Louis IX all asserted their rulership by measures against this despised and
vulnerable minority. In 1180–2 Philip first arrested and ransomed all
the Jews within the royal demesne, then expelled them and seized their
goods, then in 1198 readmitted them again from the neighbouring
territories where they had sought refuge. At his accession in 1223
Louis VIII promulgated a law which attempted to damp down Jewish
usury, but more significantly announced the agreement of king and
barons de statu Judaeorumthat no lord might receive or retain the Jews
belonging to another (so appropriating their economic value).^161
Louis IX’s early edict concerning the Jews could be no more than a
pious aspiration in its total banning of usury, but it effectively trans-
ferred the protection of the rights of lords over ‘their’ Jews from specific
‘non-retention agreements’ to a general law enforced by the king’s
courts. Saint Louis and his successors continued to increase Jewish dis-
abilities, ordering the wearing of a badge to distinguish them from
Christians and the burning of the Talmud and other ‘blasphemous
books’.^162 In England, as he embarked in 1275 upon a programme of
law-making for ‘the state of the realm and the state of holy church’,
Edward I issued ‘the Statutes of Jewry’, which followed Saint Louis’s
ordinances by requiring the Jews to wear the yellow badge and to live
by honest labour, without the usury which the king had seen ‘disheriting
the good men of his land’.^163 Yet Edward was obliged to acknowledge
that he and his ancestors had ‘received much benefit from the Jewish
people in all time past’. (There had indeed been a separate exchequer
and separate justices of the Jews since the end of the twelfth century to
exploit their wealth, and the growth of an English land-market had
depended largely on their money-lending.) Jews might still acquire
property, at least in towns, provided that they held it in chief of the
king, who would protect them—and tax them—as his bondmen; they
should be impleaded only in the king’s court. Yet their reduction to the
status of serfs of the king meant that their wholesale dispossession and
expulsion became inevitable when nothing more was to be made from
their exploitation. This administrative feat, begun in England and
Gascony in 1290 and followed in due course by Philip IV, was a demon-
stration of the new power of the English and French monarchies over
their peoples.^164
Estates of people 223(^161) G. Langmuir, ‘ “Judei Nostri” and the beginning of Capetian Legislation’, Traditio, 16
(1960); W. C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last
Capetians(Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania, 1989); Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 47–8.
(^162) Ordonnances des Roys de France, i. 53–5, 75 (c. 32), 85, 216 (c. 129); Beaumanoir,
Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 284–5 (§585), ii. 121 (§1206); Les Olim, i. 122 (xiii), 364 (vi), 791
(iv), 793 (vii), 807 (xxiii), 821–2 (xvi), 893 (xxxvi), 944 (xlvi), iii. 749 (xxxii), 839 (xx).
(^163) SRi. 221–3; EHDiii. 411–12.
(^164) H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings(London, 1960); P. Brand,
‘Jews and the Law in England, 1275–1290’, EHR 115 (2000); Select Cases in the Court of