The Exchequer of the Jews and its Plea Rolls

The Exchequer of the Jews was a governmental agency with general oversight of the Jewish community of England, responsibility for collecting Jewish debts that had fallen to the king (although not for collecting tallages), and a central function as a judicial tribunal, principally for litigation between Jews and Christians.Footnote ¹³ It was overseen in all its functions by mainly Christian “justices assigned to the custody of the Jews” (Justiciarii ad custodiam Judeorum assignati), or simply “justices of the Jews,” who sat at Westminster on a termly basis and were advised by the chief rabbi of England. Its records tell us a great deal about Jewish women's involvement in money lending, credit networks, and everyday concerns associated with those networks, and are therefore an excellent starting point for assessing Jewish women's encounters with the law in thirteenth-century England. Despite important work by Suzanne Bartlet, Victoria Hoyle, and Hannah Meyer, these topics are yet to receive significant scholarly assessment.Footnote ¹⁴ These studies often intersect with some evaluation of women's pleading at the Jewish Exchequer (see especially Hoyle) or questions of Jewish women's legal rights and status in thirteenth-century England, particularly where “Jewry law,” the law of the king of England in respect of his Jewish subjects, was concerned.Footnote ¹⁵

The Jews of England had no right to common law. “Jewry law,” as it is known today, was the product of fixed privileges granted by kings of England, the terms of which changed during the course of the thirteenth century and remained distinct from both common and rabbinic law. As Judith Olszowy-Schlanger noted, these royal privileges “constituted the legal framework for [the Jews’] economic activities and their very existence as communities.”Footnote ¹⁶ It was this law that obtained at the Jewish Exchequer. Yet, although Hannah Meyer has drawn our attention to a Jewish woman at the Exeter mayoral court and Pinchas Roth the operation of rabbinic tribunals in England, and although broader studies sometimes furnish passing reference to Jewish women litigants in England, scholars’ focus has never been directly on litigant activity at any of the courts used by the Jews of England, men or women.Footnote ¹⁷ The Jewish Exchequer was unique in medieval Europe, and the extant rolls furnish greater detail of the Jews’ legal activities than any other record from thirteenth-century England.

Comprising long narrow membranes sewn together at the head and frequently titled, front and back, with the law term and sometimes the session, the Latin records of the Jewish Exchequer resemble those of any royal law court of thirteenth-century England.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet, little more than a third of the content of its “plea rolls” is actually devoted to litigation or related activities such as essoins (excuses for non-appearance), attorney appointments, and adjournments. Much of the rolls’ content documents the administration of the crown's Jewish affairs and the non-contentious private business of loans, sales, rents, royal favors, pawnbroking, or acknowledgements of indebtedness, as they relate to the English Jews. The institution's range of interests is indicated, in broad-brush terms, by the court clerks’ subheadings of “memoranda,” “starrs” (Jewish deeds), “pleas” and the plea-related “essoins,” “attorneys,” and “prece parcium” (adjournments at the request of the parties). Such ostensibly clear-cut categories are in fact fluid, however. “Memoranda” sometimes record a plea, and “pleas” on occasion contain no more than the memorandum of a fine. The rolls survive, patchily, from 1219 to 1266, and then with greater fullness to 1286, particularly from the early 1270s on. They constitute something of “a gigantic lucky dip,” according to Dobson, “throwing intense but fitful light across great expanses of social and indeed private life, ranging from acts of murder by Christians against Jews to marital breakdown within the Jewish household itself.”Footnote ¹⁹ All rolls that survive from 1219 to Trinity Term 1281 are now available in published form, some as English calendars and some as complete, Latin texts.Footnote ²⁰

The Jewish Exchequer enjoyed broad jurisdiction. It oversaw all litigation relating to the Jewish practice of money lending, from business transacted between Jewish creditors and Christian debtors, one of the best represented causes of litigation, to suits between Christian parties in which the role of Jewish finance was incidental to the recorded suit.Footnote ²¹ It was also largely responsible for litigation over real property that concerned the Jews—including the king's interest in Jewish tenements that resulted from forfeitures by Jewish felons and escheats from Jewish converts to Christianity—and detinue cases in which one party was Jewish.Footnote ²² Civil cases of trespass involving Jews or Jewish debts, including physical assaults, ejections from house or land, defamation, fraud relating to chirographs (a deed produced in bi- or tripartite form), unjust demands for debt by Jewish creditors, and dereliction of duty relating to the archae system also appear in the rolls.Footnote ²³ Finally, the court exercised jurisdiction over private prosecutions of serious crime (“appeals of felony”) that included a Jewish party, over Jews indicted for felony, and over inquiries into the deaths of Jews suspected of having been murdered. Because felony jurisdiction fell by default to the normal criminal justice system in England, appeals of felony involving Jews were often initiated in the county courts (as were appeals involving Christians), before being transferred by special writ to the Jewish Exchequer for determination.Footnote ²⁴

Our impression of Jewish women's litigation comes from the pen of the male Christian court clerk and the “clinically dispassionate or even hostile eyes of the Angevin and Plantagenet bureaucracy.”Footnote ²⁵ It is also largely confined to a select group of Jewish women, and to conflict in their lives. The Jewish women who litigated before the Jewish Exchequer represent a minority whose wealth was great enough to occasion envy, conflict, or royal interest; who were alleged to have committed crimes or misdemeanors; or for whom access to legal process was a realistic prospect financially. The situation is much the same for the visibility of the wider English population in the extant legal records. Although, as Dobson noted, the plea rolls have nothing to say about many more English Jews, such as those in service or from poorer backgrounds, they nevertheless reveal a wide range of causes for which Jewish women in England went to court during the thirteenth century.Footnote ²⁶ They shed invaluable light not just upon the women's negotiation of justice, certainly as it was dispensed by the Jewish Exchequer, but on their broader social conduct, relationships, and status. The rolls reveal the Jewish woman litigant operating at the heart of family, business, and community in thirteenth-century England.

Invaluable to an understanding of Jewish women's litigation is the categorization of individual pleas; but the task also represents the most significant challenge to the quantification of lawsuits at the Jewish Exchequer or any other of the king's tribunals. Both the nature of the court records—redacted, formulaic, and beholden to the Christian, patriarchal structures of an English governmental law court—and the reality that forms of legal action were still evolving in thirteenth-century England render the exercise inexact. The common law, the procedures and actions of which (though different) were echoed in the judicial functioning of the Jewish Exchequer, was still a new and fairly flexible innovation in the thirteenth century. Criminal appeals and trespass remained poorly differentiated in the records of the common law courts before c. 1260, and presumably in the Jewish Exchequer too,Footnote ²⁷ and the classification of actions of the 1280s works less well for the earlier part of the century. Nevertheless, quantification of Jewish women's litigation at this tribunal is both possible and instructive. It enables us to identify indicative patterns in their actions and avenues for further investigation, and to suggest broader conclusions about the nature of Jewish women's experiences at law in medieval England. Such an approach illuminates Jewish women's capacity for action at the Jewish Exchequer in a way that complements a qualitative evaluation of specific (and often headline-grabbing) cases.Footnote ²⁸ Through such analysis, and through comparison with Jewish men's litigation, it is possible to begin to test the suggestion that Jewish women enjoyed greater legal freedoms than their Christian counterparts, and to explore the ways in which gender shaped these women's actions and determined the limits upon them at law. It is also possible to consider the impact of changing government policy toward its Jewish subjects, and particularly the promulgation of the 1275 Statute of Jewry and the catastrophic coin-clipping prosecutions of 1278–79, on Jewish women's engagement with the law.

To set manageable parameters for this study, I have gathered data only from the category “pleas” and only from the published rolls, which cover the period from 1219 to 1281. Where I have explored the details of a case in depth or examined the precise wording of an entry, I have used the original material. The sacrifice is small, because the great bulk of evidence of Jewish women before the court is contained within the category “pleas.” This method allowed me more efficiently to collate and quantify entries furnishing the repetitive, formulaic phraseology of the English litigation record, and to observe the (sometimes striking) exceptions to those formulae, as well as to gather comparative data on male litigants. Enough material has survived not simply for the assessment of Jewish women's actions between 1219 and 1281, but also for the creation of representative samples, from different time periods, to allow comparison between men's and women's litigation. The first sample derives from the single extant plea roll for 1219–20, which encapsulates the business of all four law terms from Michaelmas 1219 through to Trinity 1220. As business at the tribunal increased, the second sample comes from the three surviving rolls from the year 1244 (Easter, Trinity, and Michaelmas Terms 1244–45).Footnote ²⁹ Samples three and four come from two complete law-years’ worth of rolls from the beginning of Michaelmas Term 1277 to the end of Trinity Term 1278 and from Michaelmas 1279 to Trinity 1280 (six rolls each).Footnote ³⁰ The habit of this and other English tribunals of producing separate, but broadly similar, rolls for individual justices has left more than four rolls (i.e., one per term) for both the later periods. A minimum level of litigation by Jewish women at the Jewish Exchequer is left, but it is a selection of litigation that can be considered representative of the broader engagement of Jewish women litigants with this tribunal during the period of its operation.

Jewish Women Litigants at the Exchequer of the Jews: The Numbers

The indexes of the six published volumes of plea rolls reveal that women made up 11–12% (396/3387) of all individual Jews recorded as having business of any sort (i.e., not just litigating) at the Jewish Exchequer. This is a far cry from the gender parity suggested by Roebuck in 2013.Footnote ³¹ The figure has parallels in, for example, the numbers of Jewish women suspected of coinage violations in thirteenth-century England (13%), and the number of named Jewish women who deposited bonds in the Cambridge archa in 1240 or thereabouts (under 10%).Footnote ³² From the unnamed “mother of David,” who appears in the surviving rolls just once, in Hilary Term 1220,Footnote ³³ to the better known Chera of Winchester, whose activities at and beyond the Jewish Exchequer can be tracked across a number of years, Jewish women are named as the participants, and occasionally as witnesses or accomplices, in litigation, financial transactions, and a variety of business agreements.Footnote ³⁴ As with Jewish men, and despite the lower numbers, Jewish women's activities at the Jewish Exchequer covered the entire scope of the institution's responsibilities and are apportioned between the categories of “memoranda,” “starrs,” and “pleas.” As will be discussed, any number of entries in one or more plea rolls may relate to a single issue or activity. Likewise, individual women can be found in their many activities at the Jewish Exchequer alongside male kin or associates, and with and against other Jewish women.

In the litigation alone, the numerical imbalance between Jewish men and women at the Jewish Exchequer, although perhaps not quite as extreme as that suggested above, is nevertheless significant. From the data gathered in the manner described in the previous section, 177 discrete lawsuits and 130 individual women litigants from the period 1219–81 can be identified. One of these women, Juliana, was a convert to Christianity from Judaism, but her case has been retained for the light it sheds on the Jewish community in thirteenth-century London and its interaction with Jewry law. As Table 1 demonstrates, 10 of the litigants (12%) in the single roll for 1219–20 were women, whereas in the roll for 1244–45, 14 (16%) of the litigants were women. In terms of the total number of discrete lawsuits recorded for the periods 1219–20 and 1244–45, those that involved one or more Jewish women accounted for 24% (22/93) and 14.5% (14/98) respectively. It should be borne in mind that as men and women sometimes appeared in court at the same time, whether as co-litigants or adversaries, the number of individual lawsuits given here is lower than the sum of men's and women's actions.

Table 1

Lawsuit and Litigant Numbers in Four Discrete Periods

In the sample for Michaelmas Term 1277 to Hilary Term 1278, approximately 14% (17/124) of the litigants were women—a figure fairly comfortably aligned with the evidence from 1219–20 and 1244–45—and 10.5% (19/180) of the lawsuits involved one or more Jewish women. Although statistical evidence for free Christian women litigants in thirteenth-century England is less plentiful than for the later period, published data for Christian women's lawsuits in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries are comparable with, and in certain cases slightly higher than, the proportions of lawsuits involving one or more Jewish women in the abovementioned three samples.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, in one study of Christian women litigants, proportions of lawsuits involving one or more Christian women, in eight specific courts in England and the Welsh Marches before the Black Death, ranged from 16% at Oakington manor court in Cambridgeshire (1291–1350) up to 29% at the London Sheriff's Court (July–September 1320).Footnote ³⁶ In the present study, in marked contrast to the earlier three samples in Table 1, just over a third (34%, 24/70) of the Jewish litigants of the period between Michaelmas Term 1279 and Hilary Term 1280 were women. This is a significantly higher proportion than that found in the earlier three samples. It is likewise clear from Table 1 that Jewish women were involved in a much larger share of the pleading in the final 12 months than they had been in the earlier three samples.

The significance of this striking anomaly lies less in a numerical increase in Jewish women litigants before the Jewish Exchequer in the period 1279–80, although their number is certainly highest at this point, than in a marked fall in male litigants. As Table 1 shows, the number of Jewish men before this tribunal dropped from 107 in 1277–78 to just 46 in 1279–80. Multiple interrelated factors are likely to have contributed to this drop. Part of the explanation presumably resides, straightforwardly, in the sweeping coin-clipping allegations of late 1278 and 1279 and the arrest of large numbers of English Jews for the offense. In 1279, in London alone, it appears that almost 300 Jews were convicted and hanged, the vast majority of them men.Footnote ³⁷ Many other Jewish individuals and households either forfeited all their property or were exiled or fled, whereas others were subject to heavy financial penalties.Footnote ³⁸ The Jewish population in England, already in decline in Edward's reign, decreased further in the wake of the trials. Men were the principal casualties of the downturn in Jewish fortunes in this period.Footnote ³⁹

The gender shift in the data mentioned probably also relates, in a more complex fashion, to the prohibition of Jewish usury in the 1275 Statutum de Judaismo (Statute of Jewry), which ended the Jewish lender's right to accrue interest on loans, and to similar royal enactments concerning the Jews’ financial activities in the latter half of the thirteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although it remains unclear how far such enactments limited the capacity of individual Jews to go to court, purchase writs, and otherwise engage with legal process, male Jewish money lenders, more numerous and wealthier on the whole than their female counterparts, were collectively more vulnerable than women not just to the effects of the prohibition of usury itself, but also to the “ravages of taxation and forfeits” that characterized Edward I's approach to the Jewish population.Footnote ⁴¹ As shown in Table 2, debt litigation furnished the greatest decline in male litigants: the number of debt pleas involving Jewish men fell from 111 suits in 1277–78 to 49 in 1279–80. In addition, the practical changes to Jewish lending compelled by the crown appear to have lent the simple pawn a greater role in Jewish business after 1275 and may have rendered the relative prevalence of Jewish women in pawnbroking (suggested by some scholars) either quantitatively greater or simply more prominent in the surviving evidence.Footnote ⁴² Cases of detinue, in which one might expect to see instances of pawnbroking gone wrong—because pawnbroking did not of itself necessitate the keeping of records—increased steadily across the four samples given in Table 2, with a sharper upturn in the number of detinue suits involving women in the latter part of the 1270s (Table 2). There was more to the rise of Jewish women in detinue litigation after 1275 than a shift from usury to pawnbroking by straitened Jewish moneylenders, but it is important nevertheless to consider the effects of royal legislation on the numbers displayed in Figure 2 and on the place of Jewish women litigants therein.

Table 2

The Suits in which Jewish Men and Women Were Represented, in Four Discrete Periods

Jewish Women Litigants at the Exchequer of the Jews: Roles and Representations

The names under which the women were recorded in the rolls, as well as the life cycle stages at which they litigated (never-married, wife, widow), their roles in proceedings (plaintiff, defendant, witness), and the presence or otherwise of male co-litigants in their actions should now be considered. In this way, the extent to which Jewish women in medieval England were defined by marital status may be considered. Whereas the majority of Jewish men, as litigants, are recorded in the plea rolls under toponymics or patronymics, and the occasional matronymic,Footnote ⁴³ Jewish women litigants are most frequently identified by their marital status. They are described as the wife or widow of a fellow Jew, usually with their given name, but on rare occasions without one. Daunzele widow of Jacob de Shafton, Isaac le Polet and his wife Contassa, and the unnamed “wife of David” are three such examples.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Latin of the rolls is typically expressed as X “and his wife” (et uxor sue) or Y “widow of” (que fuit uxor or, less often, vidua or relicta), as is also the case for Christian women in the rolls of common law courts. On the few occasions that a married Jewish woman litigated alone, the expression resembled that used for the widow: Godenote uxor Furmentin’ or, in the case of the unnamed wife of David, simply uxor Davidi. One Antera, involved in a debt plea with, and as the wife of, Josce son of Benedict, is simultaneously described as the widow of Abraham son of Vives.Footnote ⁴⁵ Other Jewish women identified as wives by their descriptors had evidently been widowed at least once.Footnote ⁴⁶ The descriptors of 94 of the 130 women (a little more than 72%) of this study identify them in connection with a living or deceased husband for some or all of the litigation in which they were involved, a reality that suggests that, as for Christian women, marital status had an important role in defining the sociolegal position of Jewish women.Footnote ⁴⁷

Twenty-two women, including Belina, daughter of Mirabel of Gloucester, and Rose and Ermine, daughters of Deudone Crispin, are identified at least once by their natal family connections. Eighteen are recorded under patronymics and three are recorded under matronymics. That Belina daughter of Mirabel of Gloucester was a married woman when her name was entered in the surviving litigation records suggests that patronymics and matronymics were not, as has been claimed, the marker of single (never married) Jewish women.Footnote ⁴⁸ Toponymic surnames, which may on occasion also indicate the wife's integration into her husband's family or lineage, are used at least once for 15 of the women, including Slema of Southwark and Antera of Coventry. There are also eight exceptions to the more common naming patterns in these data, such as “the mother of David,” several women recorded only by their first name, and one Sarra “the/a widow” (vidua), a woman identified elsewhere in the rolls as Sarra of Hereford.

As the lawsuits of Sarra “vidua” of Hereford demonstrate, individual Jewish women litigants sometimes appear in these rolls under more than one descriptor. The clearest example is that of Belia of Winchester, who took part in at least 13 separate lawsuits before the Jewish Exchequer between 1244 and 1281, and is variously recorded by that toponymic (1244–45, 1268), and as “Belia of Bedford” (1268, 1273–74, 1281), “Belia widow of Pictavin [Poitevin] of Bedford” (1272, 1275), “Belia widow of Pictavin” (1281), and simply “Belia” (1244).Footnote ⁴⁹ Her descriptors thus vary between “marital” and “non-marital” types. Antera of Coventry, active in two closely related property suits against a Christian father and son in 1219 and 1220, and Antera of Warwick, who appears in a single debt plea in 1220, appear to be one and the same person.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although such variations in an individual woman's descriptor typically occur from one lawsuit to the next, Slema of Southwark can be found both under that name and as “Slema daughter of Isaac of Southwark” in a series of entries relating to a single dispute of 1274–75 over land and a house in Southwark.Footnote ⁵¹ There was evidently a certain fluidity in the naming patterns of Jewish women documented in the records of the Jewish Exchequer (despite the prominence of the marital descriptor). A rough count of Christian women's descriptors in the published Curia Regis Roll for 1242–43 reveals comparable proportions of descriptor types to those in the plea rolls of the Jewish Exchequer: marital status at just over 70%, patronymics/matronymics at approximately 20%, and toponymics at under 10%, with the occasional other label, including “sister of,” also in use.Footnote ⁵²

A number of factors could have influenced the selection of descriptors for Jewish women litigants in the extant pleas rolls, not least the way in which the same women were recorded in any written documentation, such as starrs, that they may have used in their litigation. Beneath it all presumably lay competing and intersecting influences—some perhaps specific to the Jewish communities, others more likely common to all women litigants in England—such as scribal convention, life cycle stage, social expectations, the subject of the litigation, and parental or familial renown. The father of Slema of Southwark, Isaac of Southwark (d. 1289/90), was a Jewish lawyer and financier, and a man readily associated in surviving evidence with his legal activities at the Jewish Exchequer. Father and daughter appear to have been closely linked in the period 1274–77. Mirabel of Gloucester (d. c.1235), mother of the litigant Belina, was a leading Gloucestershire financier after her husband Elias's death in 1210 and a figure familiar enough in government administrative circles to have been caricatured in the margin of the 1217/18 fine roll.Footnote ⁵³ Belia of Winchester/Bedford was a co-financier with both of her husbands and a lender in her own right. Each of her pleas in this study related to her lending business, and yet the shift of her business and private life from Winchester to Bedford around 1245, and a second period of widowhood, do not appear to have dictated her descriptor as fully as might have been expected. Even after Poitevin's death in 1261 she was still, at least once, referred to as “Belia of Winchester.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Although it is not clear whether an English toponymic implied a Jew's place of residence or business during this period—and a definitive answer, if found, would surely offer insight into Jewish women's roles and status—the late application of the Winchester toponymic to Belia's name, by error or choice, reflects a measure of independent recognition among contemporaries.Footnote ⁵⁵ Neither life cycle stage nor husband's identity were the sole determinants of Belia's descriptors in the surviving records of this institution.

Of the 130 women litigants of this survey, 44 (34%) were widows. They were either named as the relict of a fellow Jew in the rolls or can be shown in parallel evidence to have been widowed at the time of their litigation. Another 48 women (37%) were married. The majority of the latter group were recorded as “wife of,” were named with their husbands in the account of proceedings in court, and had typically been involved alongside their husbands in the activity that lay behind the record. In addition, at least one woman litigating alone and recorded under a matronymic (Belina daughter of Mirabel of Gloucester) can be shown to have been married at the time.Footnote ⁵⁶ Three more lost their husbands during the course of the litigation for which there still is evidence. None went from widow to wife again. The marital status of a further 35 is neither obvious from their descriptors, nor as yet discernible in external evidence. Presumably many of the latter group were widows, litigating independently in the manner of the Christian widow at common law, who (unless underage) did not require the participation of a husband/male guardian in her lawsuits. This was certainly true, as has been discussed, of Belia of Winchester/Bedford. It was also true for Sarra of Hereford alias “widow,” for Licoricia of Winchester, twice widowed before her first appearance in the surviving plea rolls,Footnote ⁵⁷ and for Belia's (first) mother-in-law, Chera of Winchester. Chera, who appears in the extant plea rolls in Michaelmas 1219, was the relict of Isaac the Chirographer and one other before him (possibly Abraham Crispin),Footnote ⁵⁸ and a mother of at least five, by the time that she was involved in the Jewish Exchequer lawsuits to which there is still access.Footnote ⁵⁹ Women such as Belia of Hungerford and Glorietta of Winchester, who acted without husbands but alongside sons or sons-in-law, had clearly been married at some point and were probably widows at the time of their lawsuits.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whereas at least one woman with an unrevealing descriptor was married (Belina daughter of Mirabel of Gloucester), whether any of them were never-married single-women engaging in litigation independently is, despite the optimism of some scholars, not at all clear.Footnote ⁶¹

Of the 177 discrete lawsuits identified here, one quarter (44) of them involved wives in action with husbands. Although the vast majority of married women's lawsuits in this study, of which there were 52, therefore included the husbands, there are also a few instances (eight lawsuits, 10 women) in which married Jewish women were involved in litigation without their husbands. Mirabel of Gloucester's daughter Belina was a married woman in 1220, when she twice appeared at the Jewish Exchequer against one Denise of Bereford (possibly Barford, Warwickshire) over debt, once to answer to Denise's accusation that she demanded repayment unlawfully and once to claim £8, with interest, from her adversary.Footnote ⁶² In the case of Godenote, wife of Furmentin of Lincoln, sued by Roger de Neville in 1220 for lending against the assize, her marital status is obvious from the descriptor entered in the plea roll. This was no scribal error, because Furmentin was alive and well and called upon to answer to the investigation into Godenote's conduct.Footnote ⁶³ In 1267, Avigaye, wife of Cresse son of Genta, was co-defendant in a debt plea with her son Bateman, but not with Cresse. However, because the constable of the Tower of London notified the court that Avigaye “has nought whereby she is distrainable, for that she has nought that is not her husband's,” the distraint for Avigaye's portion of the 1 mark fine fell on Cresse's chattels.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the cases of Godnote and Avigaye, the absence of the husband from the surviving litigation record probably relates to his lack of direct involvement in the lending at issue. In 1275, Henna wife of Samuel of Caerleon (Carleun),Footnote ⁶⁵ Henna wife of Abekin, and Floria wife of Juda were together sued for an unspecified trespass by a Christian couple, Hugh of Malvern and his wife Agatha. The Jewish women's husbands were not impleaded alongside them in this case, although Samuel mainperned (stood surety) for his wife.Footnote ⁶⁶

Several additional women described as wives in the extant rolls while litigating without their husbands were required to answer criminal pleas. Belia, wife of Jacob son of Fille, is recorded as having been apprehended alongside her mother-in-law with church ornaments in her possession. The two women were jointly prosecuted by the crown in 1244, but Jacob is not mentioned in the surviving record.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1276, Bassa wife of Moses son of Carol’, with her widowed mother-in-law Franziska and fellow Jew Ben[edict?] Capellin’, were accused by one William son of Hamo of Fornsett (Norfolk) of robbery and, evading arrest, were “outlawed.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Moses got off relatively lightly.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1276 also, Genta, wife of Isaac of Calne, was required to answer an accusation by Roger of Somerset that she was complicit with him, presumably in those felonies alleged, in a parallel plea, to have been committed by Roger.Footnote ⁷⁰ Isaac is not mentioned in this suit but was appealed separately by Roger for “complicity at diverse times between them,” including the receipt of stolen goods.Footnote ⁷¹

Evidence such as this raises important questions about how far Jewish wives were subject to the guardianship of their husbands (a sociolegal concept in English common law known to historians as “coverture”), and about the comparative effects of marital status on Jewish and Christian women in the English king's courts. The treatment of married women at the Jewish Exchequer should not automatically be presumed to have emulated the common law courts, where legal theory viewed husband and wife as a single legal and economic unit represented by the husband.Footnote ⁷² Although these royal tribunals were not dissimilar in outward form and internal procedure, the extent to which common law principles were absorbed into Jewry law, and precisely how far Jewish legal norms were permitted within the courts of the English king's jurisdiction, requires investigation.Footnote ⁷³ Emphasizing the traditional, unfavorable view of Christian women's status before the law in medieval England, Rachel Furst suggests that English common law restricted the rights of Christian wives in a way that was likewise unmatched in evidence relating to married Jewish women at Jewish law in medieval Ashkenaz.Footnote ⁷⁴

A measure of independent action by the married Jewish women discussed in this study is undeniable. The use of the descriptor “wife of” neither signalled nor required the living husband's presence as a co-litigant, and the women themselves were clearly viewed as responsible, or culpable, agents of their own fortunes. Yet one must be careful not to exaggerate that the extent to which the Jewish Exchequer offered an independent voice to Jewish women litigants, was “exceptional in its treatment of women [Jewish and Christian],” or indeed “made no effective distinction based on a woman's lifecycle status.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Nor, moreover, should one overplay the extent to which the principle of coverture in the English common law courts removed the Christian women from courtroom and court record.Footnote ⁷⁶ The general picture gained in this study of Jewish widows litigating independently and wives in action with husbands, particularly in civil litigation, mirrors the Christian woman's experience at law.Footnote ⁷⁷ The number of definitely married Jewish women who can be found alone at this tribunal (10 out of 48) is significant but not overwhelming. The ratio of Jewish married women's lawsuits with husband to those without is 11:2. Even in these cases, as well, the husband was not always completely missing from the picture. Avigaye, wife of Cresse son of Genta, was alleged to have had no possessions of her own to speak of—a stock response, certainly, but perhaps also a clue to Avigaye's financial position within marriage (or to the way in which she presented it to the constable)—and so the penalty was officially borne by Cresse. Furmentin was interviewed about what he knew of Godenote's alleged lending against the assize, and Samuel, son of Isaac, of Caerleon, was one of the two mainpernors (sureties) for his wife Henna in her trespass suit.

It appears that the Jewish Exchequer offered married Jewish women not a unique opportunity for independent litigation at odds with the constrained position that Christian wives are traditionally said to have occupied in the secular courts, but a series of experiences that roughly mirrored those of married Christian women in medieval English legal culture generally. The independent prosecution of married Jewish women for criminal activities resembles the common-law stance that the Christian husband was not liable for felonies committed by his wife without his collusion.Footnote ⁷⁸ The English king's law in its different permutations appears to have pursued all criminous wives, Jewish and Christian, in a similar manner. Likewise, the cases of women such as Belina, daughter of Mirabel of Gloucester, who litigated without their husbands in the context of their lending activities, are reminiscent of Christian wives’ legal accountability for their own business interests in certain customary jurisdictions. This was the so-called femme sole status. Married Christian women in the borough courts of later medieval London, Bristol, and Ruthin were able to run business enterprises as femmes soles, or something similar, and engaged in litigation relating to their occupation in the same way.Footnote ⁷⁹ (And it is by no means clear that femme sole status redounded to the benefit of the wife rather than the husband).Footnote ⁸⁰ It is evident, too, that married Christian women in medieval England who turned to town courts using customary law, and later to secular courts that were not part of the common law network, such as prerogative courts and early equity courts, were not necessarily coverte de baron as they would usually have been in civil pleading before the courts of common law.Footnote ⁸¹ As the hardening of the common law in the fourteenth century and afterwards closed down these useful ambiguities and practical freedoms, Christian men and women turned to new forums and alternative avenues of redress. Although the principle of coverture was certainly not unknown outside the king's law courts, the appearance of Christian married women without husbands in courts such as those just mentioned demonstrates the limits of this concept and the legal/judicial possibilities for these women. It also emphasizes the similarities between Jewish married women who litigated independently, especially in civil actions before the justices of the Jews (if not also at other secular tribunals to which they had access), and Christian women in an increasing range of jurisdictions.

The case of Slema of Southwark is also important for what it tells us of Jewish women's status, autonomy, and even agency as litigants at the Jewish Exchequer. Slema was a widow by the spring or summer of 1274, when she took part in the first of her suits at the Jewish Exchequer for which there is still a record. This was a plea over title to land brought against her by the heiress to that land, Elise, widow of Nicholas le Taylur.Footnote ⁸² A second entry in the rolls relating to the same suit, toward the end of 1274, indicates that Slema's father Isaac spoke on her behalf, as her guardian (custos suus), because she was underage (infra etatem).Footnote ⁸³ The fact that Isaac was a lawyer probably also helps explain his role on this occasion. Slema may even have been living under her father's roof at that time; for near Easter 1277 she was living in Southwark, where her father had a house, when she was sued by the prioress of Kilburn.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although she was already widowed in mid-1274, Slema was at that time still below the legal age of majority (perhaps no older than 21, the upper limit of women's legal minority under common law) and subject to her father's guardianship.Footnote ⁸⁵ Comparable cases of Jewish women in wardship can be found in the records of the central courts.Footnote ⁸⁶ At the very least, this reality shaped the manner in which Slema interacted with curial proceedings at the Jewish Exchequer. Although scholars recognize the formal, theoretical restrictions placed by English common law on individuals below legal age, the ready access of the Jewish single woman to the Jewish Exchequer as a legal tribunal is sometimes taken for granted.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet Slema of Southwark was not, at least at the Jewish Exchequer, free from male supervision. She represents just one Jewish woman who occupied, concurrently, ostensibly (legally) incompatible life cycle categories, but she is unlikely to have been the only one.

Like Slema of Southwark, Jewish women can be found jointly litigating with men other than their husbands in approximately 19% of suits across the period from 1219 to 1281. Some of these co-litigants were fathers and daughters, as in Slema's case, whereas others were mothers and sons or sons-in-law. Chera of Winchester and her son Deuleben were summoned to court together to hear judgement in a suit brought against them by Andrew the chaplain of Winchester in 1220; Belia of Hungerford and her son-in-law Vivant were jointly sued for trespass in 1244; and the Crispin sisters Rose and Ermine, with their father Deudone, defaulted in a plea of account brought against them by three Christian debtors in 1276.Footnote ⁸⁸ Such pleas chiefly relate to family lending. In a small number of lawsuits, however, the women's co-litigants were men to whom they had no obvious familial or even religious affinity. Again, the explanation may well lie in those business relationships that have held so much interest for historians of Jewish women in medieval England.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a suit from 1219 that reflects the interconnectedness of one prominent Jewish businesswoman with the leading lights of Christian society, Chera of Winchester and John of Herriard, a Christian servant of the bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches, and occasional attorney of Chera herself, were jointly ordered to bring a certain charter before the “justices of Westminster.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The close associations of the Tourainais bishop and the family of lenders to which Chera belonged is well documented.Footnote ⁹¹ In Easter Term 1280, Sarra of Hereford and Jacob son of Sadek were co-defendants in a plea of account brought against them by a Christian debtor, whereas in Trinity Term of the same year Avigaye, widow of Jacob Crispin, and Abraham son of Hagin were summoned to respond to fellow Jew Jospin, son of Solomon, of Marlborough, in a plea of debt.Footnote ⁹² In all cases looked at here, male–female Jewish co-litigants who were not married to each other stood together as defendants.

The women in this study were more often legal adversaries of Christians than of fellow Jews, and usually in the context of their financial activities, a reality that reflects both the priorities of king and tribunal and the important role played by the Jewish population in medieval English society. Nevertheless, the previously mentioned case of Avigaye, widow of Jacob Crispin, is one of nine lawsuits in which a Jewish woman faced a fellow Jew. These actions resulted either from a financial dispute between the sorts of business associates who have been described here as litigating together or from the breakdown of communal/intra-faith relations, typically manifest in colorful trespass or criminal pleading. In the tortuous proceedings that followed Solomon Turbe's fatal fall from the tower of Gloucester Castle in 1220, his widow Comitissa was both a co-defendant with, and a complainant against, several men of the Gloucester Jewry alleged to have been involved in her husband's death. The most prominent of these was her late husband's nemesis Abraham Gubbay.Footnote ⁹³ Elsewhere, accusations of mob violence against groups of Jewish men and women lay behind pleas brought by Elias of Warwick (1244–45) and Juliana “the convert” (1274) respectively.Footnote ⁹⁴ Where finance was at issue, most of the defendants were Jewish widows sued by male Jewish creditors or business associates for debt or, once, for trespass in the form of malicious alienation of a bond.Footnote ⁹⁵ In a final case from 1280, Giva daughter of Elias began an action of debt against Chera, widow of Moses of Warwick, but was amerced for failing to prosecute her suit.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nothing more survives of this plea.

As Tables 3 and 4 show, the women of this study were defendants more often than plaintiffs (105 versus 85 of the 198 suit appearances). On three occasions the women were witnesses, and in a further five their role in the suit not made clear by the extant record. Table 3 shows that the best represented Jewish woman litigant in these data is the widowed plaintiff, comprising 56 (28%) of the 198 suit appearances identified. This is followed by widowed, and then married, defendants at 43 (22%) and 41 (21%) respectively. Given the likelihood that many of the women of indeterminate marital status were also widows, it is probable that widows’ numbers were more strongly represented than this shows. The comparatively infrequent appearance of married Jewish women as plaintiffs in any category of suit (only 14 identifiable cases, or 7%), is curious. Seven of these suits relate to debt, five to detinue, and one each to real property and crime.

Table 3

Jewish Women Litigants at the Exchequer of the Jews, 1219–81: Marital Status Versus Role, by “Suit Appearance”¹

¹Adapting Matthew Stevens’ definition of “entry appearances” in his work on later medieval Ruthin, I have calculated “suit appearances” as the number of appearances, once per suit (regardless of how many entries survive for that suit), made by each of the 130 individual Jewish women in this study. This is neither a per capita count of the women involved, nor a collation of every appearance in the extant rolls made by these women. See Stevens, Urban Assimilation in Post-Conquest Wales, 121, note to table 3.1.

Table 4

Jewish Women Litigants at the Exchequer of the Jews, 1219–81: Role versus Plea Type, by “Suit Appearance”

¹See note to Table 3, for explanation.

It is not clear whether a Jewish husband could bring a suit to the Jewish Exchequer on behalf of his wife, without her input. As a general principle, he could not (except, perhaps, if appointed as the wife's attorney while also appearing in person, as happened on occasion in the common law courts).Footnote ⁹⁷ In one striking case from 1244, Elias of Warwick brought a private appeal, relating to a physical assault on his wife Bessa that resulted in the loss of her pregnancy, against several members of another Jewish family from Warwick. He met with strenuous opposition from the defendants over his right to bring the appeal, when his wife was still alive and might herself have sued, and when he himself had neither seen nor heard what he described. The defendants’ position is curious in the light of the common law rule limiting women's appeals to physical violence (usually rape) or the killing of their husbands and which, if applicable to Jewry law too, should in theory have precluded Elias' husband Bessa's right to bring an appeal, although not a trespass suit. Elias countered with his own rationale, namely that the killing of his unborn child, and the alleged theft from his wife during the assault of gold rings and a gold buckle, were injuries done to him.Footnote ⁹⁸ Perhaps requirements of a case like this were not entirely clear to the parties; or perhaps both sides were seeking to exploit the ambiguities in the system at that time. The limiting rule applied to Christian women's appeals in the common law courts was routinely ignored, in this very period, in the cut-and-thrust of actual litigation.Footnote ⁹⁹ The situation the Jewish Exchequer is likely to have been similarly indistinct. Indeed, in 1278 Agnes, wife of Reginald Bake of Bristol, appealed a group of Jewish men and women at the Jewish Exchequer for the death of her sister.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Debt, Detinue, and Disorder

I will now consider more closely some of the types of litigation in which Jewish women were involved at the Jewish Exchequer between 1219 and 1281, and examine the interplay of life cycle/marital status and litigant role in the context of those plea types. In this section I will look at economic litigation, in the form of debt and detinue pleading, and, briefly, at litigation relating to some form of violent or disruptive behavior. Despite the difficulties of categorization previously outlined, the method used here has been to group the litigation for 1219–81 into the following indicative categories: debt (including the unique “action of account” of the Jewish Exchequer), detinue, crime, trespass, title to real property, and unidentified (where the extant record is incomplete or unrevealing).Footnote ¹⁰¹ The full breakdown of plea types in which Jewish women were involved across the entire period is visible in Table 5. The numbers in Table 5 derive from all cases extracted from the “pleas” section of the published rolls, and not simply from the four samples used.

Table 5

Jewish Women's Lawsuits, by Type, 1219–81

* Percentages have been rounded to the nearest half.

¹ This category is an indicative amalgamation of litigation relating straightforwardly to unpaid loans (including the action of account) and the pursuit of movable property; namely, debt and detinue pleas. It does not take into account trespass litigation relating to Jewish finance and included here under the category “trespass.”

The nature of the litigation in which Jewish women participated at this tribunal spanned the complete range of the institution's judicial interests, mirroring the range of men's actions captured in the rolls, and echoing the multifarious activities of the women's daily lives and their importance to family and community enterprise. At the lower end of the spectrum lay real actions. In contrast to the frequency of property suits in which Christians engaged in the common law courts, only 6% (11/177) of the lawsuits involving Jewish women at the Jewish Exchequer between 1219 and 1281 were property related.Footnote ¹⁰² Real actions were similarly under-represented in Jewish men's litigation. English Jews had comparatively few rights to land, and lending against real property played an increasingly minor role in Jewish finance as the thirteenth century progressed. On the other hand, given the prominence of Jews in money lending in thirteenth-century England and the centrality of Jewish women to these activities, it is perhaps not surprising that debt litigation accounted for the largest proportion of Jewish women's actions at the Jewish Exchequer during the same 62-year period.Footnote ¹⁰³ Debt litigation took a range of different forms, but the most common was the straightforward demand for repayment by Jewish creditors against their Christian clients.

Regardless of the specific effects of royal legislation on Jewish litigation, and despite the marked fall in Jewish men's debt litigation in the late 1270s, debt litigation overshadowed all other actions brought or defended by Jewish men and women alike at the Jewish Exchequer. This can certainly be seen within each of the four period-specific samples given in Table 2, and, judging from a cursory assessment of men's litigation in the rolls more widely, appears also to be the case right across the period from 1219 to 1281. As a proportion of Jews’ litigation at this court that which related to debt and detinue combined (“economic” litigation)Footnote ¹⁰⁴ increased in the latter two samples, which cover the periods 1277–78 and 1279–80. The trend is roughly this: from making up exactly half of the actions of Jewish men and women in the earlier two samples (48/96 and 50/100 respectively), economic litigation comprised approximately 72% (133/186) of their actions during the period 1277–78 and 96% (90/94) during the period 1279–80. Viewed in parallel, men's and women's economic litigation both follow roughly this same trend across the four samples. For women the pattern is 12/22 (55% of the suits in which women were involved), 6/14 (43%), 15/19 (79%), and 28/30 (93%), whereas for men it is 36/74 (49% of the suits in which men were involved), 44/86 (51%), 118/167 (71%), and 62/64 (97%). As Jewish lenders adapted their business activities to the legislative changes introduced by the crown in the latter half of the thirteenth century, it is possible that the Jewish Exchequer became principally a forum for economic litigation, and for economic litigation of a more limited type. Perhaps, as suggested previously, it also had a slightly different gender profile from the litigation of an earlier period.

The centrality of Jewish women in lending money, reclaiming loans, and enforcing the repayment process may be observed not simply in the fact that approximately half of their identifiable pleas at the Jewish Exchequer across the period from 1219 to 1281 as a whole related straightforwardly to debt (to say nothing of detinue), but also in the interplay of in-court role and marital status within the context of the women's economic litigation. In 55 (28%) of their 198 suit appearances, the women were plaintiffs in debt litigation, whereas in 36 (18%) they were defendants in debt litigation, sued either by their own creditors or by debtors using the action of account to demand proof, in court, of what was still owing. In fact, it is only in debt litigation that the Jewish women in this study were more likely to be plaintiffs than defendants, the opposite being the case for all other types of action and, as mentioned, in the totality of the litigation covered by this study. In his 2017 examination of women's London-related litigation at the fifteenth-century court of common pleas, Matthew Stevens likewise found that in litigation relating to credit and debt, women were considerably more likely to be plaintiffs than defendants.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The explanation in both cases presumably lies in the regular involvement of Jewish and (especially urban) Christian women in extending and receiving credit, and their confident use of the courts in the context of community credit supply.

The women's involvement (like that of Jewish men) in the less agreeable side of the lending business is likewise evident to some extent both in their defense of trespass suits (15/198 of suit-appearances), several of which explicitly related to accusations of wrongful demand of debt or improper lending practices, and in the allegations of detinue made against them (19/198). In 1278, Margarine of Oxford had been summoned to court by Henry of Wynepol, one of the brothers of the Convent of Mount Carmel at Oxford, who demanded that she return the convent's glossed copies of St Paul's Epistles, St Matthew's Gospels, and the Sentences.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Despite Margarine's denial that she had ever held the books, the court found that she had indeed received them in pledge from the brothers, but “with the passage of time had sold them” (per lapsum temporis eos vendidit)—as was her right.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Just three years later, Moses of Dog St and his wife Bona were together accused by one Matilda la Megre of withholding several lengths of burnet cloth, against which she had borrowed 3 s from the couple and 3 s from another Jewish woman, called Belasez. While Belasez had accepted the repayment of her sum from Matilda, Moses and Bona were allegedly attempting to extort the principal with interest from the complainant, against the 1275 Statute of Jewry. The couple were found guilty and committed to the Tower until they made amends.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The greater number of Jewish women involved in detinue litigation in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, highlighted previously, requires further consideration, because a deliberate shift from usury to pawn-broking by Jewish lenders after 1275 cannot not fully explain the subsequent rise in Jewish women's detinue litigation evident in the surviving plea rolls. An examination of the suits themselves suggests a less palatable story. Here I also consider the few detinue cases for which the only surviving record is a memorandum rather than a plea record. From Hilary Term 1280, there is a striking rise in the number of Jewish widows seeking to recover valuable items, mainly from Christian trustees. Ten of the 26 detinue cases with Jewish plaintiffs from the period from January 1280 to the end of July 1281, recorded in any of the scribal categories in the extant rolls, fit this description (whereas in surviving rolls from the latter half of the 1270s there are no cases of this sort). In Trinity Term 1281, Chera, widow of Moses son of Leo, with the king, sued Mabel Comin of Newbald (Yorkshire) for goods and chattels that had belonged to Chera's condemned husband (Mossei filii Leonis judei dampnati).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In Easter Term of the same year, Belasset, widow of Sampson son of Sampson, for herself and the king, pursued Milicent de Lungevyle for 5 marks that she had entrusted to the Christian woman and her husband “for safekeeping” (salvo custodiendum).Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the record of a lawsuit brought by the king against four Christian men in the same term, it is stated that Belasset, who on that occasion was not a plaintiff but a third party to the suit, had placed other valuables with these defendants prior to her husband's death. Her late husband was also dampnatus. Footnote ¹¹¹

Not all of the detinue suits of this nature state that the deceased husband was judeus dampnatus, and the reason for the late husband's status as “condemned Jew” is only rarely found in the surviving records. Nevertheless, it is clear not only that these detinue suits belonged to a period of heightened stress within the Jewish communities of later thirteenth-century England, but that they also probably all resulted from the coinage trials of 1278–79.Footnote ¹¹² In one such case, Isaac of London is explicitly stated to have been convicted “for money trespass” (pro transgressione monete).Footnote ¹¹³ Desperate Jews were driven to entrust their valuables to the care of friends, neighbors, and associates, often non-suspect Christians, and many women were widowed by the coin-clipping prosecutions, in the context of which dampnatus generally meant suspensus (“hanged”).Footnote ¹¹⁴ The hangman's noose was not reserved entirely for men, however. At least one detinue suit, between the king and a Christian couple, concerns the plate, jewellery, and gold “which belonged to Belecote and her son Solomon, convicted Jews” (que fuerunt Belecote et Salomonis filii sui judeorum dampnatorum).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Likewise Cota, widow of Michael le Eveske, was a condemned Jewish woman whose valuable moveable goods formed the subject of at least five, possibly six, detinue suits.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Nevertheless, it remains true that of those Jews who were suspected of coinage violations across the thirteenth century, men were significantly more likely to pay the ultimate price.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The consequences of this are reflected in the litigation patterns of Jewish women after 1279.

With these qualifications in mind, it is nevertheless difficult to ignore the presence of the Jewish widow in litigation related in some way to the business of money-lending, and what this likely says—echoing the work of scholars such as Suzanne Bartlet—about the financial and social capital, and even legal competence, of the lone Jewish businesswoman. Seventy-five (42%) of the 177 separate lawsuits used in this study involved known widows in debt and detinue pleading in some capacity, including, of course, those widows navigating the aftermath of the coinage trials of 1278–79. Almost half of the Jewish women's suits dealing with debt specifically (42/89) feature a widow as the sole creditor-plaintiff demanding the repayment of debt and, before 1275, interest from a Christian debtor.Footnote ¹¹⁸ These 42 lawsuits represent just less than one quarter of the full 177 pleas, of any type, in which Jewish women were represented in the data for the period 1219–81. Once again, the true figure is likely to be slightly higher if we suppose that of the seven debt suits initiated by Jewish women of indeterminate marital status, some at least were the actions of widows. We have seen that between 1244 and 1281, Belia of Winchester/Bedford was involved, always as a widow, in at least 13 suits before the justices of the Jews. In several of these suits, she was the creditor-plaintiff impleading a Christian debtor.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The widow-as-defendant in debt litigation represents the next largest group of Jewish women before the Jewish Exchequer between 1219 and 1281, with 19 suits involving known widows as defendants.Footnote ¹²⁰ Many of these women were sued for the return of money owed to fellow Jews or, less often, to Christian creditors. The ever-active Belia of Winchester/Bedford was called upon in late 1244 to defend a debt suit brought against her by one Ingleram de Preus, a Christian from whom she herself had borrowed money.Footnote ¹²¹ A few widows, including the same Belia, were subject to the action of account, compelled thereby to provide proof in court of the sum owed to them by their debtors.Footnote ¹²² Others were summoned to answer those complaints of lending-related trespass, mentioned previously, that were often levelled at Jewish creditors, both male and female. In 1220, Chera of Winchester was accused of unlawfully disseising the widow of a deceased debtor, and Belia of Winchester/Bedford was herself twice sued for trespasses relating to her lending.Footnote ¹²³ Women like Belia and Chera of Winchester were not just lenders in their own right, but also members of complex and dynamic credit networks, some of which included Christian lenders.

Although the widow was the more conspicuous figure in debt and detinue litigation at the Jewish Exchequer, the presence of a significant number of married women alongside their husbands in similar pleading reminds us of those familial business networks and conjugal partnerships that not infrequently underpinned Jewish lending in thirteenth-century England, and that perhaps even occasioned some of the more violent intra-communal and interfamilial quarrels that have left their mark on the surviving plea rolls. Married women were involved in debt and detinue pleading, as plaintiffs and defendants, in 28 separate lawsuits, or 16% of the total number of Jewish women's pleas in this study.Footnote ¹²⁴ In all but two of these debt pleas, as has been mentioned, the wife was accompanied by her husband. Occasionally, too, married women were involved in trespass litigation directly associated with their financial activities, as when the unnamed wife of David was accused, with her husband and others, of improper lending practices in 1220.Footnote ¹²⁵ Frustratingly, however, many of the surviving trespass pleas defended by married Jewish couples are simply given as “a plea of trespass” (placitum de transgressione) without detail. It is likely not only that some of the widows’ debt (and related) litigation for which there is record had its roots in the same women's lending activities during marriage, but also that certain husband-and-wife pleas of this nature arose from the wife's activities before her marriage; however, the patchy survival of the plea rolls and the nature of the entries that have endured, more often documenting mesne process (the intermediary stages between the beginning of a suit and judgement) than the pleading itself, mean that the litigation records alone are unrevealing.

The relative frequency with which Jewish women were defendants in criminal litigation, and indeed in trespass pleas arising from some form of (alleged) physical altercation or public disorder, is also noteworthy. In 27 of their suit-appearances (or 13.5%) Jewish women were defendants in criminal pleading alone, and in several more they were defendants in trespass relating to a physical altercation or something similar. Plaintiffs are represented less in such litigation. In one sense, the number of suit-appearances in which Jewish women were plaintiffs in criminal and violent trespass litigation, shown in Table 2, is artificially high. The table displays the combined actions of all 130 women included in this study and not the separate lawsuits in which these women were represented; and, as noted, a small number of suits on the published rolls up to 1281 relate to episodes of “mob” violence perpetrated by groups of Jewish men and women. In two related criminal pleas of 1244–45, in which Bessa wife of Elias of Warwick was said to have been assaulted on the high street with such viciousness that she suffered a miscarriage, the defendants were all members of the family of Leo son of Deuleben. Five of the seven accused were women.Footnote ¹²⁶ In a comparably violent trespass suit brought by Juliana “the convert” in 1274 against members of the London Jewish community to which she had probably once belonged, four of the nine defendants identified by name were women. Three of them were wives reportedly acting in concert with their husbands.Footnote ¹²⁷ Nevertheless, the imbalance between plaintiffs and defendants in this context may well suggest that although Jewish women were sometimes arraigned at the Jewish Exchequer on charges such as those described—and further examples of Jewish women accused of disorderly conduct can certainly be found outside the plea rolls of the Jewish Exchequer—they were slower to prosecute such cases.Footnote ¹²⁸ The limiting of women's appeals to specific circumstances, although inconsistently applied during this period, is likely nevertheless to have militated against women readily bringing pleas of criminal violence and murder to the courts. These figures also serve further to undermine notions of women-as-victims in cases of physical violence in the past, or indeed of female violence as unusual or unnatural, and of medieval Jewish women enjoying genteel, domestic seclusion.Footnote ¹²⁹ Indeed, the attack on Bessa of Warwick, by a Jewish kin group that chiefly comprised women, represents a striking contrast to the fact that “abortion by assault” was a crime committed overwhelmingly by men.Footnote ¹³⁰