Licoricia Part 2

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

  Intro: Welcome to Hampshire HistBites. 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: Well, let's dive back into her story then. Why don't you tell me, we've got some really brilliant examples that we've discussed of her work, her career and what we know of the sources. Do you want to pick up after David's death? 

Rebecca: Yeah, so there we are. Everything was going really well for Licoricia and then suddenly in 1244, David died without any warning and we don't know if he was ill or whether he just had a heart attack or what happened to him. But he was probably in his 50s by this stage, which is reasonably getting along for the 13th century. Anyway, he dies and then Licoricia has a massive problem because when her first husband died, she was left with no money at all. The second time her husband died, she's left with so much money that that also could ruin her. 

So what happens is that as I mentioned, when a Jewish person died, their entire estate passed the crown and then the heirs had to buy it back by paying a third of its value. And if you're a multi -millionaire, as David was, it's a huge amount of money. So Licoricia had to raise this vast sum of money in order to be able to buy back two -thirds of the estate. And the king wasn't taking any chance on her leaving the country or anything like that, so what happens was almost immediately afterwards after David’s death, we don’t know exactly when but I don’t suppose he wasted much time, she was arrested, taken to the Tower of London and kept prisoner there for then next eight months. Bear in mind, she just had a baby, so she had a one year old baby, we don't know what happened to the baby, don't know if they went with her, or whether he was put out to a wet nurse. But Licoricia, we know, was kept in the Tower of London and what was going on during that time was that all the evidence of David's bonds, loans, debts was all being gathered, and his estate was being assessed. The value of his estate was being assessed. And it took a very long time because his up was all over the country. And once they assess the amount, then they can begin to haggle over how much she should pay. And the interesting thing is that she negotiated a very good deal for herself, a very good for herself. So after eight months, what she came up with was that she would have to pay and again bear in mind a big house was worth about £16, she had to pay 5000 Marks in order to repurchase the estate. We are talking in the millions, is a huge amount of money. 4000 of that was to go directly to Henry III's passion project, which was a beautiful, lavish golden shrine to Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. So the deal was that she was going to make a very, very substantial contribution to the creation of this shrine to Henry III’s idol, Edward the Confessor.

 She also had to make a personal donation to the shrine of 1700 marks, and then she had to agree that she was going to, for the rest of her life, pay 25 marks a year in tax.

Richard: This is huge amounts of money.

Rebecca: Huge amounts of money. But the quid pro quo is that she was now going to be exempt from paying Jewish taxations for the rest of her life. 

Richard: Okay. 

Rebecca: And Jewish taxations, which we haven't really talked about yet, but they could wipe out even the most prosperous individuals overnight. These taxations were a real problem. And she was exempt from them and they actually, 1244 on, they became more and more of a problem. So that exemption was massive. 

And the second thing is that she wasn't just allowed to buy back three quarters of David's estate. She was allowed to buy back the whole of his estate. 

Richard: Okay. So it's a real privileged position.

Rebecca: So there was some really interesting bargaining going on, some really interesting negotiations. And, you know, I don't know why she managed, or why Henry agreed to that. But, I mean, they obviously walked away from that deal both quite happy. They both got something really important that they wanted. It's also an important reminder that many of our great medieval monuments and buildings were funded by the Jewish community, by money really extorted from the Jewish community, or certainly given under a great deal of pressure. You know, so we think of these things, I mean, it's interesting, we talk a lot about the heritage of slavery and colonialism, you know, the road statue just down the road from where we're talking now, you know, or Colston in Bristol, you know, all these 18th century stuff, which was built on slave money. But a lot of the great, beautiful cathedrals of medieval England were built on Jewish money, and they were effectively an enslaved population. You know, they couldn't leave the country without the king's permission. They couldn't do this, they couldn't do that. You know, everything they owned belonged to the king. They themselves belong to the king. So I think it's kind of really important to remember that. We tend to kind of rather forget… 

Richard: These giant extortions. 

Rebecca: These giant extortions, yeah.

Richard: I would like, if we have time, I'd love to dive into those. 

Rebecca: She does this deal with Henry III, and then she's free to go. And she walks out of the Tower of London, and she returns to Winchester, not to Oxford. She goes back to Winchester. 

Richard: She comes home to us. 

Rebecca: Her sons are waiting, and her grandchildren are waiting, and her nephews and nieces are waiting. So she goes back to Winchester and to her home in Jewry Street and that is her home and her business headquarters then for the rest of her life. And she's, you know, at one level, she's triumphant and she has the king very much on her side. And there's a really interesting case that happens quite soon afterwards, which is the Thomas Charlecote case. And the interesting thing about the Thomas Charlecote case from my perspective is that it shows just how much she could rely on the King to come in and help her at this point. So the story is that this man called Thomas Charlecote, who was a local gentry, member of the local gentry, a landowner. He'd taken out a loan with David and Licoricia in 46 and then he'd renegotiated the terms of the loan with Licoricia and sort of it was all set against his estate. 1245 Thomas Charlecote is found drowned in a lake on his own estate. No one knows who's done it. Licoricia then takes over the estates and starts selling off bits of it here, left, right and centre, which is not legal. She's not allowed to do that according to the law. No, there are different rules for Jews and Christians in this respect, but she is definitely clearly outside of the law in what she's doing at this point and she's basically asset stripping the estate while she's waiting for her debt to be repaid. Now, in 1252, Thomas Charlecote's heir comes of age, and he promptly, thoroughly fed up with Licoricia, obviously, understandably, takes her to court. And it's a very sort of scandalous case, partly because she's definitely breaking the law. But secondly because the first jury she thinks won't be sufficiently sympathetic and the king intervenes, sacks the jury and installs a new jury who he thinks will be more sympathetic. In fact, they're not more sympathetic and they find Licoricia guilty again. She's back in the Tower, by the way, when there's trials going on. 

Richard: I see. 

Rebecca: She doesn't go off anywhere. But then the king intervenes and says, well, even if you do find her guilty, I'm capping the fine that she can pay, I think it's one silver crown or half a silver crown. Anyway, not a huge amount of money for her. So he's ready to basically break the law on her behalf. I mean, you know, reminds of a proroguing of Parliament going on, you know, here. But the king of England himself is stepping in and enabling a Jewish woman to break the law. And when the law, because nobody is above the law, when the law says no, she's guilty and must be fined, the King still steps in to try and limit the personal pain that she might experience as a result. So it’s a really interesting mirror into their relationship at this time. 

Richard: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting as it's another kind of facet, another reflection in the significance of her work, probably in relation to royal and national funding financing and also it kind of really underlines the access that she had to the King. 

Rebecca: I think that’s right. It seems that really from the 30s on, she had quite significant access, both in the Great Court in Winchester when he was there, but also, there are no surviving letters, but she obviously had channels of communication that she could talk to him. And for a period of time, I think really from the time of David's death through to the sort of mid -50s, she was quite a favoured person.

Richard: Yes. 

Rebecca: I think there was already a relationship there before because of his intervention and their marriage. But I think we can see that once she provided all that money for the shrine to Edward the Confessor, he was prepared to go and put his neck out to help her as well.  think it's important to make clear that we shouldn't assume he was philosemitic. That didn't mean he was a friend of all Jews and in fact, Henry III's conduct towards the Jews generally was pretty appalling. Very, very heavy taxation of the Jews, which really brought the Jewry to its needs. He was also very keen on Jews converting to Christianity and quite zealously pursued that. He set up a house of converts in London. And then the other thing is in 1255, he actively intervened in a blood libel case, which was in which large numbers of Jewish people were collectively imprisoned, charged with this murder. Again, no evidence for the murder whatsoever. But Henry III actively intervened to say, yes, this particular person should be found guilty. So, you know, that was the first time in European history that a ruling monarch had intervened in a case like this to support a blood libel charge.

His conduct was very, very destructive to the Jewish community and caused a great deal of suffering. So individually, it's like some of my best friends are, you know, I mean, we shouldn't assume from his conduct towards Licoricia that that was extended, or that it reflected his attitude to Jews more generally. 

Richard: No, not at all. I mean, it's very uncomfortable listening, and it's really important to bear that in mind, I think, isn't it? So we've got a picture here of somebody who is living an extraordinary life, both in terms of her own ability to conduct business, to pick herself back up again after the death of one husband, and then, you know, negotiate her way into a really strong settlement after the death of her second husband, somebody who's got real access to royalty, to the nobility, and indeed, as you said, to kind of the high levels of the church, and also somebody who is really significant, you know, who is funding the King's Passion Projects, but who will also be funding a lot of really important work going on all around the country, both kind of in the centre of government and in a dispersed way. Why don't we just take a couple of minutes to talk through the significance of the Jewish community more widely in this sense. So we could start in Winchester. We know that Licoricia lived in Jewry Street, I think opposite the Synagogue, quite close to what is now the Jailhouse pub, where there used to be the old city jail. Tell me if that's not quite right. But why don't we just dive in and sort of imagine ourselves in that world?

Rebecca: Yeah. Well, I think, obviously, I tried to do that when I was writing the book. I tried to imagine what her world must have looked like and sounded like on a daily basis and one of the important things, again, I think if you're kind of populating this landscape, is to remember that it was a very, very Christian landscape. You have the castle right there, you know, huge, magnificent. You have the cathedral there, huge, magnificent. All expanded a lot during the 11th Century. You know, the Cathedral was massively expanded during the 12th Century. And then the Castle again was extensively renovated during the 13th Century. So these are big monuments. Basically, on top of that, you also have lots of churches, you have the monasteries, you have the there's a lot of religious, ecclesiastical Christian buildings. So there's a very, it's a very Christian landscape. But nestled within that, you have, you have the Jewry, you have the Jewish houses. It's really important to say that these weren't, although a lot of Jews lived on Jewry Street, they weren't confined to Jewish Street. There were no ghettos, we don't have that in England. So they lived in that little network of streets, just very close to the Castle and Cathedral. So she would have certainly, you know, the sound of bells tolling would have been a huge part of the soundscape of Medieval Winchester.

There would have been a lot of sound of builders hammering and carpenters soaring. I mean, it was a city that was expanding a lot at that point architecturally. There's a lot of architectural work going on. So, there's a busy, noisy environment, but in terms of the Jews, their life was quite structured around a few sorts of landmarks, and one of them would have been the synagogue, as you say, and the Synagogue was probably near Licoricia’s house, even before it was Licoricia's house, it served as the house of the Master of the Synagogue. And that was the opposite, as you rightly said, the old jailhouse because the old jailhouse is pretty much where you said it was in the Medieval Period. So Licoricia’s house was opposite that and the Synagogue was part of the grounds of her house. It may well be the Mikveh was, as well, which was the Jewish ritual bath, because it's never been discovered, but it could have been there as part of that property. So also what may have been there, you may have had a facility for slaughtering meat according to the rules of Kashrut, so kosher meat. That may also have been part of that complex of Licoricia's house. If you're in Winchester now, to get a sense of it, it's the, the property stretches all the way back, or would have stretched all the way back to the street behind, which I think is Parchment Street, isn't it? 

Richard: So Staple Gardens behind, then I think it does go down to, we’ll check on a map 

Rebecca: We’ll check but it went right the way back. It was a long property and the land behind would have been, there would have been other buildings in that, which belonged to that house, part of is (messarge). So now it’s a carpark belonging to, I think to an architect or something like that. Chartered Accountants?

Richard: St Peter Street, actually. Yeah, I know what you mean.

Rebecca: St Peter Street, which probably was called Parchment Street. Again, I can't remember. Is Parchment Street different?

Richard: There is another Parchment Street.

Rebecca: Called Parchment Street. So St. Peter Street, I can't remember what it was called in the Medieval Period. It had a different name. So you have the synagogue, you have the Mikveh. Then the other key place in the Jewish landscape was the Cemetery. And the Cemetery was up behind the castle. As you go out, is it Ramsey Road? 

Richard: Romsey Road. 

Rebecca: Romsey Road, so it's up there and it's off to the side there. So it's Crowder Terrace, those little streets there. And there's now a locker flat on what would have been the entrance to the Synagogue. But it was excavated at one point, so we know that's where the Synagogue was. And the Synagogue was a hugely important part of the Jewish community. In fact, there was a duty for Jewish community to have a Cemetery even more than to have a Synagogue. So burying your dead the correct way is a hugely important part of Jewish life then as now. So you have the Cemetery up on the hill, you have the Scholar down on what's now Jewry Street, the Mikveh possibly was there as well. And then another really important place would have been the market. And the Jewish community of Medieval Winchester, they bought and sold their goods in the market like everybody else, even though officially they weren't necessarily meant to buy directly from Christians. 

So, but we know that they did. So that's the landscape of these key sites. And the Synagogue is interesting. he fact that the Synagogue was behind a house is very typical because it's quite clear that Jewish people didn't want to be too visible in their religious practice. The Synagogue, 

I should say, for anyone listening who doesn't know, the Synagogue is more than just a place to go and pray. Men were required to pray three times a day, but there wasn't any injunction on women to pray. But the Synagogue in any case was also a social centre. It's where people met with a community centre. It was a place where Jewish disputes would be held or rules would be made. It was a mixture of a town hall, a community centre, a social centre and a, you know, a religious centre. Adults went there to study. Children also went there to study as part of their Jewish education. So there was a lot going on. So Licoricia's house was not just her business at the epicentre, with the Synagogue in the back of the ground, it would have been an absolute hive of activity. That was the epicentre for the community. 

Richard: And it was really quite a vital community, wasn't it? And interestingly, we know of at least two other significant female money lenders in that community alongside Licoricia, which I think is quite interesting to highlight. So I'm thinking of... 

Rebecca: Chera of Winchester, yeah. So it is interesting. And asking this question, how did Licoricia recover from the death of her first husband? One possibility is that the Chera of Winchester, who was a very, very important Jewish female moneylender in the generation before Licoricia, actually stepped in and helped her. And Licoricia was also friends with her daughter -in -law, Belia. She's a sort of insignificant woman in Licoricia’s history. Belia also was a reasonably successful moneylender.

So there are these other women on the scene. She's not the first and last. There are a few of them, probably about 15 in all, significant women over that period. And some of them, of course, would have inherited wealth. Some of them would have made their own wealth. I mean, Licoricia is interesting because she seems to have made her own wealth. She didn't inherit it from anyone that we know. So Winchester is a really important city in this story. And it had been the capital of England, of course, but it wasn't the capital of England in Licoricia's day, but it was still a very, very important royal city and they would have known they were the citizens of a kind of happening place.

Richard: Yeah which is brilliant isn't it obviously brilliant people doing brilliant things in quite a lively spot.

Rebecca: Maybe the word citizens is a bit anachronistic but anyway.

Richard: Yeah I'd love to go down that road. I'm looking at the time and thinking maybe that could be another episode for us. But why don't we bring ourselves back then to Licoricia because unfortunately she came to an unfortunate end in the 1277 is that right?

Rebecca: So she did. So to fill in the gap between the Thomas Charlecote case in 1250s and then Licoricia's death in 1277, I'd like to just pick up on something you mentioned earlier, which is that this was a time of rapidly increasing anti -Semitism and anti -Jewish persecution. So in every decade from 1222 on, there is anti -Jewish legislation. And this really picks up pace as we go into the 50s and 60s and 70s. And it becomes increasingly punitive, increasingly restrictive, increasingly brutal to the extent that in 1250s you have a statute concerning the Jews. In 1253 in which a rule that had been made in 1222 but never really imposed, was then imposed and that was that Jews must wear an identifying badge. It is important to say that to listeners that England was the first country to impose an identifying badge on its Jewish population. The first country in Europe to do that. And from the 1250s on, it enforced it quite stringently, which again is a kind of indication of how the Jewish community was viewed at that time, as well as how they were treated. How they were treated was also pretty appalling. The country was going for a very, very turbulent time. It had one civil war when Licoricia was a teenager, and in the 1260s it descended to another civil war led by Simon De Montford, who was married to Henry III's sister, Eleanor De Montford. Simon led this, really spearheaded this civil war, and the Battle of Lewis, which took place in 1264, Simon De Montfort defeated Henry III and became the de facto king of England. And one of his first acts was to ban all Jewish money lending, which of course cut a lot of people off from their essential livelihood. As I said, they were operating at a low level, but they still depended on that income to live.

It also had a very bad effect, obviously, on the more prosperous, successful, high -level money -lenders. So that was really bad news, and it was an indication of kind of the direction of travel, and things really just got worse and worse. 

So, then King Henry III dies in 1274, and then his son, Edward, becomes King, and Edward is really zealously anti Jewish. His religious sensibility is a very hard line. He sees the Jews as a massive problem. They're also a problem for the economy because the economy is so dependent on money lending and Edward wants to sort it out and clean it up. And one of the reasons Henry had run into such trouble was because of what was seen as some kind of complicity between the Christians and the Jews in land grabs. You know, also these things. Actually, the Jews were just being used by the Christians to get what they wanted. But nevertheless, you know, your hostility is towards the person who comes and knocks on the door and said ‘Can I have that £100 I lent you,’ it's not to the person who said to that person ‘Go and get that £100 because I want it’. So the Jews got it in the neck either way from both directions. And Edward was really determined to kind of clear up the economic situation, to deal with anti-Semitism and to kind of reward anti-Semitism really by showing that he too was going to be very harsh on the Jews.

It was all kind of bound up with kind of Christian theology at that time as well, of course, and it was a complicated combination of different factors. But anyway, long and short of it, it was 1275. Edward I first issue is the Statute of Jewry, which is just two years before Licoricia's death, and that statute imposes all sorts of really catastrophic measures on the Jews. First, they can't do money lending of any kind. All forms of Jewish money lending are outlawed.

Secondly, they can't inherit, so nothing can be passed on to their children. So all children basically start in a position of complete poverty. It's designed to kind of squeeze them out. And to me, it's reminiscent really kind of the way that the Windrush generation were treated, you know, once their usefulness was over. It was just to make life unbearable for them and then push them out through one means or another. 

Richard: Squeezed as far as you can be squeezed.

Rebecca: Squeeze and squeeze. So really, really unpleasant. And we should remember that Simon De Montfort's parents were responsible for massacres of Jews and forced conversions of Jews in France. So this is not coming out of nowhere but nevertheless. We can only surmise what was happening to Licoricia at this time but it can’t have been very happy. Her livelihood had dried up and she had no purchase with Edward I, so she had lost her influence, she had lost her money. She was also quite old by this point, she was probably in her early 70s herself . Anyway, I suspect that emboldened by the general political climate, any enemies that she might have made or any people just knocking around Winchester at that time who didn't feel well disposed towards Jewish people, felt very emboldened, I think. So there was a great ramping up of anti -Jewish attacks, which had really been the case since the civil war. But we know that Licoricia’s own son was attacked in his house around this time. We know that her son was attacked so harshly that he was in fear of his life. And in 1277, one April morning, somebody broke into Licoricia's house while she was asleep and her maid was asleep and stabbed them both to death.

And the reports of this death actually got as far as Germany and we know that she was stabbed in the heart. So it was a close quarter attack with a knife. It seems that her daughter or possibly her daughter -in -law discovered her. And then there was a bit of a scandal then about the house because the house was boarded up. There was a bit of a scandal then after her death because two of her sons called for an inquiry and paid for an inquiry and it was a stitch up and the local big wigs just basically said let's just cover this up. And the response, the blame for the murder was pinned onto some random guy called Ralph Lassila who was a poor saddler. 

Richard: Who'd fled Winchester.

Rebecca: Who'd already fled Winchester. Oh, who can we not find? Oh, Ralph's conveniently disappeared. Let's pin it on him. So, you know, it was obviously a stitch up, and then later two of Licoricia's grandchildren were accused of stealing property from her house and were then held up in court, accused of this, and they were eventually, well, one was banned from Winchester, Abraham, and then another was let off. But nevertheless, it was a very ugly case and no one was ever found guilty of her death. So it was, in a way, it's a very sad ending to her life. But I kind of find a very, very small sliver of a silver lining in there, in that because she died in 77, she was spared knowing what happened to her son Benedict the following year.

And Benedict had done extremely well for himself. He was so successful that only a few years before that he'd been elected to the Merchants Guild in Winchester. He was the first Jewish person ever, possibly the last for several hundred years at least, to get elected to a Christian Guild. He had a lot of friends in high places within Winchester.

Richard: Including the mayor. 

Rebecca: Including the mayor, Simon Draper. I mean, really good friends, clearly, people who really liked him, wanted to do business with him and were prepared to push the boat out for him, because in fact it was very unpopular with the local people when Benedict was elected to the guild, and there were riots, you know. But Benedict then also was pretty popular or certainly pretty successful, let's say, with the royals at that time. And Eleanor of Castile, who was with the first Spanish wife, she made him Keeper of the Queen’s Gold. A very prestigious right at the top of the Jewish community in that intersection between Royalty and the Exchequer, you know the Treasury and the Crown. And what Benedict’s job was, it wasn’t a very nice job at all, it was a poison chalice. His job was to make sure that whenever a Jew was fined or a Jew’s property was confiscated or whatever, or a Jew died and their property was up for inheritance tax, the 10% of any of that money went into the Queen’s purse. And this was not a particularly nice queen. Edward adored her but she was pretty rapacious and self-serving in her conduct. Anyway the point at which Licoricia died, there was this great crisis engulfing the country around the quality of the coins and a whole series of trials were issued for people accused of coin clipping.

Although Christians were also arrested as part of the coin clipping crisis, it's quite clear that this was really an excuse to arrest and execute as many Jews as possible. 600 Jewish people were arrested and put on trial. This was a population, it's probably around 3 ,000 people at this point. 

Richard: It's a huge proportion. 

Rebecca: A huge proportion of the population. And over 250 of them were executed. Another 150 had all their property confiscated. And you just think, well, this was obviously an exercise to move money from the Jewish community wholesale into the coffers of the Crown. Benedict himself, Licoricia's very successful son, was arrested, charged, along with one of his sons, Abraham, and they were subsequently executed. So she was at least spared that. And I think I'm glad she was spared that because that would have been appalling but it was a very, very, very dark episode. Not one Jewish family in England was not affected. Some lost every male member of their family. So it was a really terrible, terrible time. And then of course, really not that long after-13 years later-by which time Eleanor is dying, wanting to atone for just how much money she herself has made by using Jewish moneylenders. I think the most credible explanation for what happens next is that she says to Edward, on my deathbed wish is that we expel all the Jews of England and really show what good Christians we are. There are other explanations for why Edward did what he did, but anyway, in July, I think it's July the 18th 1290, he issues the edict of expulsion, which says that all the Jews of the realm must be gone, must have left the realm by the 1st November.

1st November is the day on which Eleanor and Edward got married and three weeks later she's dead. So other arguments have been advanced for why Edward expelled the Jews of England. The first country again in Europe to expel all its Jewish community, I mean, England does not have a very good record. And what it did during the Medieval period is pretty terrible. I do think it should be much more widely known and thought about and engaged with as a history. But the story ends very, very, very sadly. Licoricia was spared in a way the worst of those last 15 years, which was so terrible for the Jews. Many of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, were amongst the Jewish community that then left the country in 1290. 

Richard: In 1290. Well, there are so many more interesting stories that we could look into, even in the short period between Licoricia's death and that very sad, horrendous event. I just want to mention briefly. I know there's a connection with Basingstoke. Her son Lombard, I think, lived in Basingstoke, and Asher, too, lived just beyond the bounds of Hampshire in Marlborough. I think she had relatives in Odiham, so... 

Rebecca: That's right. That's right. So I think as things got very bad in Winchester, during the 1260s on, and there were these attacks and riots, Licoricia’s sons and grandsons, they moved their families away. They moved to places where they felt were safer. Because Winchester was so politically important, that's why in a way they felt particularly vulnerable there. But there were attacks on Jewish communities all across England. 

But yeah, so her family, we do get these glimpses of what happened to her dynasty, if you like, you know, her children and their children. So Benedict had six children. One of them, as I said, was executed during the coin clipping trials. But, you know, that's five children left. And what happened to them. And they probably had children of their own. And she left a big family behind her. 

Richard: A legacy. 

Rebecca: Definitely a legacy. We don't know anything about what happened to the Jewish community after they left England. They sort of disappeared. And I don't think we have a trail of what they actually did with their lives, but I can't believe they didn't take with them that knowledge of who their mother was and what she'd achieved and done.

Richard: And the significance as well in our national story, not only our local history, but our national story. 

Rebecca: Absolutely, sitting there, gleaming in Westminster Avenue to this day. 

Richard: Exactly. There's no clearer sort of example, is there? Well, Licoricia obviously was an incredible woman. Rebecca, thank you very much for helping to tell her story. I just want to end as well by saying there's so much more to be discovered, isn't there? And I know there are some really exciting work going on in the University of Winchester, for example, that has a project specifically looking into the history of the Jewish community in Winchester. 

Rebecca: That's right. 

Richard: And of course, there's a lot of work going on elsewhere and kind of nationally, internationally, to kind of bring these stories to light, which is really fantastic. So we're going to link through to a couple of the resources that are available locally. There's a great walking map for example, available from the University of Winchester that will be around some of the sights that we have talked about. 

Rebecca: Fantastic, yeah. 

Richard: Where Licoricia may well have lived and worked. So, I encourage our listeners to go online and check out the links that we’ve got on those pages and I really hope that we can come back and pick up some of these threads again. Thank you so much. 

Rebecca: Thank you, Richard and there is just one other thing I would like to say.

Richard: Go on.

Rebecca: Which we haven’t included. One of the other places on Licoricia's map, I'm sure it's on the walking map, is Wolvesey Palace. Because, you know, one of her first patrons was the Bishop of Winchester, Peter Des Roches. And there's no question. She would have been making paying visits to Wolvesey Palace. That would also have been in her past. 

Richard: Fantastic. Oh, I'd love to hear more about that. Well, we'll save ourselves for another day. Thank you very much, Rebecca, and look forward to picking up again soon one day, I hope. 

Rebecca: Thank you. 

Outro: We 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 HistBites and there you'll find today's show notes as well as some links to more information.

Thank you.