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The Measure of Her Actions: A Quantitative Assessment of Anglo-Jewish Women's Litigation at the Exchequer of the Jews, 1219–81

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2021

Emma Cavell
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Abstract

Taking a chiefly quantitative approach to Jewish women's litigation at the Exchequer of the Jews between in the period 1219–81, this article represents the first exploration of Jewish women before the law in medieval England. It contends that, far from enjoying a level of ‘legal sexual equality’ not available to Christian women, Anglo-Jewish women at the Exchequer of the Jews in fact shared many of their experiences of (secular) law and justice with their Christian counterparts. This contention is possible in part because of the greater interest, over the last decade, in pre-modern European women's litigation and the realisation that Christian women of all classes were able to navigate their way around judicial systems in ways that confounded any theoretical legal disadvantages they may have faced. The article variously examines the number of Jewish women litigating at the Exchequer of the Jews, their roles in court and representation in the records, and the types of litigation in which they took part. It demonstrates that if we are ever to seek a holistic view of the operation of legal jurisdictions in medieval England, our knowledge must include the experiences of Anglo-Jewish women.

Type
Original Article
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 135 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History

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References

1. Hereafter, the Exchequer of the Jews is referred to in the footnotes as EJ.

2. Dobson, R.B., “The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England,” in Christianity and Judaism. Papers Read at the 1991 Summer Meeting and the 1992 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Wood, Diana (1992), 145–68Google Scholar, at 154. Dobson advances the same view in “A Minority within a Minority: The Jewesses of Medieval England,” in Minorities and Barbarians in Medieval Life and Thought, ed. Ridyard, S.J. and Benson, R.G. (Sewanee: University of the South Press, 1996), 27–48Google Scholar, esp. 42, 45–46.

3. Dobson, Barrie, “The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered,” Jewish Culture and History 3 (2000): 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Adler, M., “The Jewish Woman in Medieval England,” in Adler, M., Jews of Medieval England (London: Edward Goldston Ltd, 1939), 17–45Google Scholar; and Roth, C., A History of the Jews of England (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1941; 3rd ed. 1964), 115Google Scholar.

5. Derek Roebuck, Mediation and Arbitration in the Middle Ages. England 1154–1558 (Oxford: Holo Books, the Arbitration Press, 2013), 241, 265.

6. See, for example, Victoria Hoyle, “The Bonds that Bind: Money-Lending between Anglo-Jewish and Christian Women in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, 1218–1280,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 122.

7. Avraham Grossman, “Medieval Rabbinic Views on Wife-Beating, 800–1300,” Jewish History 5 (1991): 60–61.

8. John Langdon Davies, A Short History of Women (New York: Viking Press, 1927), 231; and Adler, Jews of Medieval England, 17.

9. Janet S. Loengard, “What is a Nice (Thirteenth-Century) Englishwoman Doing in the King's Courts?” in The Ties that Bind: Essays in Medieval British History in Honour of Barbara Hanawalt, ed. Linda E. Mitchell, Katherine L. French, and Douglas L. Biggs (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 55–70; Sue Sheridan Walker, “Litigation as a Personal Quest: Suing for Dower in the Royal Courts, circa 1272–1350,” in Wife and Widow in Medieval England, ed. Sue Sheridan Walker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 81–108; Patricia Orr, “Non potest appellum facere: Criminal Charges Women Could Not—But Did—Bring in Thirteenth-Century English Royal Courts of Justice,” in The Final Argument: the Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald J. Kagay and L.J. Andrew Villalon (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1988), 141–62; Daniel Klerman, “Women Prosecutors in Thirteenth-Century England,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 14 (2002): 271–319; and Margaret Kerr, “Husband and Wife in Criminal Proceedings in Medieval England,” in Women, Marriage and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, ed. Constance Rousseau and Joel Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), 211–51. Occasional earlier studies include R.H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

10. For example, Sara M. Butler, “Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice,” in The Place of the Social Margins 1350–1750, ed. Andrew Spicer and Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 59–78; Sara M. Butler, “Discourse on the Nature of Coverture in the Later Medieval Courtroom,” in Married Women and the Law. Coverture in England and the Common Law World, ed. Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring (Montreal: McGill-Queens-University Press, 2013), 24–44; Cordelia Beattie, “Married Women, Contracts and Coverture in Late Medieval England,” in Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe, ed. Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), 133–54; Matthew Frank Stevens, “London's Married Women, Debt Litigation and Coverture in the Court of Common Pleas,” Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe, 115–32; Teresa Phipps, “Creditworthy Women and Town Courts in Late Medieval England,” in Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. E.M. Dermineur (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 73–94; Teresa Phipps, “Coverture and the Marital Partnership in Late Medieval Nottingham: Women's Litigation in the Borough Court, ca.1300–ca.1500,” Journal of British Studies 58 (2019): 768–86.

11. “Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice: Britain and Ireland, c. 1100–c. 1750,” Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/L013568/1).

12. Rachel Furst, “Marriage Before the Bench: Divorce Law and Litigation Strategies in Thirteenth-Century Ashkenaz,” Jewish History 31 (2017): 8; and Rachel Furst, “Striving for Justice. A History of Women and Litigation in the Jewish Courts of Medieval Ashkenaz” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014), 5.

13. Tallage was an arbitrary tax levied by the crown on its subjects, and frequently imposed on the English Jews during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

14. Suzanne Bartlet, “Three Jewish Businesswomen in Thirteenth-Century Winchester,” Jewish Culture and History 3 (2000): 31–54; Suzanne Bartlet, “Women in the Medieval Anglo-Jewish Community,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), 113–27; Suzanne Bartlet, Licoricia of Winchester: Marriage, Motherhood and Murder in the Medieval Anglo-Jewish Community, ed. Patricia Skinner (Edgware and Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell, 2009); Hoyle, “The Bonds that Bind”; Victoria Hoyle, “Negotiating the Margins: Anglo-Jewish Women in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, 1218–1284” (MA diss., University of York, 2006); Hannah Meyer, “Gender, Jewish Creditors and Christian Debtors in Thirteenth-Century England,” in Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten Fenton (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 104–24; and Hannah Meyer, “Female Money-Lending and Wet-Nursing in Jewish-Christian Relations in Thirteenth-Century England” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2010). See also Reva Berman Brown and Sean McCartney, “David of Oxford and Licoricia of Winchester: Glimpses into a Jewish Family in Thirteenth-Century England,” Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 39 (2004): 1–34; and Reva Berman Brown and Sean McCartney, “The Business Activities of Jewish Women Entrepreneurs in Medieval England,” Management Decision 39 (2001): 699–709.

15. Hoyle, “The Bonds that Bind” offers some assessment of Jewish women's experience of the law, but unsupported assertions about the EJ's role as a venue for women's litigation (122) and about misreading of the evidence—including confusion over whether Slema of Southwark was plaintiff or defendant in her surviving EJ pleas (she was always the latter) and failure to notice that her father Isaac was not dead, but an active participant in certain of her actions (126)—mean that caution is warranted.

16. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, ed., Hebrew and Hebrew-Latin Documents from Medieval England: a Diplomatic and Palaeographical Study, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), I:1, 21–22. See also Shael Herman, Medieval Usury and the Commercialization of Feudal Bonds (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1993), 68–75; and Paul Brand, “Jews and the Law in England, 1275–90,” English Historical Review 115 (2000): 1139–58.

17. Meyer, “Gender, Jewish Creditors and Christian Debtors”; Pinchas Roth, “Jewish Courts in in Medieval England,” Jewish History 31 (2017): 67–82; Bartlet, Licoricia; Simha Goldin, Jewish Women in Europe in the Middle Ages. A Quiet Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Women's use of the independent Jewish courts in the medieval German lands is the subject of Furst, “Marriage Before the Bench” and “Striving for Justice.”

18. The National Archives (hereafter TNA), E9/1-70.

19. Dobson, “A Minority within a Minority,” 31.

20. The English calendars comprise: J.M. Rigg, ed., Calendar of the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, vol. 1: Henry III, 1218–72 (London: printed for the Jewish Historical Society of England by Macmillan, 1905; repr. 1971); J.M. Rigg, ed., Calendar of the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, vol. 2: Edward I, 1273–75 (Edinburgh: printed for the Jewish Historical Society of England by Ballantyne, Hanson and co., 1910; repr. 1971); H. Jenkinson, ed., Calendar of the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, vol. 3: Edward I, 1275–77 (Colchester: printed for the Jewish Historical Society of England by Spotiswoode, 1929); and H.G. Richardson, ed., Calendar of the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, vol. 4: Henry III, 1272 and Edward I, 1275–77 (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1972). The vastly superior complete text editions are: Sarah Cohen with Paul Brand and W.M. Schwab, eds., Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, vol. 5: Edward I, 1277–79 (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1992); and Paul Brand, ed., Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, vol. 6: Edward I, 1279–81 (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 2005). Hereafter, all published volumes in the series are referred to as PREJ. See also J.M. Rigg, ed., Select Pleas, Starrs and Other Records from the Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, A.D. 1220–1284, Selden Society 15 (London: B. Quaritch, 1902).

21. See for example, Adam de Neufmarché's plea of trespass against Henry of Luffenham PREJ, vi, nos 110, 111, 399, 587.

22. The king's right to chattels forfeited by Jewish subjects frequently generated litigation at the EJ to recover Jewish goods that had ended up in the hands of third parties: PREJ, vi, 9–10. Detinue was the wrongful detention of goods or personal possessions. See, PREJ, vi, 11.

23. Brand, “Jews and the Law in England,” 1139. Archae were small networks of chests that held the deeds and charters of Jewish financial transactions; namely, the records of loans against debtors’ lands, and of the repayments made on those debts.

24. Evidence can be found to indicate both that appeals and indictments involving Jews could only be determined at the EJ, and that it may also have been possible to initiate such appeals (by or against Jews) there: Select Pleas, 78 (1273); PREJ, i, 130–31 (1266), ii, 110 (1273). Compare H.G. Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin Kings (London: Methuen, 1960), 156–57, who appears to imply, erroneously, that appeals of Jews had to be initiated at the EJ. On the special writs required, see PREJ, vi, 11. On the plea rolls and functions of the EJ, see PREJ, vi, 9–16; and Paul Brand “The Jewish Community of England in the Records of the English Royal Government,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain, 73–81.

25. Dobson, “The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England,” 150.

26. Ibid., 151.

27. Paul Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 218.

28. Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 183. For divergent views of the value of quantitative analysis of medieval litigation, see Zefira Entin Rokéah, “Crime and Jews in Late Thirteenth-Century England: Some Cases and Comments,” Hebrew Union College Annual 55 (1984): 95–157; Charles Donahue Jr., “Female Plaintiffs in Marriage Cases in the Court of York in the Later Middle Ages: What Can We Learn from the Numbers?” in Wife and Widow, 183–213, at 183; and P.J.P. Goldberg, “Gender and Matrimonial Litigation in the Church Courts in the Later Middle Ages: the Evidence of the Court of York,” Gender and History 191 (2007): 43–59. Statistical analyses of medieval Christian women's litigation are more common for the post-1300 period: for example, Matthew Frank Stevens, “London Women, the Courts and the ‘Golden Age’: A Quantitative Analysis of Women Litigants in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” The London Journal 37 (2012): 67–88; Matthew Frank Stevens, “London's Married Women”; Matthew Frank Stevens, “Women, Attorneys and Credit in Late Medieval England,” in Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial Europe, 45–72; Suzanne Jenks, “Picking up the Pieces: Cases Presented to the London Sheriffs’ Court between Michaelmas 1461 and Michaelmas 1462,” Journal of Legal History 29 (2008): 99–145; Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Phipps, “Creditworthy Women”; and Erin McGibbon Smith, “The Participation of Women in the Fourteenth-Century Manor Court of Sutton-in-the-Isle,” Marginalia 1 (2005), http://www.marginalia.co.uk/journal/05margins/smith.php (accessed December 15, 2019).

29. 1219–20: TNA E9/1 (PREJ, i); and 1244–45: TNA, E9/2-4 (PREJ, i).

30. 1277–78: TNA, E9/25-8, E9/57, E9/63 (PREJ, v); 1279–80: TNA, E9/33-6, E9/26, E9/65 (PREJ, vi).

31. Roebuck, Mediation and Arbitration, 241, 265, and see Hoyle, “The Bonds that Bind,” 122.

32. Of the 459 Jews suspected of coinage violations in the thirteenth century, identified by Rokéah in the early 1990s, 13% were women: see note 118. Dobson found that among the named Jews who deposited bonds in the Cambridge archa in 1240 or thereabouts, the figure was fewer than one in 10: Dobson, “A Minority within a Minority,” 36.

33. PREJ, i, 34.

34. See, for example: Curia Regis Rolls, vii, 70, 245; Bartlet, “Three Jewish Businesswomen”; and Joe Hillaby and Caroline Hillaby, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 398–99.

35. See, for example, the findings in Loengard, “What is a Nice (Thirteenth-Century) Englishwoman Doing in the King's Courts?” 56.

36. Matthew Stevens collated and supplemented existing data on Christian women's litigation at eight courts, providing an earlier (chiefly pre-Plague) and later (chiefly post-Plague) sample for each: Stevens, “London Women, the Courts and the ‘Golden Age,’” Appendix, 84.

37. See, especially, Zefira Entin Rokéah, “Money and the Hangman in Late Thirteenth-Century England: Jews, Christians and Coinage Offences, Alleged and Real (part I),” Jewish Historical Studies 31 (1988–90): 83–109 and also Richard Huscroft, Expulsion. England's Jewish Solution (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), 124–45; Robin Mundill, England's Jewish Solution. Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174; Brand, “Jews and the Law in England,” 1147–53; and Hillaby and Hillaby, Dictionary, 106–7.

38. Brand, “Jews and the law in England,” 1148; Zefira Entin Rokéah, “Money and the Hangman in Late Thirteenth-Century England: Jews, Christians and Coinage Offences, Alleged and Real (part II),” Jewish Historical Studies 32 (1990–92): 161; and Hillaby and Hillaby, Dictionary, 107.

39. Mundill, England's Jewish Solution, 26, 146

40. See, for example, ibid., 119–21; and Brand, “Jews and the Law in England,” 1140–47 and generally.

41. Mundill, England's Jewish Solution, especially ch. 5; and V. Lipman, The Jews of Medieval Norwich (London: the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1967), 162–85.

42. On pawnbroking, see Dobson, “A Minority within a Minority,” 42; Dobson, “The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England,” 155; Dobson, “The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered,” 16; and Huscroft, Expulsion, 73. On prominence, see Mundill, England's Jewish Solution, 115, and see chapters 5 and 6 generally.

43. Exceptions include Elias le Blund, Abraham le Prestre, Vives le Long, and men who are simply recorded under a single forename. In the plea rolls of the EJ, Jewish men were much more likely than Jewish women to bear toponymic surnames: Dobson, “Minority within a Minority,” 33.

44. PREJ, i, 34, ii, 122, vi, no. 1164.

45. PREJ, ii, 150.

46. For example, Rose, wife of Samuel Lohun, who was involved with her husband in a debt plea before the EJ in 1272 (PREJ, i, 277, iv, no. 12), was at that time already the widow of one Aaron son of Leo: Zefira Entin Rokéah, ed. and trans., Medieval English Jews and Royal Officials. Entries of Jewish Interest in the English Memoranda Rolls, 1266–1293 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2013), 74–75. By Easter 1278, she was a widow once more: Zefira Entin Rokéah, ed., English Jews and Royal Officials, 216–17, nos. 803–5 (and see 225, no. 823).

47. Meyer determined that of the labels applied to Jewish women who contributed to the tallages of 1221–77, 38.58% were marital descriptors, the largest proportion of women's descriptors in these records: Meyer, “Female Money-Lending and Wet-Nursing,” Appendix, 34 (Table 11). For the prevalence of marital descriptors among women of the Christian knightly classes, see Louise Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire (London: Royal Historical Society, 2007), 71.

48. Bartlet, “Women in the Medieval Anglo-Jewish Community,” 118. See note 62 for the evidence relating to Belina daughter of Mirabel of Gloucester.

49. Compare PREJ, i, 62, 75–76, 83, 87, 95, 101, 102, 173–74, 288, ii, 6, 298–99, iii, 14, 27, 40, vi, nos. 790, 822, 1139. Elsewhere in the rolls her forename is given as “Belecote,” and outside of the rolls she can be found as “Bely”: PREJ, i, 173–74; Cal. Patent Rolls, 1266–72, 21. Belia's first husband Deuleben died in 1236, whereas Poitevin, whom she married no earlier than c.1245, died in 1261. Belia herself died after 1276. See for example, Hillaby and Hillaby, Dictionary, 49–50.

50. Hillaby and Hillaby, Dictionary, 383.

51. PREJ, ii, 124, 197, 210, 215–16. Where each woman's descriptor has been counted once per lawsuit (regardless of how many times that suit appears on the rolls), Slema has been counted twice for the single suit in which she appears under two different descriptors.

52. Curia Regis Rolls, xvii. Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire, Appendix 3, identifies a large number of women with toponymic surnames in the accounts of Robert le Venour, keeper of Lincoln.

53. TNA, C60/9, m. 7. Belina is named as “daughter of Elias” in the record of her contribution, made jointly with her son-in-law Abraham, to the tallage of 1223: TNA, E401/4, m. 4v. For Mirabel of Gloucester and family, see Joe Hillaby, “Testimony from the Margin: the Gloucester Jewry and its Neighbours, c. 1159–1290,” Jewish Historical Studies 37 (2001): 64–73.

54. PREJ, i, 173–74 (1268).

55. On possible meanings of English toponymics borne by Jews, see Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin Kings, 12–14 and Bartlet, “Women in the Medieval Anglo-Jewish Community,” 117.

56. See n. 62.

57. Licoricia first appears in the surviving rolls at Easter 1253 (PREJ, i, 120). Her second husband, David of Oxford, had died in 1244.

58. Bartlet, “Three Jewish Businesswomen,” 35. See, for example, Curia Regis Rolls, vii, 245 for reference to Chera's former husband Abraham and their son of the same name.

59. For Chera, see Curia Regis Rolls, vii, 70–71, 245; Cal. Patent Rolls, 1216–1225, 59. Isaac the Chirographer seems to have died before early September 1218: Paul Dryburgh and Beth Hartland, eds., Calendar of the Fine Rolls of the Reign of Henry III preserved at the National Archives (hereafter Fine Rolls Henry III), vol. I. 1216–1224 (Woodbridge: the Boydell Press, 2007), 45 (no. 219). For the identity of some of Chera's children, see Select Pleas, 13 and Fine Rolls Henry III, i, 238 (nos. 48, 51); Paul Dryburgh and Beth Hartland, eds., Fine Rolls Henry III, vol. II. 1224–1234 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008), 62 (no. 22), 316 (no. 214). See also Bartlet, “Three Jewish Businesswomen,” 35–39; and Hillaby and Hillaby, Dictionary, 389–91. Women whose marital status was known, despite the ambiguity of the descriptor entered in the plea rolls, have been counted as wives or widows as appropriate, and not as women of unknown marital status.

60. Belia of Hungerford was co-defendant in a trespass plea of 1244 with her son-in-law Vivant, and Glorietta of Winchester was co-defendant in a like plea with her son Samsekin in 1244: PREJ, i, 81–82, 97, 105. Without independent verification of their status as widows, Belia and Glorietta register in Table 3 as women of unknown marital status.

61. Hoyle, “The Bonds that Bind,” 122.

62. PREJ, i, 37, 53. Belina's husband Isaac was alive in 1221, but absent from the tallage records of 1223 and therefore probably dead at that time: Hillaby, “Testimony from the Margin,” 69. Presumably it was the same debt, originally a loan from Belina to Denise and her late brother Henry, that was at issue in both pleas: PREJ, i, 53. For the relationship between Denise and Henry, see PREJ, i, 52–53; and Hillaby, “Testimony from the Margin,” 69.

63. PREJ, i, 27–28, 43–44.

64. PREJ, i, 145–46. Cresse was still alive for some 19 years after this suit. His last known appearance (alive) in the records is on February 24, 1286: Calendar of Close Rolls, 1279–88, 387.

65. See David Stephenson, “Jewish Presence in and Absence from Wales,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 43 (2011): especially 9–10, 14.

66. PREJ, ii, 259.

67. PREJ, i, 69.

68. PREJ, iii, 162–3; TNA, E9/22, m. 4. The use of the term “outlaw” here is curious. The sheriff reported that, as he had not found the trio, he was “compelled to proceed to outlawry, according to the law” (procedere debet ad utlagariam secundum legem). See also the 1275 case of Rose daughter of Benedict, also outlawed, in PREJ, ii, 291; TNA, E9/20, m.17. English law dictated that (Christian) women could not be outlawed: excluded from membership of a tithing or frankpledge, they were never within the law and could only be waived (although the practical outcomes were the same): Henry de Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. G. Woodbine, trans. S.E. Thorne, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press in association with the Selden Society, 1968; repr. 1997), ii, 353–54. All Jews were excluded from the law for the same reason. The reference to Jewish women's outlawry in these cases is perhaps best understood as the court clerks’ faithful reproduction of the contents of the sheriffs’ returns. The sheriffs—men of practice rather than theory—presumably had little time for the niceties of legal terminology.

69. PREJ, iii, 157-8; TNA, E9/22, m. 3: Octave of Holy Trinity 1276, Huntingdon.

70. PREJ, iii, 189.

71. PREJ, iii, 185.

72. On coverture in later medieval England, see Butler, “Discourse on the Nature of Coverture,” 24–44; Stevens, “London's Married Women”; and Beattie, “Married Women, Contracts and Coverture.”

73. Married women's status according to the Talmud is discussed in Samuel Morrell, “An Equal or a Ward: How Independent is a Married Woman According to Rabbinic Law?” Jewish Social Studies 44 (1982): 189–209.

74. Furst, “Striving for Justice,” 164.

75. See especially Hoyle, “The Bonds that Bind,” 122.

76. For example, Furst, “Striving for Justice,” 164. At very least, the married woman was expected to be named alongside her husband in civil litigation pertaining to her own interests, with little exception (for which exception, page 160).

77. Loengard, “What is a Nice (Thirteenth-Century) English Woman Doing in the King's Courts?” 58–59. For the independent litigation of widowed Christian women, see Walker, “Litigation as a Personal Quest.”

78. Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire, 159.

79. Marjorie K. McIntosh, “The Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status in England, 1300–1600,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 410–38; Matthew Frank Stevens, Urban Assimilation in Post-Conquest Wales. Ethnicity, Gender and Economy in Ruthin, 1282–1348 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010).

80. McIntosh, “Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status.”

81. Stevens, “London's Married Women,” 121–22; McIntosh, “Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status,” 417–18; and Beattie, “Married Women, Contracts and Coverture.”

82. PREJ, ii, 124, 197, 215–16, iv, nos. 246, 317.

83. PREJ, ii, 197; TNA, E9/27, m.8: Slema que est infra etatem per Isaac de Suwerk, custodem suum, … fecit defaltam. Et predictus Is[aac], pro predicta Slema, dicit … [etc].

84. PREJ, iii, 246. For Isaac's houses in Southwark, which he sold shortly before his death, see Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1281–92, 4; TNA, KB 27/126, m. 13 (1291).

85. The ages of majority of Christian men and women in England, especially according to the legal treatises known to scholars as Glanvill (1187–89) and Bracton (1220s and 1230s), are discussed in Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens. Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 32–43. See also Israel Lebendiger, “The Minor in Jewish Law,” Jewish Quarterly Review 6 (1916): 459–93 and Tirzah Meacham, “Legal-Religious Status of the Female According to Age,” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, February 27, 2009, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/legal-religious-status-of-female-according-to-age (accessed December 17, 2019). Presumably the determinants of legal majority at the EJ broadly corresponded to those of common law.

86. For example, L.C. Hector, ed., Curia Regis Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, vol. XVI (1237–42) (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1979), no. 1665 (with 1801, 2592).

87. Hoyle, “The Bonds that Bind,” 122, 126.

88. PREJ, i, 36, 81–82, iii, 20.

89. See, for example, Bartlet, “Three Jewish Businesswomen”; and Bartlet, Licoricia.

90. PREJ, i, 4.

91. Nicholas Vincent, Peter des Roches. An Alien in English Politics, 1205–1238 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 179; and Bartlet, “Three Jewish Businesswomen,” 37.

92. PREJ, vi, no. 403 (Christian debtor); and PREJ, i, 72 (Avigaye and Abraham).

93. PREJ, i, 33, 42–43, 45, 50.

94. Select Pleas, 11–12; PREJ, i, 103–4, ii, 209–10, iii, 18, 41–42.

95. For example, PREJ, v, nos. 236 (widow sued by Jewish man) and 609 (trespass as malicious alienation of bond). In one case, Manser son of Joce and his wife Genta were sued together for debt by Samuel son of Joce: PREJ, vi, no. 595.

96. PREJ, vi, no. 580.

97. The author thanks Paul Brand for raising the attorney option.

98. Select Pleas, 11–12.

99. The principle statements on women's appeals at common law are found in Glanvill and Bracton, and in Magna Carta (1215). See G.D.G. Hall, ed., The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England commonly called Glanvill (Edinburgh, London: Nelson in association with the Selden Society, 1965), 173–76; Bracton: on the Laws and Customs of England, ii, 419–20; Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, arranged and edited by William Stubbs, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 299. For evidence of the practical flexibility of the limiting rule in the common law courts of the 1240s, see C.F.A. Meekings, ed., Crown Pleas of the Wilshire Eyre, 1249 (Wiltshire: Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Records Branch 16, 1960). See also Sara Butler, “Abortion by Assault: Violence against Pregnant Women in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England,” Journal of Women's History 17 (2005): especially 16; Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire, 144–9; Klerman, “Women Prosecutors”; and Orr, “Non Potest Appellum Facere.”

100. PREJ, v, no. 802. See also PREJ, v, nos. 796, 815.

101. For the action of account at the EJ, see the introduction to PREJ, vi, 15. For the common law action of the same name, see John Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability in Medieval England, 1170–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 2. The breakdown takes its lead from the “Analytical Table of Contents” in PREJ, v and vi.

102. See, for example, Loengard, “What is a Nice (Thirteenth-Century) Englishwoman Doing in the King's Courts?” 56 and generally; and Emma Cavell, “Periphery to Core: Mortimer Women and the Negotiation of the King's Justice in the Thirteenth-Century March of Wales,” Mortimer History Society Journal 2 (2017): 1–19.

103. See, for example, Mundill, Robin, The King's Jews: Money, Massacre and Exodus in Medieval England (London and New York: Continuum, 2010)Google Scholar, especially ch. 2; Mundill, England's Jewish Solution, especially chs. 2 and 5; Hoyle, “The Bonds that Bind”; Meyer, “Gender, Jewish Creditors, and Christian Debtors”; and Meyer, “Female Money-Lending and Wet-Nursing.”

104. A label of convenience. It does not include trespass litigation relating to matters of Jewish finance, which although economic in nature, are included with the trespass pleas.

105. Stevens, “Women, Attorneys and Credit,” 59.

106. Peter Lombard, The Four Books of Sentences (c. 1150).

107. PREJ, v, no. 401. Richard I's charter of 1190 authorized Jews to sell pawned items after a year and a day. See full text in Hillaby and Hillaby, Dictionary, 19–20.

108. PREJ, vi, no. 1135; and Select Pleas, 115–16.

109. PREJ, vi, no. 1230.

110. PREJ, vi, nos. 958, 1065 (Easter Term 1281).

111. PREJ, vi, nos. 947, 1178.

112. For example, PREJ, iii, 119, 124–25, 185, 196, 205–6, 264, 290–2, 309, 318–19, iv, 99, 120, 126.

113. Coinage offenses took a variety of forms, for which see Rokéah, “Money and the Hangman, I,” 94.

114. Ibid., 98–99.

115. PREJ, vi, no. 1113.

116. PREJ, vi, nos. 945, 1029–32, 1192, Cota may also may have been remarried to Salle (Solomon) of Southampton, also executed: no. 1050.

117. Rokéah compiled a list of some 459 Jews suspected of coinage violations between 1244 and 1287 (although chiefly from the 1270s onward). A quarter of these (116) appear to have been executed. There were 61 women in the sample (c. 13% of the total), and of these, eight (13%) were executed. Of the 398 men suspected, 108 were likely executed (27%). Of the total number of Jews condemned to death for coinage offenses between 1244 and 1287, 93% were men. See the extensive table in Rokéah, “Money and the Hangman, II,” 164–281.

118. For example, Chera of Winchester versus Helto Faucilium, 1219: PREJ, i, 6.

119. PREJ, i, 62, 173, iii, 27, 40, vi, nos. 790, 1139.

120. Four Jewish women defendants in debt cases were of indeterminate marital status: at least some are likely to have been widows.

121. PREJ, i, 95. 102.

122. PREJ, ii, 80.

123. PREJ, i, 26 (Chera); PREJ, i, 288; ii, 6, and also PREJ, i, 83 (Belia).

124. This is 23% of their economic litigation. Compare with the proportion of fifteenth-century Christian women's lawsuits that involved married women in Stevens, “London's Married Women,” 117.

125. PREJ, i, 34.

126. Select Pleas, 11–12; and PREJ, i, 103–4.

127. PREJ, ii, 209–10, iii, 18, 41–42.

128. See, for example, Calendar of Close Rolls, 1237–42, 357; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1272–81, 287, 290; TNA, JUST 1/710, m. 52; and JUST 1/707, m. 22 (with the unpublished EJ plea roll E9/54, m. 11).

129. For an exploration of pre-modern female violence, and historians’ attitude to it, see, for example, Walker, Garthine, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Dobson, “The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England,” 149.

130. Butler, “Abortion by Assault,” 24.