Persecution of Jews in England

Roman emperors
Under Christian emperors, Jews were persecuted in the Roman Empire, which included forbidding Jews from marrying Christians, restricting Jewish ownership of slaves, and punishing those that converted from Christianity to Judaism.

Blood libels
In 1144, William of Norwich was the first known Christian child death that was falsely blamed on Jews based on the blood libel or ritual murder libel, which is a false accusation that Jews killed a Christian, usually a child, for a ritual. Other blood libels occurred in Gloucester in 1168, Bury St. Edmunds in 1181, Bristol in 1183, Winchester in 1192, 1225, and the 1230s, Norwich in 1230, London in 1244 and the late 1260s, Lincoln in 1255, and Northampton in 1277. At Lincoln, over a dozen Jews were executed.

Massacres of 1189-1190
A Christian mob attacked and massacred Jews in London in 1189 and again in Lynn, Norwick, Stamford, York, Bury St. Edmunds, Colchester, Thetford, and Ospringe in 1190. Over a hundred Jews were killed in York.

Council of Oxford
The ecclesiastical Council of Oxford, convened by Archbishop Stephen Langton in 1222, forced Jews to wear a Jewish badge and forbade the construction of new synagogues.

English monarchs
Henry III, King of England, issued the Statute of Jewry in 1253, which was a statute that placed restrictions on Jews. Among the provisions in the statute are the segregation of Jews, the ordering of Jews to wear the Jewish badge, the ordering for no new synagogues to be built, the banning of Jews from buying and eating meat during Lent, the banning of Jews from offending the Christian faith, and the placing of a duty on Jews to pay Christian churches. In 1269, Henry had the terms under which the Jews could trade restricted and made blasphemy by Jews punishable with death by hanging.

King Edward I (who reigned from 1272 to 1307) arrested and executed around 300 Jews. The Statute of the Jewry he issued in 1275 was similar to the one issued by King Henry III, including the enforcement of the Jewish badge and the segregation of Jews. Edward also made Jewish moneylenders pay additional taxes. In 1280, he ordered all Jews to attend sermons, preached by Dominican friars, to convert them to Christianity, and he expelled all Jews from England in 1290.

In the late 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I signed a death warrant to have the doctor Roderigo Lopes, a Jewish convert to Christianity, executed after he was accused of supposedly trying to poison her and sentenced to death. There were many incidents in the past that Jews were falsely accused of poisoning Christians, such as during the persecution of Jews during the Black Death. The prosecutor, Sir Edward Coke, called Lopes “a perjured, murdering villain and a Jewish doctor worse than Judas himself ... [not] a new Christian ... [but] a very Jew.”

Antisemitism in literature
The story in The Prioress's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th century involves Satan inciting Jews to kill a Christian child, and in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in the late 16th century, a Jewish antagonist is portrayed negatively and stereotypically. There were many publications that depicted the antisemitic Wandering Jew myth, including Bernard Capes' story The Accursed Cordonnier.