A Minority At Law: Jews And The Courts In Medieval England, c. 1216-1290 [QMUL & TNA AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship]

We expect interviews to take place by the end of July 2024.

Queen Mary University of London and The National Archives are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative doctoral studentship from October 2024, under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme.

The studentship will examine how Jews, men and women, interacted with royal justice, and how they navigated Common Law jurisdictions in medieval England. It will disrupt our understanding of how minorities were involved in civic life and provide the student with a topic at the cutting-edge of scholarship combining legal history, race and racialisation with archival and recordkeeping practice. The close collaboration will allow the student access to specialist knowledge and training across the partnership and opportunities to contribute to the generation and dissemination of knowledge for diverse audiences on England’s most prominent medieval minority community.

The Student’s doctoral project will be jointly supervised by Professor Miri Rubin (QMUL) and Dr Paul Dryburgh (TNA). The student will be expected to spend time at both Queen Mary University of London and The National Archives. They will also become part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK, with access to CDP Cohort Development events.

The studentship can be studied either full or part-time.

It is important to us that our organisations are more diverse, so we encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and identities. We especially keen to hear from candidates from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds as they are currently underrepresented at this level in this area. 

Students should have a Master’s Degree in a relevant subject or be able to demonstrate equivalent experience in a professional setting.

Project Overview 

Aims

The project disrupts our understanding of the involvement of minorities in public life, by examining how Jews, men and women, interacted with royal justice in medieval England. It aims to develop an historical understanding of the structures that affected lives of minorities in the Middle Ages: the measures that excluded and restricted, and those that enabled inclusion.

Importance, originality and timeliness

This project challenges current historiography and popular narratives by rethinking how Jews used the royal courts to live fuller lives. By concentrating on documentary evidence from the English courts, the project extends research beyond the current focus on the financial labour of England’s Jews or the persecution of England’s Jews leading to the expulsion in 1290, elucidated by Mundill and Stacey. The project moves beyond considering the law as solely excluding along ethnic, racial or religious lines. It seeks agency and participation, even if these were curtailed for minority groups in comparison to others. The CDP will contribute to understanding racialisation in medieval Europe, and so to cutting-edge research in the Humanities.

The project will analyse the involvement of Jews across the royal jurisdictions. It will focus on cases involving Jews for offences unrelated to their fiscal obligations, and on cases where Jews used the royal courts to litigate with other Jews. The project builds on the scholarship of Brand on the courts, of Lipman and Hillaby on regional justice, and of Meyer on participation by Jewish women.

Methodology

By concentrating on a well-defined, manageable source-base of plea rolls of the central criminal court of King’s Bench (KB 26 and 27) and of itinerant justices (JUST 1, 3-4), the project will be feasible within the standard three years. The student will extract relevant entries from these rolls, compiling both quantitative and qualitative datasets. All of the Coram Rege rolls for King Henry III’s reign (1216-72) are edited, and so provide the student with guides into the legal formulae and abbreviations current in the records.

The sources will be analysed by litigants, crimes, instances, and outcomes, with the aid of digital mapping tools. They will also be studied as textual sources. This is a powerful combination, allowing the researcher to scope the range of judicial activities, but also of underlying attitudes that informed the interaction between Jews and others.

Research questions include:

The key research questions for this CDP are:

What do Common Law records reveal about the social position of Jews and the Jewish community in medieval England?

What light do records of Jewish institutions and individuals shed on the interaction of Jews with the law in thirteenth-century England?

What do the legal findings reveal about relations between Jews and their neighbours, and how can those relationships be visualised digitally?

Which matters brought Jews to the royal courts to litigate with/against their Christian and Jewish neighbours?

For what crimes and criminal behaviour were Jews presented before the royal courts?

Approaching the court records as texts: what rhetorical strategies are revealed in the language used by Jews in courts, and how were Jews described?

Details of Award

CDP doctoral training grants fund full-time studentships for 48 months (4 years) or part-time equivalent.

The award pays tuition fees up to the value of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) full-time home rate for PhD degrees. The UKRI Indicative Fee Level for 2024/25 is £4,786.

The award pays full maintenance for all students, both home and international students. The National Minimum Doctoral Stipend for 2024/25 is £19,237, plus London Weighting of £2,000 per year. There is also a CDP maintenance payment of £600/year.

Further details can be found on the UKRI website.

The student is eligible to receive an additional travel and related expenses grant during the course of the project courtesy of The National Archives worth up to £1,000 per year for 4 years (48 months).

CDP students will also have access to training and development opportunities throughout the course of their PhD, supported and facilitated by the CDP Consortium itself, Queen Mary University of London, and The National Archives. CDP4 students would be expected to undertake a work placement or development opportunity for a minimum of a 3-month period (or equivalent). 

Please note: the project can be undertaken on a full-time or part-time basis.