Twenty-Five Years On: Derby's 1260 Charter and Its Renunciation

This year marks twenty-five years since one of the most striking acts of reconciliation in our city's recent history. In March 2001, Derby Cathedral hosted a service to formally renounce a 741-year-old royal charter that had once barred Jews from living in Derby. It is a story worth telling, and worth remembering.

A Charter to Exclude

In 1260, the burgesses of Derby paid King Henry III ten marks for a royal charter stipulating that no Jew should be allowed to live in the town. The wording, as later recorded, was unsparing: the charter sought to exclude "any Jew or Jewess from ever living or being remembered in Derby."

It was part of a wider pattern. Across thirteenth-century England, towns sought and obtained similar local expulsions - Newcastle, Warwick, Newbury, Romsey, Bridgnorth, Windsor among them. Derby's was one of the earlier examples. A local expulsion of the Jewish community followed in 1261.

Violence in a Wider Pattern

The charter was not the worst of it. According to one contemporary record, in February 1262 supporters of Simon de Montfort massacred most of the Jews who still remained in Derby - an outbreak of violence two years before the open civil war that would soon follow.

That war, the Second Barons' War of 1264-1267, was fought in part over debt. De Montfort and many of his baronial allies had borrowed heavily from Jewish moneylenders, and the cancellation of those debts was a central baronial demand. Where the rebels could not secure cancellation by political means, they sought it by force - by destroying the archae, the official chests in which records of Jewish loans were kept, and, all too often, by killing the lenders themselves.

The pattern was nationwide. The Jews of Canterbury were attacked in 1261. In April 1264, John fitz John led an assault on London's Jewish community in which around 500 are said to have died, an atrocity with which de Montfort himself was implicated. Further attacks followed at Winchester, Lincoln, Cambridge, Northampton and Worcester.

There is a particular Derbyshire chapter to this story that deserves to be told. In February 1264, Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby and one of de Montfort's principal allies, arrived at the walls of Worcester. He was himself heavily indebted, possibly to Jewish financiers in that very city. Alongside de Montfort's son Henry, he led the sack of the town and the destruction of its Jewish community. Many were killed and the records of their loans burned.

So Derby's complicity in this period ran on two tracks. The burgesses of the borough had paid the king for a charter excluding Jews from living among them. The Earl of the county had taken an active hand in killing Jews elsewhere. The medieval town of Derby and the medieval earldom of Derby both carry a share of this history.

De Montfort himself was no late convert to violence. As early as 1231, as Earl of Leicester, he had issued a charter expelling the Jewish community from his town "in my time or in the time of any of my heirs to the end of the world", justifying his action "for the good of my soul, and for the souls of my ancestors and successors." His role in the wider pogroms of the 1260s was the logical extension of a settled and theologically dressed-up hostility.

The wider story ends with the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, when Edward I banished every Jew from England - the first time in European history that a state had permanently done so. Jews would not be readmitted to England until 1656, under Oliver Cromwell.

A Service of Renunciation

For seven centuries, Derby's 1260 charter lay as a quiet stain on the city's history. In March 2001, that changed. More than 150 church members from across the Derby area gathered at Derby Cathedral for a service formally renouncing the charter. The Rev. Geoff Pickup of the New Life Christian Centre led the initiative. Geoffrey Smith, of Christian Friends of Israel, had taken the trouble to contact the Bank of England to work out what ten marks in 1260 would be worth today: roughly £3,000.

In the months that followed, Derby's churches raised that sum and, in January 2002, presented it to the Zionist Federation. In his accompanying letter, Rev. Pickup wrote:

"Seven hundred years ago the burgesses of Derby paid the king 10 marks... for a charter to exclude any Jew or Jewess from ever living or being remembered in Derby. We feel we have now cut off the injustice of 700 years with much prayer and repentance... We now feel as a token of our respect and to bring a closure motion on the past that we would like to give the equivalent amount of money to a Jewish cause."

It was a gesture without legal force - the original charter has long since lapsed, and Jewish people have, of course, lived in Derby again since the nineteenth century. But its symbolic weight was real. As Geoffrey Smith remarked at the time, "It took 700 years to undo the charter, and then it took another seven months to raise the money."

Why It Still Matters

It is worth being clear about what the 2001 renunciation was and was not. It was not an act of Derby City Council, and the original charter was not a council ordinance - it was a royal grant purchased by the medieval burgesses of the borough. The act of repair came from the churches of Derby, led by Derby Cathedral, with the practical work done by individuals of conscience.

But the gesture mattered in the way such gestures always do: by naming an old wrong, by refusing to leave it unremarked, and by offering a public act of repair to those who came after.

A quarter of a century on, the work of building Jewish life in Derby and Derbyshire continues. In February 2026, Derby City Council passed a cross-party motion on antisemitism, recognising the concerns expressed by our community in the consultations of 2025 and 2026. The councillors who supported that motion stand in a long, unbroken thread of public conscience that runs back through the worshippers who gathered at the Cathedral in 2001, and forward into the work still to be done.

We remember the 1260 charter not to dwell on the wrong, but to honour what came after it: the people who refused to let seven centuries of silence stand, and who chose, with prayer and with money and with public witness, to put something right.