The Tantalising Story of Licoricia of Winchester
An independent, 13th century business woman of whom too little is known.
On a corner of Jewry Street in the English town of Winchester is the statue of a well-dressed woman in medieval garb, holding a young child by the hand. The statue was unveiled in 2022 in the presence of a host of dignitaries; they included the Prince of Wales, the senior rabbis of every Jewish denomination, archbishops, bishops and senior figures from all the churches, representatives from the Muslim communities and a host of politicians.
The gathering was prestigious yet the statue that was unveiled almost certainly bore no resemblance to the woman it represented; the sculptor, Ian Rank-Broadley, had been obliged to use his imagination in depicting his subject. He had no picture to work from, the woman in question had probably never posed for a portrait or even seen a likeness of herself on paper.
Her name was Licoricia, she was a business woman with connections to the King and nobility, the wealthiest Jewish woman in England, probably the wealthiest of all English women of independent means. The charity who erected her statue did so, they say, to promote tolerance and diversity, to educate people in the history of the town and its Jewish community, and to act as an inspiration to women and young people. Their website is www.licoricia.org.
Licoricia was born in the early part of the 13th century, probably around 1210, give or take a few years. It is not possible to be more accurate than that because no personal information about her has survived. Everything that is known about her life comes from official documents: records of business transactions, court cases, royal writs and the like. Most of these have only survived because they were stored in archae, medieval document chests in which, by royal decree, records of all business transactions carried out by Jews were to be placed. Jews were only allowed to do business in one of the 26 towns that had an archa; the most important being Winchester, Oxford, London and Canterbury. The purpose of the archae was to enable the Royal Treasury to monitor the activities and the possessions of the Jews. In medieval England, Jews ‘belonged’ to the king, as did their property.
The first Jews had arrived in England just over a century earlier, in the wake of the Norman invasion of 1066. William the Conqueror had encouraged them to settle in the country to stimulate trade. By the time that Licoricia was born they numbered about 4,500. Like the new rulers of England, the Jews spoke French. Licoricia was an Old French name, like the plant liquorice it meant a ‘sweet root’ (from the same stem as the word glucose).
Licoricia is first mentioned in January 1234. Her name appears in a document from Canterbury, recording a business transaction carried out by ‘Licoricia, the wife of Abraham of Kent and Winchester’. Her name crops up again in another business document dated two years later. By 1240 she is mentioned as receiving repayment of a loan she had made to monks in Winchester; and she is no longer described as Abraham's wife. It seems that by now Abraham was dead and Licoricia was in business on her own.
Even if he wasn’t dead then, Abraham certainly was by 1242 because that was the year Licoricia, now described as a widow, married the phenomenally wealthy David of Oxford. When, in 1240, King Henry III imposed a tallage, or arbitrary communal tax, on the Jews of England, David’s wealth was assessed at over 10% of that of the whole community. Aaron of York was the only man wealthier than him.
David of Oxford had just been through a very difficult divorce from his first wife Muriel. Matters became so acrimonious that King Henry III wrote to the three rabbis of the bet din, the Jewish court overseeing the divorce, warning them that under no circumstances were they to forbid David from remarrying. The most likely reason for him doing so is that David was refusing to pay Muriel the settlement he had agreed in her ketuba when they married, and as a result the rabbis would not allow his divorce. This did not please the King, whose revenues depended to a great extent on David’s prosperity. Another document shows that after the King overruled the English rabbis, the rabbis of France became involved, causing a rumpus in the royal court. The upshot was that, while David got his divorce, the Archbishop of York stirred things up by obtaining a royal decree forbidding any more Jewish law courts in England.
David’s divorce from Muriel took place in 1242, the same year as he and Licoricia married, it has been speculated by some historians that, since he and Muriel had not been able to have children, he divorced her in order to remarry.
David, Licoricia and her four children lived together briefly, either in Oxford or Winchester, and soon had a baby son. His name was Asher, he is the child depicted as holding Licoricia’s hand in the statute. Then, no more than 18 months later, David died. Licoricia was left a widow once again, this time with five children and a vast estate on which she owed one-third in death duties.
David’s estate was so large and complex that it was all but impossible to calculate how much Licoricia was obliged to pay in death duties, and equally hard to tie up all the loose ends of his business deals. The Royal Treasury stepped in, to calculate how much she owed. They ordered all the archae in the towns around Winchester and Oxford to be sealed and sent to Windsor to be scrutinised. They demanded that any Jew from Oxford who might be able to provide information into David’s affairs also present themselves to the Treasury at Windsor. Finally, they imprisoned Licoricia in the Tower of London, to prevent her from interfering with any of the accounts or absconding without paying the duties.
Licoricia stayed in the Tower until the Treasury had completed its assessment of the death duty owed. They settled on a figure of 5,000 marks and agreed to release her into the custody of ‘six of the richer and discreeter Jews of England, willing or nilling' until such time as she paid up. Of the 5,000 marks she owed, she was to pay 4,400 directly to Westminster Abbey, to fund a project close to the heart of the King. He had long wanted to build a shrine in the Abbey for Edward the Confessor, the last King of Wessex, who died in 1066. Licoricia’s money finally enabled him to do so.
Licoricia was released from the Tower in September 1244 and went back to her family in Winchester. The records for the next few years have been lost and nothing more is heard of her until 1253, when she was involved in litigation against a man called Thomas of Charlecote. He had accused her of charging excessive interest on a loan she had made to his late father and then, when he couldn’t pay, seizing his estate. Licoricia parried by accusing Thomas of murdering his own father, apparently without any evidence to support her accusation. King Henry III wrote a letter to the court in her support, demanding that she be given Thomas’s estate. It was not an act of chivalry, he was as anxious to increase her wealth as she was, since as a Jew, both she and her property ultimately ‘belonged’ to him.
Licoricia’s lost the case. The court overruled the King, telling him that he had no authority over Thomas of Charlecote’s estate. They found Licoricia guilty of making a fraudulent loan, restored the estate to Thomas and prepared to pass sentence upon her. Once again Henry intervened, this time successfully, insisting that her fine be limited to the paltry sum of half a mark
Trouble continued to haunt her. In 1258 a former business partner sent her a ring, asking Licoricia to present it to the King as a gift. The ring disappeared, a neighbour claimed that Licoricia had stolen it and she was once again locked up in the Tower of London while the matter was investigated. She was released when the neighbour who had accused her of theft was herself discovered to have been the thief.
The worst was yet to come. In 1277 Licoricia’s daughter Belia entered her house to discover that her mother and her maid were both dead; they had been stabbed through the heart. It may have been a robbery but the details of what had happened were never made known. A suspect was named but never found, three other men were charged and acquitted and Licoricia’s murder remains a mystery until this day.
Licoricia’s career as an independent businesswoman was long and successful, impressively so so because of the disadvantage of being a Jewish woman in a hostile, patriarchal society. It is little surprise that the sponsors of her statue in Winchester regard her as an inspiration. From our perspective, nearly 750 years after her death, it is frustrating that so little is known about her as a person; documents from the archae and court records give only the bare facts, they tell us nothing about the person behind them.
Of course, there were bound to have been family stories told about her, memories recounted by her children and grandchildren. But we have no access to such stories. 13 years after Licoricia’s death all the Jews were expelled from England and her descendants and those who knew her were dispersed across Europe. All remaining memory of her was scattered to the winds.