The Sempster's Tale (45 page)

My research to understand Daved Weir and his double life ranged from children’s books about Jewish religious life as a starting point through to such studies as (but not only) Dean Philip Bell’s
Sacred Communities,
Jeremy Cohen’s
The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism,
Mark R. Cohen’s
Under Crescent and Cross,
John Edwards’
The Jews in Christian Europe 1400-1700,
Menahem Mansor’s
Jewish History and Thought,
James Parkes’
The Jew in the Medieval Community,
K. R. Stow’s
Alienated Minority,
and Erwin I.J. Rosenthal’s “Anti-Christian Polemic in Medieval Bible Commentaries” in
The Journal of Jewish Studies.

Much told here is true. Among other things, there was a German bishop in 1450 who ordered all Jews out of his territory, and forced baptism was a frequent threat—and practice—against Jews. Oddly, the House of Converts—
Domus Conversorum
—founded by King Edward I not long before expelling all Jews from England, meant for the support of Jews impoverished by turning Christian, survived in almost steady use more than 300 years longer. A list of its inmates through those centuries and speculation on where they came from can be found in
Jews in Medieval England
by Michael Adler. There, you will find Joan of Dartmouth and her daughter Alis named among the inmates from 1409 to 1449 and 1454 respectively.

As for the persistent insistence through the late Middle Ages that Jews ritually murdered Christian children, pope after pope ruled and decreed that no such murders were taking place or had ever taken place. Pope after pope forbade anyone to act on such false rumors, and pope after pope was ignored. In the same way, mob violence against Jews broke out again and again despite of the Church’s orders to the contrary, including the Council of Bourges ruling in 1236 that “Faith must be kept with the Jews and no one may use violence towards them…”

This same ignoring of orders held true of papal opposition to the inquisitorial activities of the Dominican and Franciscan friars. Originally given a brief to work against Christian heretics, many of them made grounds to extend their power to include Jews, exactly as detailed in the debate between Daved and Brother Michael. In despite of repeated papal orders to desist and a papal bull in the 1420s attempting to restrict their claimed authority over Jews, they built up a centuries’ long reign of terror against Jews and anyone suspected of being Jewish, mainly in Spain and Portugal but sometimes raising its ugly head in other parts of Europe. For some friars it was probably seen as a holy crusade: for others—well, a convicted heretic’s property went to the Church.

I came across no outright evidence of such secret Jewish efforts as Daved’s in the 1400s, but there is no doubt of such activities hardly one hundred years later in London, as discussed in Cecil Roth’s “Jews in Elizabethan England” in
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England,
and I’ve no reason
not
to suppose like activities had happened earlier.

For coming to understand bills of exchange and something of international banking well enough to use them in the story, I am grateful to Raymond de Roover’s works, especially
Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Of course there is the small bother that the word “smuggling” is from the 1600s, and therefore Daved could not smuggle the gold into England. Hence the need for “illegal conveyance.” Nor could Cade’s rebels “loot” in London, that being a Hindu word unavailable in England in the 1400s. They couldn’t even be a “mob,” according to the
Oxford English Dictionary.

The English uprising in the summer of 1450 did follow the course of events detailed here—or something
like
the course of events given here. The several contemporary and near-contemporary chronicles agree on what happened but not always on which day or in which order things occurred. My reconstruction of the course of events derives from what seems to me most likely—that the London government could put up with Lord Saye’s and Crowmer’s deaths, brutal though they were, but turned on Cade when he began wholesale seizures of property and money. That this ordering differs from I. M. W. Harvey’s conclusions
Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450
does not lessen in the slightest my great indebtedness to that very fine coverage of the revolt and its aftermath.

Concerning London itself, some readers will find my description of it at variance with the cliche of filth-ridden streets stinking of garbage and ankle-deep in mud too prevalent in some presentations of medieval London. Whatever may have happened during the breakdown in society that came with the Renaissance and Reformation, the plethora of medieval civic laws concerning streets—paving, repair, and cleaning as well as lighting—would seem to indicate an active effort in all those areas. Certainly John Stow in his later
Survey of London,
when talking about officials in the city’s wards, includes scavagers
(non sic)
whose job was to keep a ward clean. Regular, frequent removal of waste was expected and failure fined. London probably smelled in ways we would now find unfamiliar, but have you choked on the exhaust of a passing bus lately?

The biblical quotations are translated from John Wycliff’s Middle English version of the Bible.