A new East London exhibition has shed light on a little-known episode of persecution faced by England's medieval Jewish communities.

Executions, which opens at the Museum of London Docklands until 16 April 2023, immerses visitors in the city’s 700-year history of recorded public executions through a series of illuminating objects and documents.

One artefact that provides a glimpse into this brutal past for Britain’s Jews, is a “clipped” silver “short cross” penny, minted in the 13th century.

The crime of “coin clipping” was widespread in the late 1200s. Perpetrators would trim off the edges of English currency, then made from high-quality silver, so they could be melted down and sold to a silversmith or used for producing counterfeit coinage. “Short cross” pennies were especially vulnerable to clipping as the structure at its centre did not reach the edge.

Medieval coins were rarely perfectly round and so the cutting or filing off of small pieces often went unnoticed. However, when the Crown realised the value of its currency in circulation had been halved by 1278, it ordered a crackdown in which Jews were disproportionately blamed and punished, often by death.

It provided a grim foretaste of the expulsion of all Jews by Edward l 12 years later in 1290, which is the event most-remembered by popular history.

Executions co-curator Meriel Jeater says the exhibition hopes to highlight the hostilities towards Jews that were already present across the kingdom more than a decade before Edward I’s infamous edict.

She told the JC: “On 17 November 1278, 600 Jewish people were arrested on suspicion of coinage clipping and subsequently trialled.

“Only 29 Christians were executed, compared with the 269 Jews hanged at Tower Hill; likely over ten per cent of the kingdom’s Jewish population of 2000-3000.

“More Christians carried out coinage crimes but Jews were seven times more likely to be executed.”

A clipped silver

A clipped silver 'short cross' penny (Museum of London)

Ms Jeater also hinted at the financial factors behind the disproportionate targeting of Jews “In medieval England, Jewish people were legally the property of The Crown,” she said.

“The monarch thus inherited around £11,000 - the equivalent of over £9.5 million today - from Jews who were executed over coinage crimes in this period." 

Edward l reaped a similar sum in 1290 when he promised Parliament he would expel all Britain's Jews in exchange for a hefty tax hike. As wards of the Crown, Jews were able to work in certain financial professions that Christians were barred from. However they were highly taxed and their precarious legal status is likely to have left them more vulnerable to the whims of individual rulers than other groups, as their  expulsion demonstrated. 

Yet England’s thirteenth-century justice system was already showing signs of moderation. Records on show at the exhibition tell the case of a London Jew being accused of clipping because part of a coin was found in a street near his house. But there was no other “evidence” to connect him to the crime and the case against him was thrown out. 

Ms Jeater said prisoners were sometimes able to pay a fee to avoid execution. “While you were more likely to obtain a non-fatal punishment if you were Christian, your chances still depended entirely on wealth and connections,” she said. 

The Crown ended its crackdown on clipping on 1 May 1279. “Probably, the authorities felt that they had profited enough from the situation, or they recognised that it was allowing too many Christians with antisemitic sentiments to make false accusations - or both,” Ms Jeater said. 

“By the end of the 18th century, there were over 200 crimes you could be executed for. We wanted to convey the deep impact these public executions had on Londoners from all walks of life, from Kings and Queens to Victorian paupers. 

“Capital punishment was about the state dispensing justice and deterring more crime, no matter what faith the defendant, although recent research is more skeptical of whether capital punishment is a deterrent.  

Indeed, the fact that the state continued to pour scorn on coinage crimes well into the 1600s suggests that even fear of death was not enough to dissuade those keen to cash in on it.”