Montfort returned to England in 1263 at the head of the baronial rebels, he used the cancelation of Jewish debts to his own advantage and convinced his followers that an attack upon Jewish moneylending was essential to the rebellion (Mundill 1998, p. 259). Although Christians also were involved in moneylending, and although Jewish moneylenders were only a very small percentage of the English Jewish population, anti-Jewish sentiment and Christian theology cooperated to associate usury almost exclusively with Jews (Mell 2023). The debt cancelations led Jews to sell their bonds at sharply reduced rates to rich courtiers, however, who were even more exacting than the original Jewish lenders, forcing many small landholders to lose their properties. Violence against Jews increased nonetheless, with massacres arising in Worcester, London, and elsewhere. Even before de Montfort’s return, on about 11 November 1262, the London Jewry had been attacked by his supporters following an incident in which a Christian was allegedly stabbed by a Jew in Colechurch Lane. After de Montfort’s return, on 7 April 1264, the London Jewry, which was controlled by de Montfort supporters, was again attacked. De Montfort himself entered London, where the rumor had spread that Jews were planning to burn down the city with “Greek fire”.11 The use of the fearsome Greek fire in Crusade warfare was attributed to the most notorious enemies of thirteenth-century Christendom: the Saracens and Mongols. A Jewish plot to burn London with Greek fire would not only link them to powerful foreign enemies, but also to a horrifyingly destructive weapon. As a result, many Jews were killed, and one of de Montfort’s supporters, John FitzJohn, led the attack and is alleged to have killed leading Jewish figures Isaac fil Aaron and Cok fil Abraham with his bare hands (Huscroft 2006, pp. 104–5), while another leading Jew, Elias le Blund, also fell victim to the violence. Somewhere between 400 and 700 Jews reportedly died in the London attack (Hillaby 1990b, p. 440). Additional anti-Jewish attacks broke out in Canterbury, Worcester, Lincoln, Bedford, Bristol, Northampton, and Kingston.

After his victory at Lewes in May 1264, de Montfort sought to temper the violence and issued orders in the king’s name to authorities in London and Winchester that Jews should be protected and allowed to return to their homes in peace. But the orders did not prevent Simon’s own son (also called Simon) from destroying the Winchester Jewry in July 1265. After de Montfort’s death in August 1265, some of his supporters continued their attacks upon Jews. One of these, the knight John de Deyville, sacked Lincoln in 1266, killed many Jews, desecrated the synagogue, and burned as many Jewish bonds and charters as he could find (Huscroft 2006, p. 108).12

The full restoration of Henry III’s authority after de Montfort’s death hardly improved the situation for English Jewry which, during Henry’s long reign from 1216 to 1272, “began in chaos and ended in crisis (Stacey 2003, p. 41)”. Henry’s rapacious and destructive financial exactions imposed on English Jewries revealed his desperate need for funds, stemming from a debt that, by 1255, had reached 200,000 marks (about 132,000 pounds). His debt arose not least from an ill-considered agreement conceived before the 1255 ritual murder accusation in Lincoln surrounding the death of Hugh of Lincoln, to pay for papal troops in Sicily so as to seize it from the Hohenstaufen rulers for the benefit of his younger son, Edmund, for whom Henry sought to obtain the crown of Sicily from the pope (Carpenter 1996, pp. 120–21, 184; 2023, pp. 73–74). As Emily Rose (forthcoming) notes, within days of condemning wealthy Jews of Lincoln for young Hugh’s supposed murder, and following seizure of the Jews’ goods, Henry was able to dispatch thousands of pounds to Rome to help his younger son win the crown of Sicily with money collected from Jews. As Matthew Paris reports, Henry so clearly believed that his scheme would succeed that he had begun rather prematurely to call Edmund “King of Sicily (Matthew Paris 1880, 5: 458)”, and “sent to the pope all the money he could draw from his treasury or the exchequer as well as whatever he could scrape from the Jews or extort by means of his circuit justiciaries”.13

By 1258, English Jewish communities had been subjected to such inordinately heavy taxation, leading to both internal conflict and the severe decline of communal institutions, that many prominent English Jews, including both the London archpresbyter Elias L’Eveske (from 1243 to 1257) and his sons, converted to Christianity. The Jews’ near-term conversion had emerged in 1232 as a political priority when King Henry established an institution in London intended to promote and receive new converts, the Domus conversorum.14 Henry III’s 1253 Statute of Jewry increased pressure as it sought again to compel Jews to wear the badge mandated at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and to segregate them (Resnick 2019b), on the assumption that they were a polluting and dangerous minority. By 1255, as David Carpenter notes, the domus had received a considerable influx of Jewish converts from Lincoln, some of whom may have converted in the aftermath of the ritual murder accusation.15

Between 1263 and 67, many Jewish communities were not merely in near financial ruin, but they had also been looted and had suffered violence from Simon de Montfort’s followers. When the baronial wars ended, new restrictions were placed on Jewish moneylending, culminating in 1275 with a complete prohibition under Edward I’s (r. 1272–1307) Statute of Jewry. Thomas de Cantilupe, who had apparently remained silent on the mistreatment of Jews during Henry’s reign and throughout the baronial rebellion, did not raise his voice as Edward I implemented policies that hastened the decline of English Jewry. Indeed, under Edward Thomas rose once again at court: by February 1276 (as Bishop of Hereford), he had returned to the king’s council and in 1279 Thomas was appointed one of the king’s regents during Edward’s absence from the kingdom (Carpenter 1982, p. 71; 1996, p. 306).

The most revealing images of Thomas de Cantilupe’s attitude toward Jews may be traced to this period in 1276–1279 when he reemerged as a king’s councilor, and when hundreds of Jews were accused, imprisoned, and ultimately hanged on charges of coin-clipping and counterfeiting. On 13 January 1276, and just before Thomas rejoined the king’s council, King Edward I had ordered an examination of the archae or chests containing the records of Jewish debts in London, Gloucester, Hereford, Bristol, Exeter, Winchester, Wilton, Devises, Canterbury, Norwich, Colchester, Sudbury, Huntingdon, Bedford, Northampton, Oxford, Lincoln, Stanford, Nottingham, and York (Calendar of the Close Rolls 1900, p. 263). Moreover, from Easter 1276 through 1279, coin-clipping charges swept through English Jewries.

Thomas’s reappointment to the king’s council seemingly brought an unexpected benefit to the Hereford Jewry stemming from Thomas de Cantilupe’s extended absences in London. As late as May 1279, it remained “but little affected” by policies being formulated in London (Hillaby 1990b, p. 455). Nonetheless, according to an early seventeenth century account of the canonization proceedings from 1307 to 1320, during this period as king’s councilor Thomas “observed that the Jews, permitted then to live promiscuously, were very pernicious to the State, not only for counterfeiting falsecoin, but also by reason of their usurious extortions”, and therefore “he prevailed with the King that some fit men might be appointed to preach to them, and if they would still remain obstinate, that then they should quit the realm (Strange [1674] 1879, pp. 207–8)”. The account includes John Bute’s testimony that 500 Jews then sought out Thomas to offer him a substantial bribe in order to circumvent the order, but that Thomas replied that “they were enemies to God and rebels to faith, nor could ever gain his goodwill but by becoming good Christians (Strange [1674] 1879, p. 208)”16. Thomas could imagine no justification for the Jews’ survival in England, except as Christians. The number 500 seems so wildly implausible, given the reduced numbers of the Jewish community by this period, that the entry for Thomas de Cantilupe in The Lives of the Saints reduces it (without explanation) to just forty (Baring-Gould 1877, p. 40).

4. The Hereford Jewry

Cantilupe’s anti-Jewish sentiments were apparently well-known in Hereford, which contained a large Jewish population prior to 1290 (Fleming 2013, p. 232). Joe Hillaby had characterized Bishop Thomas of Hereford as “an inveterate enemy of the Jews (Hillaby 1990b, p. 466)”. As already suggested, Cantilupe’s anti-Judaism may have been encouraged by Simon de Montfort’s, although it is also possible that Thomas de Cantilupe had been influenced by the anti-Judaism prevalent in Paris during his first period of study there, which began in 1242. In Paris in 1240, the first public disputation against the Jews’ Talmud, precipitated by the complaints of the converted Jew Nicholas Donin, was held at the royal court under the auspices of the queen mother Blanche of Castille;17 in Paris, thousands of copies of the Talmud were confiscated from the Jews and burned at the Place de la Grève, likely in June 1241 and it was in Paris in 1245 that Odo of Châteauroux, quondam chancellor of the University of Paris and then cardinal bishop of Tusculum and apostolic legate to France, formed a commission to reopen the investigation into the Talmud. Under his authority, 1922 passages from the Babylonian Talmud were translated into Latin for the use of the commission, to reveal the ‘blasphemous errors’ of the Jews.18 This translation project likely had its center at the Dominican priory of St. Jacques. According to Thomas of Cantimpré, his Dominican confrère Henry of Cologne (Henry of Marsberg, d. 1254) was instrumental in the effort to confiscate the Talmud in Paris. Alexander Fidora argues, moreover, that Henry actively campaigned against the Talmud, that he was the collaborator or translator who worked with Nicholas Donin, and that he was a compiler of the Talmud dossier or Latin Talmud collection, the Extractiones de Talmud.19

Odo of Châteauroux’s commission, convened in 1245 at the request of Pope Innocent IV (who named Thomas de Cantilupe a papal chaplain in that same year), issued a report in Paris on 15 May 1248 signed by 41 university scholars and clerics that reaffirmed the Talmud’s condemnation. Many of the signatories were prominent Dominicans, including Albertus Magnus and the sub-prior of the Dominican priory of St. Jacques, Theobald of Sézanne (who was himself a convert from Judaism).20 In sum, the decade in which Thomas began his studies in Paris was also a decade of intense Christian anti-Jewish polemical activity that had its center, it seems, among the Dominicans in Paris. It seems likely that Thomas de Cantilupe, whose chief tutor in Oxford had been the Dominican Robert Kilwardby, would have been introduced to the Dominican milieu in Paris. His association with the Dominicans endured: in 1272, after he had returned to Oxford and received a doctorate in theology, his inception ceremony was held in the church of the Oxford Dominicans. While in Paris de Cantilupe also developed a close relationship with King Louis IX, moreover, who was the only European king to act upon Pope Gregory IX’s 9 June 1239 instruction to confiscate rabbinic texts. Louis’ mother, Blanche, presided over the first public disputation. Only in France were thousands of Talmud manuscripts burned over the next decade.21 Regardless of whether Cantilupe’s anti-Judaism derived from his association with de Montfort or from this Parisian milieu, he carried it with him to his see in Hereford.

Although Hillaby identified an isolated Jewish settlement in Hereford as early as 1179 (Hillaby 1987, p. 193), the origin of the Hereford Jewry itself dates to 19 June 1216 when a mandate was sent to the sheriff of Hereford that confirmed the right of Jews to live there and protected their customs and liberties.

Between 1218 and 1253, the Hereford Jewry was dominated by the economic activities of the extraordinarily wealthy Hamo of Hereford and his sons Ursell and Moses. Hamo was “not one of the lesser provincial magnates but was equal in wealth to the plutocrats who dominated the London Jewry and that of York…” (Hillaby 1990a, pp. 30–31) with a fortune comparable to that of the fantastically wealthy Aaron of York. At Hamo’s death in 1231, Hamo’s heirs paid the second highest recorded death duty for any English Jew. His family and its fortunes had prospered from the support of sheriff Walter de Lacy, who provided protection to the Jews of Hereford, and who as late as 1244 still was indebted to Hamo’s family for £666 (Hillaby 1987, pp. 195–239; 1990a, p. 63).

After Hamo’s death, his family retained substantial properties in Hereford. A writ from 8 July 1253 to the sheriff of Hereford notes that following the death of Hamo’s son Moses in 1253, who had himself contributed £3000 towards the building costs of Westminster Abbey, the king had granted “the appurtenances of the houses of Mocke [Moses] of Hereford, a Jew”, whose ownership had reverted to the crown, “to William de Sancta Ermina [d. ca. 1272] (Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous [1916] 1973, p. 62, no. 185)”.22 The writ includes specific instructions to conduct an inventory of the properties and mentions explicitly the “synagogue of the Jews (schola judeorum)”. The schola judeorum, i.e., the synagogue, was founded by Hamo soon after his arrival in Hereford. After Moses’ death in 1253, the schola was taken over by the community (Hillaby 1990a, p. 57). In addition to the synagogue in Hereford, the curia judeorum formed a communal complex that included not only the schola but also a slaughterhouse and communal oven (Hillaby 1990a, p. 60). The site of the Hereford mikveh has not been found, but a tradition endures that the Hereford Jewry had its own cemetery to the rear of the site of St Giles hospital.

Another of Hamo’s sons, Leo (d. 1234), had married Floria, the daughter of Abraham of Berkhampstead, who managed the finances of Richard of Cornwall, the king’s brother. In his Chronica majora, Matthew Paris (d. 1259) denounced Abraham of Berkhampsted as a wealthy English Jew who had purchased a carved statue of the Virgin “nursing her son at her bosom” and cast it into his latrine “in order to dishonor Christ the more … (Matthew Paris 1880, 5: 115)” every time he relieved himself. According to the chronicler, when out of pity his wife Floria sought to retrieve and clean the image of the Virgin, Abraham murdered her. After having been convicted of her murder, he was sent to the Tower of London where, rather implausibly, Richard of Cornwall intervened on his behalf and paid the king a fine of 700 marks (£466 13s 4d) for Abraham’s release (Vaughn 1993, pp. 142–43; Newall 1974–1978). As the Tower of London biographical entry indicates, however, “There is no evidence that [Matthew] Paris’ story about the statue is true”.23 Instead, Abraham appears to have been imprisoned in the Tower for financial irregularities.

Hamo’s death led to the gradual impoverishment of the family, however. A decline in the tallage (i.e., tax) revenue from Hereford’s Jewry after Hamo’s death is revealed in the returns: in 1223 Hereford ranked 5th among 16 Jewries tallaged; by 1255 it had fallen to 19th from among 21. Although this need not suggest a concomitant economic decline for many of the community’s ordinary members, clearly much of the wealth concentrated at the top had been siphoned off. But within a decade of Moses’ death in 1253, a new leader appeared: Aaron le Blund, the son of the London magnate Elias le Blund, who would dominate the Hereford Jewry for its last 25 years. Aaron, who had been named after his grandfather (Aaron I), was “the wealthiest of all the London Jews (Hillaby 1990b, p. 435)”. In 1255, Aaron married Mirabelle, the daughter of the local Gloucester magnate, Bonenfaunt. Why did Aaron settle in Hereford and not London? Perhaps because the anti-Jewish riots in London in 1264 led by de Montfort’s supporter, John FitzJohn, had resulted in his father’s death.

Evidence of Aaron’s arrival in Hereford is confirmed from 1265, when he lent money to Christians there. Yet, Henry III’s expanding and repeated financial exactions would hasten the decline of the English Jewry by transferring to the crown substantial amounts from the small number of wealthy Jewish magnates. Indeed, Julie Mell has argued that “12 percent [of England’s Jews] held 75 percent of the wealth, with the majority of this wealth in the hands of a few families representing 1 percent of the population (Mell 2017–2018, 1: 187)”.24 Approximately 2/3 of England’s Jews in the thirteenth century were “at the lower end of the urban economic scale (Mell 2017–2018, 1: 195)”. In 1269, Henry III demanded £1000 from England’s Jews, although he promised to demand no more money unless he or his son should go on crusade. In 1271, Prince Edward took the Cross, however, and demanded a tallage of 6500 marks. The Jewish community only raised £4000, and the shortfall was met by Richard of Cornwall, whereupon he was given the English Jewry as security. At Easter 1272, a further tallage of 5000 marks was imposed; the Jews who could not provide security for payment were incarcerated in the Tower—indeed, the entire Hereford Jewish community had been sent there previously when it failed to meet a 500-mark tallage in 1259. In 1274, King Edward I levied a tallage of 12,500 marks. For the Great Tallage of 1275–76, which imposed a tax of 1/3 on moveable goods, Aaron le Blund and his eldest son, Elias, contributed £45-2-1, that is 67%, of the £67-13-6 levied on the Jews of Hereford (Hillaby 1990b, p. 446).

Despite, or rather because of, pressure on England’s Jewish communities, Hereford received a slight influx of new Jewish residents after King Edward I’s mother, Queen Eleonore of Provence (d. 1291), retired to a nunnery at Amesbury in 1275. On 16 January 1276, Edward I issued a writ on behalf of the queen mother, Eleanor, that no Jew should dwell or abide in any of her dower towns. Edward commanded that the Jews of Marlborough be deported to Devizes, the Jews of Gloucester to Bristol, the Jews of Cambridge to Norwich, and the Jews of Worcester to Hereford, along with their chirograph chests and all their goods (Hillaby 1990b, p. 453).

At the end of his episcopal reign, de Cantilupe left his diocese when, on 17 February 1282, the crown provided him safe conduct to travel to Rome to petition the pope (Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1893, p. 11). Thomas never returned in life to Hereford, and his death was recorded at the papal court in Orvieto on 25 August 1282. During the bishop’s absence, the Hereford Jewry may have feared a period of renewed anti-Jewish violence. The Calendar of the Patent Rolls (1893, p. 15) records the appointment of twenty-four burgesses of Hereford on 10 April 1282, “as keepers (custodes) of the Jews of Hereford, and they are to make public proclamation that the said Jews are not to be molested either in their goods or persons”.

Although Jewish–Christian social and economic relations may have been reasonably harmonious in Hereford, de Cantilupe’s episcopal successor Richard de Swinfield embraced his predecessor’s attitudes toward the Jews.25 On 26 August 1286, about the time that Aaron le Blund offered in marriage one of his children in expensive and elaborate style, de Swinfield complained that Aaron’s family had publicly invited some Christians to the wedding celebrations to preach their wickedness to simple Christians, generating scandal as a result. De Swinfield threatened ecclesiastical censure for Hereford Christians who accepted invitations to the Jews’ marriage feasts and wedding celebrations (Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield 1909, pp. 120–22). The bishop’s threats evidently were unpersuasive, however, since a second episcopal order from 6 September 1286 directs the dean to take strict measures against those Christians who had disregarded his earlier order (Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield 1909, pp. 121–22).26 Similarly, a record of de Swinfield’s episcopal visitation from 1286 to diocesan parishes likewise condemns a cleric [?] in Ledbury parish for interacting with Jews of Hereford just as if with Christians (Forrest and Whittick 2016, pp. 744 and 756).

5. Coin Clipping and Counterfeiting

The most compelling evidence for de Cantilupe’s anti-Judaism appeared during the coin clipping scandal from 1277 to 79 in his reported criticism of a prominent Jewish convert, Henry of Winchester, who had previously been knighted by King Henry III as Henry de Dernegate (now Durngate).27 During King Henry III’s reign, Henry was employed at the Exchequer of the Jews as a notary clerk, writing Hebrew inscriptions. He also traded in wool and bought and sold bonds, often collaborating with a Jew named Moses de Clare of Sudbury (Hillaby and Hillaby 2013, pp. 344–46). In 1270, King Henry III had listed Henry of Winchester as one of the 25 guardians and protectors of the Jews of Winchester (Hillaby and Hillaby 2013, p. 124).

Coin-clipping had occurred earlier in King Henry’s reign. At his accession, he introduced the new short-cross penny, but the introduction of new coinage was soon accompanied by accusations of coin clipping (Carpenter 1996, pp. 125–28). The practice of coin clipping is simple enough and typically entails ‘clipping’ the edges of the coin and then melting down the silver shavings into plate to be sold. The practice may even have been facilitated by the design of the short-cross penny, which left a margin beyond the image of the Cross on the reverse side. As Zefira Entin-Rokeah (1988–1990, p. 84) noted in comprehensive studies of the coin-clipping scandal, already in 1238, dangerous rumors of coinage offenses had led the Jewish community to offer the king £100 to ensure that Jews convicted of coin clipping, or harboring a coin clipper, would be banished from the realm forever. A concern that coin clipping accusations would be used to demonize England’s Jews was not unjustified since in 1250 Matthew Paris had remarked that although the Jews undoubtedly had suffered from the increasingly burdensome taxes imposed upon them during Henry III’s reign, they are unworthy of Christian compassion because they are forgers and coin clippers (Vaughn 1993, p. 159). He also likened the practice of coin clipping to circumcision to assert an essential connection to Jewish ritual.28 In part, it was concern generated by coin clipping that led to the introduction of the new long-cross pennies in 1247, in whose design the Cross extended to the edge of the coin, making it easier to identify clipped coins.

Unlike coin clipping, counterfeiting could entail forming false coins, just as Thomas de Cantilupe complained of Jews counterfeiting false coinage (Strange [1674] 1879, pp. 207–8). But counterfeiting also extended to a separate charge that entailed the forging of financial documents or seals. One example appears from Edward I’s reign: an entry from 21 June 1290 orders that “Joceus de Newebyry, Jew, and Isaac de Pulet, Jew of London”, be “detained for counterfeiting the seals of the abbot and convent of Radinges [Reading Abbey] and sealing with the counterfeits false writings in the names of the abbot and convent and certain Jews involving large sums, and for other felonies in divers parts of the realm (Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1893, p. 402)”. Evidently the documents were forged to create the perception that the Reading Abbey owed them money.

While coin clipping accusations may have abated briefly after the introduction of the Long Cross coin, by the end of Henry’s reign, concerns that coinage had been seriously debased had re-emerged. So long as the coins of the realm depicted the king’s image, an attack on coinage was likewise an assault upon the crown and construed as an act of treason. At the same time, the presence of the Cross on the coinage presented the possibility that coin clipping was also a crime against religion. Indeed, the ‘idolatrous’ image of the Cross on coinage was not unproblematic for some Jewish communities (Resnick 2021, pp. 587–88). A document from the Calendar of the Close Rolls (1900, p. 565) dated 10 May 1279 and sent to the justices who were appointed to hear charges of coinage offenses also includes the complaint that “certain Jews of his realm have not and do not fear to blaspheme the catholic faith and the church sacraments…the crucifix of the catholic faith or of St. Mary the Virgin” and warned that they do so “under peril of life and limb”. Coinage offenses, though economic crimes, were easily conflated with crimes against religion. Religious tensions could only be resolved by stricter modes of segregation, prompting Edward on several occasions to reinforce the separation of Jews from Christians by reiterating the requirement that Jews must wear the tabula badge, “insisting that Jewish women shall henceforth bear a sign on their outer (superiori) garment as Jewish men do… (Calendar of the Close Rolls 1902, p. 176)”.

Despite strenuous efforts to eliminate coinage offenses, after Edward I’s accession in 1272 complaints of coin clipping only increased. It was not English Jews alone who were accused but also some English Christians, foreigners, and even Jews from abroad. Rabbinic Jewish authorities outside England were cognizant of the threat the coin-clipping accusations posed but also considered the possibility that some Jews were indeed guilty of the crime. A thirteenth-century responsum of R. Meir of Rothenberg includes a letter of support for R. Judah Sar ha-Birah, who complained of Jews who had taken an oath not to engage in coin clipping but in fact did so, with the justification that the oath was invalid because it had been “extorted”. R. Meir of Rothenberg insisted coin-clipping is theft, and that “Their hand should be severed till its middle…for so much blood has been spilled on account of these coin embezzlers. They have caused the ruin of our brethren who dwell in France and the Island [England]…”29

Such rabbinic concerns reflect a fear of the punishment such criminal activity would bring down not only on individual Jews but on whole Jewish communities; rightly so, as England’s Jews remained the principal targets. Consequently, after Edward I’s 1275 Statute of Jewry ordered “that from this day forward no Jew shall lend anything at usury, either upon land, or upon rent, or upon other thing…”30 with devastating effect for the Jewish economy, the crown redirected its attention from 1276 to 1279 to accusations, arrests, convictions, and punishment for coinage offenses. A series of coin clipping trials ensued, and approximately 600 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London with perhaps 293 hanged in London alone.31 As Entin-Rokeah indicates (Entin-Rokeah 1988–1990, pp. 96–97), the 600 imprisoned Jews represented a sizable proportion of the roughly 2000–3000 Jews still dwelling in England and, although not all the imprisoned were men, nonetheless their number represented nearly every head of household. Moreover, although Jews were not the only victims during the coin clipping crisis, Entin-Rokeah (1990–1992, p. 160) has demonstrated that they were punished far more severely than Christians and executed at three times the rate of Christian felons (Maclellen 2022, p. 832).

In 1278, while Henry of Winchester was traveling the countryside buying up 3080 pounds of fused silver, he was twice arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of coin-clipping. However, as Paul Brand (2000) has demonstrated, the evidence strongly indicates that Henry was part of a “sting operation” in which the crown employed Henry to obtain secret evidence for trials of Jews suspected as coin-clippers. His expenses during his imprisonment (by the Constable of Bristol Castle) were paid by order of the king, while a court case from 1279 records that his arrest in Bury St Edmunds in March 1278 impeded the “special business” in which he was employed by the king. Henry’s Bristol expenses are listed alongside an entry for “gifts and bribes given both to Christians and Jews to convict them of exchanging” coin-clippings. In August 1278, the king ordered Anthony Bek, Constable of the Tower of London, to assign a suitable house at the Tower to Henry and his household for as long as he required to perform his service to the king. For his role in the coin clipping trials, in early 1279, Edward I even sought to give Henry the “power of testimony or record”. This extraordinary power would have made it impossible for any of the accused to dispute the evidence already gathered by Henry of Winchester in his “sting” operation (Brand 2000, p. 1152). But Bishop Thomas de Cantilupe—then a king’s councilor—complained bitterly, according to the acts of his canonization proceedings, that “it was not fitting that the aforementioned convert and Jew should have such power over Christians”.32 He failed to express the same concern for the defense of Jews who were on trial. In fact, Paul Brand (2000, p. 1153) suggests, “The relatively small number of Christian offenders who were hanged may well mean not that far fewer were involved in coin-clipping, but simply that those who were involved were saved by Cantilupe’s intervention and by the verdict of friendly juries”.

When these remarks regarding Henry of Winchester were entered into the canonization proceedings begun in 1307, the editor offered that Thomas “judged that it was unworthy and not at all pleasing to God to subject Christ’s faithful, born from Christian parents, to a man who had only recently converted from Judaism to Christ … whose conversion and conduct he held perhaps suspect from the longstanding Jewish perfidy and hatred of this people toward Christians”.33 The Church had long prohibited Jews from holding public office and exercising authority over Christians, but it had not prohibited converts from doing so.34 Although Thomas’s opposition to Henry’s proposed role in the judicial proceedings may have stemmed from a personal dislike, in general, Thomas seems to have opposed the promotion of Jewish converts to positions of authority because of the Jews’ “longstanding Jewish perfidy (Bartlett 2004, p. 24)”, suggesting that Thomas’s opposition to the Jewish presence in the realm stemmed from a racialized notion of Jewishness that could not be removed even by conversion to Christ (Resnick 2012, pp, 287–89; Curk 2015, pp. 155–69).

When the powerful bishop threatened to resign, Edward revoked Henry’s appointment. Henry fell from grace in July 1279, when he was arrested and accused of buying the goods of deceased Jews, including clothes, furs, Christian and Hebrew books, copper lamps, and silk girdles to sell in England and overseas. He was fined 1000 marks (£666 13s 4d) for concealing the goods of his rival Benedict of Winchester, who had been executed for coinage offenses. By March 1281, Henry had been imprisoned in Winchester for failure to pay his fine. The sheriff was instructed to release him on bail if Henry could find twelve guarantors and if he agreed to pay the fine in two installments. As late as 1287, however, he still owed the king 400 marks.35

6. The Jews’ Expulsion from the English Realm

The impact of the coin-clipping trials and executions upon later English Jewry can hardly be overstated. According to Robin Mundill (2003, p. 62), the coin-clipping trials represent “a watershed in the lives of the Edwardian Jewry”. Robert Stacey (2000, p. 175) has noted that the coin-clipping trials fully enabled Edward I to stigmatize Jews as coin clippers, usurers, ritual murderers, and inveterate blasphemers, and essentially paved the way to the mass expulsion of England’s Jews in 1290. By 18 July 1290 Edward I had secretly instructed the Constable of the Tower of London and the king’s sheriffs (including the sheriff of Hereford) “that all Jews, with their wives, children and chattels, were to quit the realm by 1 November, on pain of death (Hillaby and Hillaby 2013, p. 13)”. Additional instructions were dispatched on 27 July 1290 to the bailiffs and sailors of the Cinque Ports, a group of five harbors in south-east England which had previously served as a port of entry for Jews arriving in England (Tolan 2017), generally allowing for “Safe-conduct for the Jews quitting the realm with their wives, children and goods;… (Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1893, p. 378)”. Additional communications with the Cinque Ports dated 8 and 24 August 1290 identified individual Jewish families from Northampton and York who were to receive “safe and speedy passage at moderate charges”. The crown’s justification for expulsion is made clearer by 5 November 1290, with its assertion that because the Jews had managed to circumvent the 1275 Statute of Jewry, it had failed to eliminate Jewish profits from moneylending. This claim undoubtedly contributed to the groundswell of support in Parliament for the Jews’ expulsion.36 By December 1290, the crown had already begun the process of inventorying and valuing for sale “all the houses, rents and tenements which late belonged to the king’s Jews… (Calendar of the Close Rolls 1904, pp. 410, 417, and 419)”.

The fact that the expulsion order cited the earlier effort to eliminate moneylending and enjoyed the approval of Parliament does not negate the role of the coin clipping crisis, however, which was identified alongside moneylending as a principal Jewish evil leading to moral decline in the English realm (Stacey 1997). It would be well to remember too that usury was not listed first among Thomas de Cantilupe’s objections to a Jewish presence in England; rather, he complained that Jews “live promiscuously, were very pernicious to the State, not only for counterfeiting falsecoin, but also by reason of their usurious extortions,…”. Only by their departure could England itself achieve purity.

7. Thomas de Cantilupe’s Last Days, Canonization and Cultic Anti-Judaism

Just prior to his death, Bishop Thomas de Cantilupe became embroiled in a bitter feud with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Franciscan John Peckham (r. 1279–1292), who had tutored Thomas in Paris just a little more than a decade earlier. Although both Peckham and de Cantilupe seem to have shared a hostile attitude towards England’s Jews (Knowles 1942, p. 198), the Peckham dispute, which lasted until Thomas’s death, stemmed from disagreements over Canterbury’s jurisdiction to adjudicate ecclesiastical cases in the Hereford diocese. Faced with an ecclesiastical interdict, Thomas decamped to Normandy from the late summer of 1280 until the autumn of the following year. He returned to England in early 1282, but with the jurisdictional dispute unresolved. Peckham then excommunicated Thomas for infringing upon Canterbury’s archepiscopal rights. Thomas resolved to take his case to the papacy and therefore set out for Italy in early spring 1282, where Pope Martin IV received him at Orvieto. In Italy, Thomas soon succumbed to a fever, however, and died on 25 August 1282. Thomas’s body was boiled to separate flesh from bone: the flesh was buried in the church of the monastery of San Severo near Orvieto; his heart and bones were returned to England by his steward, John de Clare. Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, deposited the heart with a small college of canons at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire (Finucane 1982b).

Thomas’s estrangement from his erstwhile tutor, Peckham, did not end at his death. Although Pope Martin absolved Thomas of his sins and released him from excommunication, Peckham insisted that Thomas could not be buried at Hereford until it could be proved to him that the specific excommunication he had placed on Thomas had been lifted by the pope. In defiance, Thomas’s Hereford entourage returned him to England, where it was reported that as his bones passed in their casket through the archbishop’s diocese, they bled in a phenomenon known as “cruentation”,37 as if to accuse Peckham of having caused Thomas’s death,38 until at the council of Northampton in January 1283 John Peckham finally approved Thomas’s burial in Hereford (Bass 2020, pp. 696–97). There may be a polemical implication here, inasmuch as cruentation was also associated with the ritual murder charge leveled against Jews at Pforzheim in 1261, where the blood issuing from the ritual murder victim in the presence of Pforzheim Jews was perceived as a sure and certain sign identifying her murderers (Resnick 2019a). Certainly, the episode was cited to establish that Thomas, having been unjustly persecuted by John Peckham, died a martyr like Thomas à Becket, preparing the path for his canonization by Pope John XXII on 17 April 1320 (Daly 1982). Four years after his interment in the Lady Chapel of Hereford cathedral, on 3 April 1287, Bishop Richard de Swinfield translated his remains to a newly built tomb in the north transept, where miracles were immediately attached to their presence. Over the next twenty years, more than 400 miracles were attributed to Thomas, which encouraged Pope Clement V to open an investigation into his life and miracles (Finucane 1982a, p. 138). The miracles alone, however, insufficiently explain the speed with which Thomas was elevated to sainthood. He must also have had very powerful backers promoting his cult in England—including the new Hereford Bishop Richard de Swinfield—who managed to obtain his canonization even more quickly than did the cause for St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), who was canonized in 1323 and three years after de Cantilupe.

De Cantilupe’s canonization proceeding, lasting from 1307 to 1320, assembled hundreds of attestations to his character and testimonies concerning the hundreds of miracles that were attributed to him posthumously. Even before he was officially recognized as a saint, by 1320 his tomb in Hereford had attracted perhaps as many as 182,000 pilgrims (Bass 2020, p. 699). Pilgrims naturally bring an economic impact. As Bass (2020, p. 706) notes, by 1290, when Pope Nicholas IV “granted an indulgence of a year and forty days to anyone who visited Hereford cathedral on the four feasts of the Blessed Virgin, or St Ethelbert, as well as the Holy Cross, or during their octaves….The total income for the year was recorded as £286 1s 5d, with £178 10s 7d being generated by Thomas’s shrine alone”. The oddest miracle documented in the canonization proceedings involves the strange case of the Welshman William Cragh, who had been hanged in 1290 as a brigand and had been convicted on multiple homicides, but who was miraculously resuscitated through Thomas de Cantilupe’s intercession (Bartlett 2004).39 Curiously, some 5.8% of the miracles found in the testimonies attest to cures that provided relief to various animals, including horses, dogs, falcons, and a rather unfortunate pet dormouse (Bass 2020, p. 714).40

Although the pilgrimage income at Thomas’s shrine was utilized to refurbish the Hereford cathedral and to construct a new bell tower, by the mid-fourteenth century visitations to the shrine were declining. The emergence of a competing shrine in Gloucester following the death of Edward II in 1327 diverted many pilgrims from Hereford, while the impact of the Black Death in 1348–49 would also result in a precipitous decline in income. By 1446–47, no further income was recorded from Thomas’s shrine (Morgan 1982, p. 152).41

The shrine may, however, have perpetuated English anti-Judaism following the Jewish community’s expulsion in 1290, less than a decade after Thomas’ death, since an important feature associated with Thomas’s shrine is the famous Hereford mappa mundi, whose first documented location will be the Lady Chapel in Hereford Cathedral. Debra Higgs Strickland (2022, p. 32) has argued that the Hereford map was produced ca. 1300 under Bishop Richard de Swinfield’s patronage and was created in a double effort to enhance the site’s appeal as a pilgrimage destination and to help secure Thomas’s canonization.42 Equally important, however, is Higgs Strickland’s hypothesis that details of the map—particularly its anti-Semitic Exodus iconography—were also created as a ex post facto justification for Edward I’s expulsion policy and reflect the anti-Jewish agendas of both de Cantilupe and de Swinfield, so as to provide “divine justifications for a unified English nation accomplished at the expense of England’s Jews (Higgs Strickland 2018, p. 421)”. Strickland’s argument has been developed further by Asa Mittman’s Cartographies of Exclusion. Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England, for whom the mappa mundi visibly pushes Jews toward the edges of the world to ‘distance’ them from an emerging English national identity (Mittman 2024, p. xv). Mittman gives even more attention to the role of de Cantilupe and his successor, de Swinfield, in promoting English anti-Semitism.

8. Conclusions

During the thirty-five years from 1255 to 1290, the Jews’ position in England had dramatically changed. In a royal mandate from 1255, Henry III threatens any bailiffs at the Cinque Ports who, if they value their persons and their liberty, would in any way allow Jews to leave the realm (Close Rolls 1937, p. 227). Desperate for funds, Henry preferred to keep the Jews close and to exploit their financial resources under increasingly burdensome tallages. By 1290, the situation had radically changed: having exhausted the wealth of England’s Jews and in response to worsening anti-Judaism, the crown demanded the community’s mass expulsion. Although Thomas de Cantilupe had died eight years before the expulsion, throughout his long political, administrative, and ecclesiastical career he had earned a reputation as an enemy of the Jews. He objected not only to their alleged financial offenses—usury and coin-clipping—but also because they “live[d] promiscuously [and] were very pernicious to the State”. He embraced, moreover, a racialized anti-Judaism whereby even converted Jews could not escape “the longstanding Jewish perfidy and hatred of this people toward Christians”. It was especially for this reason that he fiercely opposed the extraordinary testamentary authority with which King Edward I had been prepared to endow the convert, Henry of Winchester. For de Cantilupe, a Jew cannot put aside his perpetual enmity toward the English people; even Jewish converts appear to pose a danger to the realm. Although converts avoided expulsion, the Jews—a source of corruption and impurity—could not. Nevertheless, as Hillaby notes, a small number of Jews may have remained in the Hereford area even after the Expulsion order: in 1292 a Jewess named Floria Smallpurse was murdered and in the same year another, unnamed Jew was killed by John Clobbe of Lye. Hillaby speculates that in fact these two may have been Jewish converts (Hillaby 1990b, pp. 467–68); if so, their murders might lend even greater support to a racialized notion of Jewish identity and to the liminal status of Jewish converts in late thirteenth-century England where “Converts had little luck shedding their Jewish identity… (Williams Boyarin 2021, p. 101)” prior to the Expulsion. Moreover, de Cantilupe’s legacy and cult sought to establish ex post facto justification for the expulsion, both through the witness of the Hereford mappa mundi and the successful outcome of the canonization process. As nearly the last medieval English Catholic saint, during his lifetime and even after his death de Cantilupe left an enduring imprint upon medieval English Jewish–Christian relations.