High Middle Ages · Europe · Politics
1290
Edward I expels the Jews from England
1290
By royal edict, every Jew in England was ordered to leave by the first of November. Some four thousand people boarded ships for the continent; a few drowned when sailors abandoned them on a sandbar. Jewish communities would not be readmitted to England for nearly four centuries. The expulsion was accompanied by cancellation of debts owed to Jewish moneylenders, a windfall for the crown and its indebted barons.