Licoricia Part 1

Rebecca Abrams is a British author, teacher and journalist, based in Oxford. She is a long-standing tutor on the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and a regular literary critic for the Financial Times.

Rebecca produces both fiction and non-fiction. Her 2022 book ‘Licoricia of Winchester: Power and Prejudice in Medieval England’ was written in collaboration with The Licoricia of Winchester Appeal, and has met withcritical success in the UK and beyond. Other works include Touching Distance;The Jewish Journey (in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum); When Parents Die; and Three Shoes One Sock & No Hairbrush.

Transcript

Licorcia 

Intro: Welcome to Hampshire HisBites. Join us as we delve into the past and go on a journey to discover some of the county's best, and occasionally unknown, history. We'll be speaking to experts, as well as enthusiasts, asking them to reveal some of our hidden heritage, as well as share with you a few fascinating untold stories.

Richard: Rebecca, thank you very much for joining me today to talk about Licoricia of Winchester. Why don't you start by telling me a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you came to be involved in writing about Licoricia? 

Rebecca: Well, I'm an author and journalist, and I write both fiction and non fiction.

And in the last, um, 10, 12 years, I suppose, I've been drawn into writing on Jewish history specifically. So this wasn't a plan, it wasn't an intention, it just sort of happened. But in about 2012, I started work on a book about the Jewish objects in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where I live, and using these objects to tell the story of the Jewish people across 4, 000 years. And what's interesting, it was a way of recurating them in a sense, into restoring their Jewish context, which had been lost in the way that they'd been curated in the bigger narrative of the museum. I see. So I got very interested in that and the relationship between objects and curation and narrative of stories.

And then I also was interested in how these objects almost seem to kind of reflect a very Anglo Jewish experience, which is quite invisible actually, to be quite assimilated and integrated and not obviously Jewish. So that was sort of floating around the back of my head. And then the book I did after that was about the Jewish manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which again, one of the top collections in the world, never been written about before.

The focus of the book is looking at the collectors and what they collected. So again, it's finding the human stories in possibly rather dry looking artefacts. Now, I knew about Licoricia of Winchester because even though she's called Licoricia of Winchester, she actually lived in Oxford for a couple of quite important years in her life.

And one of her children also lived in Oxford at various points. So there's a sort of connection between Oxford and Winchester and I'd come across her story. And then just before the pandemic, I was approached by the Licoricia of Winchester Appeal, who asked me if I would write a short biography of Licoricia to go with the statue of Licoricia that now stands so magnificently in Dury Street.

So I thought it sounded really interesting and said yes. And that's how I came to be involved in this project and came to write this book. 

Richard: Brilliant. And it is a fantastic book. I've really enjoyed reading it myself. And it's lovely, of course, to have the statue on Dury Street today. So why don't you start telling me a little bit about what we know about Licoricia? Who was she? 

Rebecca: Well, she was a phenomenally successful Jewish medieval businesswoman, and we know that because of the records about her activities. But it's also actually quite interesting how little we know about her, and in terms of history, she's been very forgotten until very recently. Uh, there was a Winchester based historian called Suzanne Bartlett who wrote a book about her back in 2012, and she really sort of, you know, helped get the ball rolling.

I mean, there was, in terms of reviving Licoricia's, um, reputation, but the fact is, is she was one of the most important Jewish women. not just in Medieval England, but in Medieval Europe, really a very, very significant figure. And she's been completely kind of sidelined by history as so many amazing women are.

So on the one hand, we know quite a lot about her, but on the other hand, there's an awful lot about who we don't know. And that of course makes her a fantastically interesting character. I mean, what I can assume from what we do know and what about what she did is she must have been an extraordinary individual.

She must have been very determined, she must have been pretty fearless, she must have been probably pretty annoying, I'd have thought. She didn't take, I don't suppose she tolerated fools. She was quite quick to take people to court when they didn't do what they should have done. She was also taken to court herself on several occasions when she didn't do what she should have done.

Okay. So she was quite a strong character. And the other thing is that she overcame enormous obstacles. So she must have been. Very resilient, very resourceful, very, very impressive, really, whatever, whatever way you look at it. She was a phenomenal woman. She broke all the stereotypes as a woman and as a Jew to do what she did. So she's great. 

Richard: So an incredible woman right at the heart of our local history in Hampshire, in Winchester, which is fantastic. something to be really, really proud of. And in terms of, if I guess if we start with the basic facts, so she was born in the early 1200s. 

Rebecca: So we don't know when she was born. We don't know where she was born or when she was born, but working from the probable dates of birth of her children, her first child to her last child, and knowing what we do about female fertility, which hasn't changed that much, and knowing when she was married and had a husband to have children with, and knowing when she died.

We can kind of work out, well I'm sort of assuming, I've worked out, I don't know whether other historians would agree with me, but I think she must have probably been born between about 1200 and 1208, and she died in 1277. So that means that she was pretty much keeping pace with the year of the century.

So if it was 1205, she was probably around 5, and if it was 1215, she was probably around 15, and so forth. That kind of fits with the dates of her children and kind of probable ages around which she would have married. But we don't know. We don't know her date of birth. Um, we do know her date of death and I'll come to that later.

Yeah. We also don't know where exactly she was born. So sometimes we know her as Licoricia of Winchester, but what that tells us is that that's where she had her business. That was her business headquarters were in Winchester. And in fact, we know they were in Jury Street, which wasn't then called Jury Street.

It was then called, um, Shoemaker Street, and I won't attempt to pronounce it in Anglo Saxon, but so we know where she was. as an adult. She lived for a time in Oxford, but she's also referred to as Licoricia of Canterbury. Ah. So it's possible that she originally came from Canterbury. Interesting. And her first husband was called Abraham of Kent.

So it's possible that they actually both came from there and then moved to Winchester. which would make sense because it's around the time that they probably moved there. The Royal Mint had just been reopened in Winchester. So it would have become and Jews could only work as moneylenders in places where there was a mint.

So then Winchester at that point would have become quite an attractive place for a young Jewish couple who just starting out, you know, in life, just maybe looking to get their phones home and have their children. That's where they could have had some chance of doing well for themselves. So that may be why they came to Winchester at that point.

Yeah. Or maybe they were already in Winchester. We don't really know, but just piecing things together, that seems to me quite a plausible explanation of what they were doing in Winchester. And then, I mean, so things were probably going reasonably well for them, and then disaster sort of struck, really, in 1225.

Henry III was a very young king at this point still. He'd recently come of age. And Henry III is very linked to Winchester as well, it was where his, one of his favourite castles was, he spent a lot of time there. In 1225, um, her husband, Licoricia’s husband, was accused of killing a Christian baby, or child, to use its blood in a religious ritual around Passover.

And he was arrested, and he was found guilty. And we don't have a record of when he died. But we certainly know that by 1234, Licoricia was a widow because she appears in the financial records at that time and she's referred to as Licoricia Winchester, who was the wife of Abraham of Kent. I see. So we know that she was widowed by that stage.

So he had died. If he was found guilty of murdering a Christian, he was almost certainly executed. So, by 1225, which by the time she was around 1225 herself, she had three, possibly four young children. Her husband had been killed on a completely trumped up charges of this, this ritual murders, [00:08:00] which was a myth.

I mean, it just didn't happen. There's no evidence. There's no evidence for it, but it was a kind of standard Christian trope that Jews killed Christians to use their blood in Jewish practices. I mean, it was an anti Semitic. Yeah. But so we know that she was a single mum, a widow, and probably had no money because if, when her husband was found guilty and executed, all his chattels would have been confiscated.

Right. So everything that he owned would have been confiscated at that point. So she was probably in a pretty parlous state financially as well. What's really mysterious is that sometime between 1225 and 1234, when she first appears in the record, she'd somehow managed to get her act together and is, uh, occur, you know, was obviously making quite a substantial loan to a man called Hugh Sansever, and the reason she had made this loan, um, in partnership with another Jewish person.

But they were up in court because Sansever didn't want to pay the interest on the loan. And in fact the court ruled in his favour. But we know from that interaction what the amount was and it was a hundred pounds. Now a hundred pounds might not sound much to you and me today, you know. But in the 13th century, it was enough to buy a fully fitted out brand new ship.

So it was a lot of money. Um, a house, a big, quite a grand house, a grand stone house at that time might be worth about 16 pounds. So a hundred pounds is a vast amount of money and that's how she obviously had made a loan for that amount of money. Again, as I said, in partnership, not entirely on her own, but so by 1234, she's a successful money lender on the Winchester scene.

Richard: Interesting. Okay. And she went on, didn't she? I don't want to skip too far ahead if there's more interesting tales to tell in between. But she went on to make a very advantageous marriage and to increase her wealth further, did she? 

Rebecca: So she did. I mean, she didn't rush into it. She was a young, fertile, wealthy woman.

She must have been quite marketable, to put it in that respect, as far as the men were concerned. But acting independently. Acting independently as a, as a businesswoman, as a financier. But she did not rush into a second marriage. So let's assume Abraham was by 1225, she is single right up until the 1240s.

So she spends the next, at least the next 15 years on her own. And I suspect she could have had, you know, there must have been many suitors. Anyway, she did not, she was not having any of it. She obviously quite liked being independent and saw many advantages to it. Yeah, one couldn't imagine what But this all changed in the kind of early 1240s because we don't know exactly how she met her next husband but certainly by 1242 she was very keen to marry somebody called David of Oxford and David of Oxford was very keen to marry Licoricia and it led to this It's a tremendous scandal.

David of Oxford, I should just say, um, was originally from Lincoln. The Jewish community was sort of scattered around the country, but had very, very close links. He was originally from Lincoln. He'd moved to Oxford [00:11:00] in 1216, and he was one of the most important financiers from the Jewish community in England.

He was the major, one of the major banks. He was one of the kind of, you know, the Lloyds. of the day. You know, he was a, he was a very, very important figure in how the, the, the feudal economy worked. Yeah. In the loans he was making and the people he, the kind of quality of people he was making loans to. So he was making very high level loans.

Now he and Licoricia met and decided that, um, they should marry. And the problem was that David was already married. Ah, that old chestnut. That old chestnut. And he had a wife called Muriel, um, who was also from Lincoln, and they'd been married for a long time. They didn't have children, and this may be one of the reasons why David really urgently wanted to marry.

But the problem was, is that according to Jewish law at that time, you shouldn't divorce a wife without her permission. And Muriel wasn't giving her permission. Muriel was having none of it. Muriel was, like, over my dead body. So what David did is he actually went to the governing body, really, of the Jewish community, which was called the Beth Din, which was based then in Canterbury.

Remember that Licoricia’s family originally came from Canterbury, so there's another link to Canterbury. He went to the Beth Din in Canterbury and petitioned them for permission to divorce Muriel and marry Licoricia. And the interesting thing is that the Beth Din agreed, um, even kind of the general ruling at the time was that you shouldn't divorce without your wife's consent.

Okay. There's a kind of, there's some interesting sort of back, theological backstory to this in terms of the fact that, uh, some, that that particular ruling had just expired. It had been set, it had been the case for a thousand years, but that it was set to expire in 1242 or something. So that rule had actually recently lapsed and it's possible that David made a theological case for why he should be able to marry Licoricia and divorce Muriel. But the other explanation is he may just have made a straightforward financial case. He may have said to them, Look, I'm one of the most prosperous and important and powerful Jews with the most leverage with the ruling people, the kings and queens of this country.

I am really useful to you and my wealth is really useful to you. And if I die without an heir, all of my estate will become the property of the crown. So actually. It's really in all of our interests, not just in my interests, for me to be allowed to remarry somebody who we know can have children, before it's too late, so that she can produce an heir for me.

And then my estate will pass to my heir, or at least a portion of it. So, he may have made a financial argument, he may have made a theological argument, but in any case, he made his argument and he got their permission. I imagine it would be quite difficult to stand up to somebody like David of Oxford, but there we go.

And, uh, the Beth Tins said, yes, we Muriel said absolutely no. She rallied her supporters in Lincoln and she sent a delegation off to Paris. Now, the Paris Beth Dinn was higher in authority than the English Beth Dinn. And the Paris Beth Dinn overruled the decision of the English Beth Dinn. At which point, Licorice and David were back to square one.

Now again, we don't know exactly what was happening behind the scenes, but the next thing that happens is that Henry III issues two letters, one through one of his archbishops and, and then another through some others through his sheriffs saying Muriel and her supporters must desist. He would hear no more talk of all of this.

Anyone supporting Muriel and opposing David would be punishable by death and David of Oxford was free to marry whoever he chose. So we don't know again what happened behind the scenes, but certainly Henry stepped in and very firmly said, I don't want to hear any more of this. David can marry who he likes.

Richard: So there's probably some influence there, and there's obviously a real significance here to the crown. 

Rebecca: Real significance to the crown because, of course, David's massive estate belonged to the crown, technically, because this is a bit of history which we haven't sort of covered yet, but the Jews had already been in England for 100 years before Licoricia was born, and they came from Rouen in about 1070 with William the Conqueror.

So they came from France, they were from Normandy, and they came with the special protection of the king, which had some advantages and disadvantages, but basically they were sort of the property of the king, and they were there in the country to serve the king, and everything that was theirs was actually the king's.

They themselves were the king's. So no one could attack a Jew without technically attacking something that belonged to the king. So mostly their wealth was there for the king. Got it. And one of the Aspects of the Licoricia story which we'll come to is just how the crown, the kings of England and the queens of England and the bishops of England and everybody with any power in England made really active use of Jewish assets to enhance their own wealth and position.

But so when we come to Licoricia and David and we think what on earth was going on that he managed to persuade, they managed to somehow get the king himself to intervene in their marriage plans. It's possible again that. It was pointed out to the king or occurred to the king that effectively what was happening is that the Jews in Paris were dictating to the king of England what he could and couldn't do with his own Jewish subject.

So that in itself may have been completely unacceptable to him. He's like, I'm the king of England. These are the Jews of England. I am in charge of what they can and can't do. The other issue, of course, is, as I've said, you know, David was a [00:16:00] very successful businessman with a great deal of money and that money, If he was allowed to, well, it was just that the king had an interest in what happened to his estate and there's a possibility, one argument is that had the Paris Beth didn't decide what he could and couldn't do, they could have confiscated his estate.

I see. So again, there might have been a way for the king to have kept David's estate. To himself, which would have been at risk. I see. Had he not been allowed to marry Licoricia. Maybe it was just like, Yeah, you've done me a few favours, I'll do you a favour. But maybe there was a bit more to it than that.

We don't really know. Whatever the outcome, The King's intervention obviously was decisive. And, um, Muriel had to just go quietly. She was moved out of her very grand house in Oxford. Um, which is now the site of the town hall in Oxford. And she was moved into a much smaller house, sort of around the back.

And Licoricia and David got married and moved into the house on the main, the main drag. And they then had another child. So then Licoricia did have her last child, um, a year later in 1243. It's a little boy called Asher, who always referred to as Doosman or Sweetman, that's his nickname. And, and I like to imagine that this was actually a very, kind of, happy time in Licoricia’s life, that it really was a love match, not just a strategic match.

Who knows? We don't know. But in any case, she was now in a very, very, very, privileged position. You know, she was not only the first lady of the Oxford jury, she was pretty much the first lady of the whole of the English jury. Her wealth combined with David's, her business portfolio combined with David's. I mean, they were the celebrity couple.

Yeah. You know, uh, some parade. So yes, they were living the high life. These two King of England was one of the clients, his wife, Simon to Montford's wife, Simon to Montford. All of the big names at the top of the English establishment were doing business through people like David of Oxford and Licoricia.

Richard: So they were really keyed into that kind of, that very national power network. Absolutely. Across church, kind of nobility, royalty, and indeed, as you said, it was sort of plugged into a wider network of connections, possibly across the continent, or certainly across Northwest Europe. 

Rebecca: Yes, and, and one of the problems for England at this time was that the court around the king and queen was very French.

Mm. And Eleanor of. Provence, who was Henry III's French wife, had brought a lot of her relatives over, and this was deeply unpopular with a lot of the English barons and people lower down in the English system. So the court itself was very French, it had a very French flavour, a lot of French fashion, French music, French literature, and the Jews, because they themselves came from France and they spoke Old French, they were themselves much more kind of keyed in to that world than the ordinary peasantry.

Interesting. Which may also have been a reason why they were a sort of target for hostility because there was a lot of hostility at that time directed at what were called the aliens. One of the fascinating things about Licoricia’s story is how many resonances there are with now. So a lot of xenophobia, there was a lot of push back against people who are perceived as foreigners.

Yes. And of course a lot of those foreigners were in the court. They were the queen and her relatives and a lot of them also were the Jews in the country. So the Jewish people kind of would have shared a language with the court, they would have shared kind of customs, and they would have had a kind of continental perspective.

Yes. They were much more worldly than your average English peasant at that time. Yeah. They were also much more literate. And so all of these things kind of meant there was probably a sympathy, possibly, or certainly a cultural familiarity between the Jewish community and the rulers of the country, the English rulers of the country, which might have been perceived without enthusiasm by other members of English society.

Richard: So it's a kind of complicated picture, but quite an interesting picture. I mean, fascinating and totally interwoven with kind of national events. But is it important to note that not all of the Jewish community was necessarily very well off and wealthy? 

Rebecca: It's terribly important. Thank you for mentioning that, Richard.

It's terribly, terribly important because one of the anti Semitic stereotypes that's kind of stayed with us since the medieval period is that Jews were moneylenders. Yeah. Full stop. Yeah. But actually, most Jews weren't moneylenders, either in England or anywhere else. Christian at this time, even though officially that was forbidden because of a crackdown on Christian moneylenders by the church.

It's certainly the case that by the 13th century, most moneylenders in England were Jewish. Interesting. But not all Jews in England were moneylenders by any means. In fact, only a minority were moneylenders. Got it. They were involved in many other occupations as well. Of those who were involved in money lending, both men and women could be money lenders, Jewish men and Jewish women.

But again, of those, only a tiny, tiny proportion at the top were acting at a high level. Uh, the sort of licoricia show was in the upper echelons of the money lenders, but there were only a tiny number, like a handful, maybe 10, 15 people at any one time. And the majority of Jewish moneylenders, let's get this really clear, they were doing pawnbroking.

It was really low level stuff. It was like, well, you give me your shoes for the weekend and I'll give you some money and you can go and, you know, get some, you know, go out for a drink on a Friday night. So it was that level of moneylending, it was very, very minor, insignificant. They certainly weren't making a living out of it, they were scraping by.

So this idea, which we've been left with, Yes. of the kind of the Jewish money, it all feeds into really grotesque anti Semitic stereotypes, like the protocols of Zion and the kind of Jewish conspiracy and all of that is a legacy of the medieval period. Yeah. In which Jews were used. to keep the economic wheels turning.

But they certainly, the vast majority of them, weren't beneficiaries of that system. No. And that is itself an anti Semitic distortion. And the records speak to this, don't they? 

Richard: I mean, I know we might get onto this in a bit, but there are various statutes and kind of limitations imposed by the Crown on what Jews could do.

In fact, there are quite a lot of those, and they sort of build up. one upon another. But those statutes include a list of professions that you could sort of take part in. By no means are they limited to kind of money lending. There are some very ordinary down to earth professions. Yeah, I mean they were making shoes, which is probably why there were so many of them in Shoemaker Street.

Rebecca: Yeah. They were making food. They were working as doctors and midwives. They were working as lawyers. They were doing everything. They were probably doing rag and bone trade. They were sort of doing everything. Yeah. So it is a real distortion and I think it's a really important message to correct. It's. It's very sticky, that particular prejudice or assumption, 

Richards: Yeah. I mean this is why it's so great to look into the history as we can see it, and obviously it's interesting too because it does reinforce just how different and how significant Licoricia was, because she was in a sort of a peak of society and well connected.

Rebecca: What I love about Licoricia is that she seems to uphold a negative stereotype of the rich Jewish banker, but actually she was so exceptional that what she does is completely the opposite. She actually shows how, she's actually a way. into seeing actually how misleading that stereotype is. So she sort of subverts the caricature or the stereotype.

I mean, to put some figures to this, about half the Jewish population of England at any one time in the 200 years that they were in England were too poor to pay any taxes at all. They came below the threshold. for eligibility to pay tax. So that tells you. And also, we know from the financial records that different Jewish communities around England gave very different kind of amounts of money.

And within those communities, different people gave very different amounts of money. Yes. So there were a few people. I like today, you know, a few people who are carrying the community financially, but their wealth was very significant to the crown, both cumulatively. So all the little bits, the pennies here and the pennies there, you know, it's like, it's like the government now taxing people who have barely enough to scrape by, still fills the coffers as well as the money from people at the top of the scale. But licoricia, it was I'm a very exceptional person.

Outro: Hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. If you would like to find out a little bit more about what we've been talking about, then please visit the website www. winchesterheritageopendays.org Click on Hampshire HisBites and there you'll find today's show notes, as well as some links to more information. Thank you.