Catalogue description JEWS. (INCLUDING DOMUS CONVERSORUM).

Details of Subseries within E 101
Reference: Subseries within E 101
Title: JEWS. (INCLUDING DOMUS CONVERSORUM).
Description:

The earlier part of the collection consists of accounts relating to the Jews from the last years of the twelfth century to just after their expulsion from England in November 1290 (E 101/249/1 - E 101/250/14). The remainder relates to the Domus Conversorum (House of Converts) (E 101/250/15 - E 101/255/17). The earliest document to survive, E 101/249/1, is an enrolment of letters of obligation to Aaron the Jew of Lincoln by persons living in Rutland, and dates from late in the reign of Henry II, after Aaron's death in 1186, when his bonds were enrolled in the Exchequer county by county. This is the only one to survive, although some details from the contents of others were entered in the pipe roll for 3 Richard I. The next oldest item is a roll of Jewish receipts from the reign of Richard I in 1194, promised to the king by them at Northampton after his return from Germany (E 101/249/2); it provides lists of many of the most important Jews in the major towns and the counties in which they lay. Then there is a file of 11 writs and returns concerning debts secured by deeds, tallies and chirographs incurred before the 'general arrest of the Jews' in 1210, and some arrears of the Bristol tallage on Jews of that year; the writs were issued in 1219 (E 1011249/13). There are a few other documents from the reign of Henry III consisting mostly of rolls of Jewish debts and receipts from Jewish tallages (E 101/249/3-12, 14). One of the most significant is a list of Jewish debts surrendered to the King in 1262 (E 101/249/10). More numerous are items for the first two decades of the reign of Edward I, from 1272 to 1292, which are mostly similar in type. They do however also include a number of the rolls compiled in 1292 from the Jewish arks set up from 1194 onwards to register Jewish bonds in the main towns where Jews lived (E 101/250/2-12). From 1275 onwards all Jews were supposed by law to live in a town where there was an ark. Counties covered are Devon, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Kent, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Lincolnshire.

E 101/250/15 - E101/255/17 consist overwhelmingly of the surviving particulars of accounts of various keepers between 1331 and 1559, many of them in their original pouches. The keepers included such subsequently prominent individuals as Archbishop William Warham, Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, Thomas Cromwell and Lord Chancellor Thornas Egerton. The accounts contain details of the amounts received from the Exchequer for expenditure, how and when they were received, and the amounts paid out to named converts, giving the number of days for which they were paid, at rates such as 8d a week or 1½d a day. Later they also include the wages of the chaplains serving the chapel. They are struck through to show that they had been enrolled.

Related material:

Much financial information about the Jews in the thirteenth century is to be found in early Exchequer rolls in E 403.

Publication note:

An account of the history of the Domus Conversorum is in M Adler, Jews of Medieval England (1939), pp 279-379, and includes extracts from some of the accounts.

Administrative / biographical background:

The Domus Conversorum

The House of Converts was founded by Henry III in 1232 in 'Newstreet', which later became Chancery Lane, just west of the city of London and linking the old Templar site in Holborn with the new one by the river. It was intended as a refuge for Jews converted to Christianity, where they were taught useful trades, and which had its own chapel, later called the Rolls Chapel, on the site of the later original Public Record Office building. After the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 it became partly redundant, although the post of keeper of the House of Converts remained in being, and its buildings continued to be used to make pension payments to converted Jews as late as the eighteenth century. A couple of the later inmates of the house, Alexander le Convers and Edward Brandao, even reached positions of prominence. In 1377 the post of keeper was combined with that of the keeper of the rolls of Chancery, who began to keep his records on the Chancery Lane site.

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