The founder of the modern English monarchy and the infamous feudal system in the British Isles: William the Conqueror (or the William the Bastard as he was better known to his contemporaries) needs little or no introduction to most readers. Aside from his victory over Harold Godwinson and his Anglo-Saxon forces at the battle of Hastings in 1066 and the compilation of the Domesday book later in his reign: William also has another claim to fame in English history.

That is very simply that William was the person who first brought the jews to England (from his territories in northern France) as far as can be demonstrated. (1) It is reasonable to suppose that a few jews had visited or come to England during the Roman occupation of the British isles, but we have scant proof that this actually occurred and it may be confidently asserted that if there was a jewish population in England during the Roman era then it was so minuscule as to be microscopic.

We know precious little about the jews that William brought over to England or specific information about how William (and his son and successor William Rufus) treated the jews both in England (2) and in their other (and arguably more important in William's mind) (3) domains in northern France. (4)

Despite this however it is possible to make some inferences from what we do know.

We know that William's policy was to drive out the English thegns (i.e., the principle landholders and roughly equivalent to the rulers of a village/small town and/or the yeomen class of later medieval England) by requiring them to purchase back their land from him at exorbitant rates (5) (some of which he confiscated outright to create his royal hunting parks aka the infamous forest laws). (6)

We also know that William subjected the newly conquered people of England (as well as his own vassals) to exorbitant taxes designed to extract money in order to finance his various counter-insurgency campaigns against anti-Norman English guerrillas (most famously Hereward the Wake). (7)

Combine this with the fact that most English manors (i.e., the usual unit of land used to divide up England based off the remnants of the Anglo-Saxon thegn system) only paid their feudal dues to their lord in kind (i.e., with goods/services rather than with coins) (8) and it becomes apparent that the landowners of England were having to get hard currency to pay their taxes from somewhere.

This has to have come (and indeed we know former thegns did just this) from borrowing money at interest from a third party (9) (as you could hardly obtain it on credit from William himself) and the only third party we know of who were in England at the time and who specialized in lending money were the jews. (10)

This specialty and the fact that the jews of England were (legally-speaking) owned directly (and thus under his special protection) by the King. (11) Necessarily suggests that the jews were the principle source by which the oppressed commons of England borrowed the money to pay for William's wars of conquest and allowed an additional amount of said money to be taxed from the jews or acquired as further loans by the crown. (12)

This is identification of lord and peasant a-like (as in later times) (13) being forced to borrow money at usurious rates of interest from jewish moneylenders who were beholden only to the crown itself and running amok is further suggested by the fact that jews in Norman England were identified directly with, in addition to being believed to be the most unscrupulous agents of, the Norman overlords. (14)

Understanding this relationship and how the kings of England (till their expulsion by Edward I in 1290) tended to utilize the jews (who we must stress were enthusiastic accomplices not merely oppressed tools trying to make a living as they like to try and portray themselves) as their financial intermediaries in terms of taxation lays the foundation for understanding how some individual jews (such as Aaron of Lincoln) in circa a century after the Norman conquest and their arrival attained levels of personal wealth that exceeded those of the king of England himself. (15)

From such beginnings does jewish power stem.

References

(1) Robert Chazan, 2006, 'The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000-1500', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 154

(2) Cecil Roth, 1941, 'A History of the Jews in England', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: London, p. 5

(3) David Crouch, 2002, 'The Normans: The History of a Dynasty', 1st Edition, Continuum: London, p. 99

(4) Chazan, Op. Cit., p. 131

(5) Christopher Dyer, 2002, 'Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850 – 1520', 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, p. 81

(6) Ibid., p. 82

(7) Ibid., pp. 88-89; Crouch, Op. Cit., pp. 101; 107

(8) Dyer, Op. Cit., p. 98

(9) Ibid., p. 81

(10) Chazan, Op. Cit., p. 154

(11) Ibid.

(12) Ibid., pp. 154-156

(13) Dyer, Op. Cit., pp. 177-178

(14) Chazan, Op. Cit., p. 154

(15) Roth, Op. Cit., p. 15