The Edict of Expulsion (1290)

On 18 July 1290, King Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion, ordering every Jew to leave England by All Saints' Day, 1 November, that year, on pain of death. The order came after decades of royal exploitation, banning of the Jewish moneylending trade in 1275 and repeated heavy taxation, had already stripped the community of most of its wealth, and it was granted in Parliament alongside the largest single tax grant of the medieval English crown, roughly 116,000 pounds. An estimated 3,000 Jews left; no legal Jewish community would exist openly in England again until Oliver Cromwell's government permitted informal resettlement in the 1650s, over three and a half centuries later. It was the first instance of a European kingdom expelling its entire Jewish population by royal decree, a pattern later followed by France (1306, 1394) and Spain (1492).