Welsh Journals

landownership in Eifionydd will be admired and valued by the students of various facets of the history of Wales. D. HUW OWEN Cardiff THE JEWS OF MEDIEVAL YORK AND THE MASSACRE OF MARCH 1190. By R. B. Dobson. York, St. Anthony's Press (Borthwick Papers No. 45), 1974. Pp. 50, 1 illus. 55p. This well-produced pamphlet provides the best account yet available of the rise and decline of the most important medieval Jewish community north of Lincoln. Although a few Jews may have reached York at the beginning of the twelfth century in the household of the scholarly Arch- bishop Gerard, a settled community did not develop until the 1170s. Its twenty to forty households formed a close-knit group dominated by a handful of money-lenders who provided credit for a variety of local landowners. Dr. Dobson makes clear that it was some of these debtors who led the wave of anti-semitism which resulted in the famous massacre and mass-suicide of the York Jews in April 1190. Moreover he demon- strates that, contrary to the accepted view, Jews soon returned to the city, resumed their activities, and enjoyed exceptional prosperity. It was only in the 1250s, and then as a result of savage royal tallages, that the community entered its final stage of rapid decay cut short by the expulsion of all the Jews from England in 1290. Perhaps the greatest merit of Dr. Dobson's clear, but never over- simplified, account is that the fortunes of the Jews of York are examined in the context of the history of the medieval English Jewry and not in purely local terms. A chirograph recording the sale of land to the commune of the Jews of York c. 1230 is printed as an Appendix. CLIVE KNOWLES Cardiff THE NOBILITY OF LATER MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. By K. B. McFarlane. Oxford University Press, 1973. Pp. xlii, 315. £ 4.25. K. B. McFarlane's reputation as the most distinguished scholar of his generation in the field of later medieval English history was already well established before his untimely death in 1966. It was essentially the reputation of a teacher, for McFarlane's published output as a historian, though of surpassing quality and of seminal importance, was relatively meagre during his lifetime. That this should have been so was in part a matter of temperament and of intellectual approach; but it is also to be explained by the fact that his contribution amounted not merely to minor tinkering with an established historical orthodoxy nor to additions to the accepted corpus of historical interpretation of his chosen period, but to a sustained rethinking of the fundamental assumptions about the study of later medieval English society. Herein lies McFarlane's un- doubted greatness-and I use that word advisedly-as a historian. As