Gertelote, a Jewish woman from Stamford in southern Lincolnshire, was the wife of Sampson son of Meir. In the spring of 1273, she was written into two entries of the Exchequer of the Jews’ rolls, the first detailing charges of trespass and breach of the king’s peace against her husband and his associate Elias of Doncaster. Sampson and Elias along with a group of other Jews, three Christian men claimed, had accused them of kidnapping, and perhaps even murdering, Gertelote. They apparently caused quite a scene: Eudo the innkeeper claimed that the Jews had entered his inn, demanded Gertelote, defamed him with false charges through all the town, and caused his inn to be searched by local officials. The sheriff of Lincolnshire and the constable of Stamford Castle were to assemble a mixed jury of Christians and Jews to review the case.

In the second entry, several others, likely the group that accompanied Sampson and Elias, were included in the charges: Solal wife of Bateman, Elias’s wife Prude, and Sampson’s parents Genta and Meir. None of the Jews appeared. Their guarantors could not account for their whereabouts, and Gertelote herself, who must have (at least for a time) been discovered safe, is listed among those who cannot now be found. The justices set a new court date, meanwhile seizing the home of Solal and Bateman, but no further records of the case survive. Gertelote, something of a spectre here, likewise never appears again in national records.

Further reading

• Hillaby, J. and C. Hillaby, The Palgrave Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History. London: Palgrave. 2015, s.v. Stamford, p. 340–43.