Aaron of Lincoln

There is an important omission in my little book, The Jews of Angevin England, which has been received with praises so much above its deserts. In a measure, to use a much-hackneyed expression, it resem bles the play of Hamlet without any representative of the Danish prince. Owing to circumstances, which have been explained by myself and others over and over again, the Jews of mediaeval Europe were forced to be *1 usurers, or, as we nowadays call them, financiers. But the greatest of these financiers in twelfth-century England (to which my book is confined) is undoubtedly Aaron of Lincoln. My pages positively reek with his transactions. He is in many ways the typical Jew of Angevin England as he presented himself to the outer world. I have given in my book all, or at any rate most, of the passages which relate to his activity, but I have not, as I at one time intended, brought together these passages so as to give a complete account of his career. I propose supplying that omission on the present occasion. It will at any rate render our notion of what Jewish finance at this early period really meant more definite if we concentrate our attention on such a typical Jewish financier as Aaron of Lincoln. We only know of his activity for the twenty years between 1166, . when we find him in full force, and 1186, when he died and all his riches fell into the king's hands. We do not know his age at death and therefore it is impossible to state when he was born; but it must have taken him some time, as we shall see, to organise the method by which he acquired his comparatively huge wealth, and he was probably born some time before 1130. As his name indicates, he was a native or at any rate an inhabitant of Lincoln, then the second town of the kingdom. Who was his father we know not, nor how he acquired the beginnings of that wealth which he knew so well how to multiply, but his parents or he himself must have been amongst the earliest Jewish settlers in Lincoln, where we find him located somewhat outside the 157

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