Genta was the daughter of Cresse (also called Deulecresse) and his wife Avigaye, Jews of London. Genta’s namesake was her paternal grandmother, an apparently well-known Jewish woman of early thirteenth-century England who survives almost exclusively through records of her son (almost always identified matrilineally as son of Genta). The younger Genta was likely part of the London Jewish community, at least in her youth if not throughout her life, but surviving records show her occupied with the Poyntz family of Somerset and Dorset. An interlocking series of cases show Genta collecting debt from tenants on William Poyntz’s lands in Dorset. No other legal proceedings are connected to Genta, so it is unlikely that she was primarily a financier. She may have been specially employed by William Poyntz in some fashion, though he was also in debt to her. The difficulties started when he died, having long since defaulted on a 1251 loan of £10 between himself, Emma Oliver (his heir and perhaps his wife), and Genta. Genta tried to recover her losses—now at 25 marks (over £16)—by collecting from William’s estate. She first summoned the abbot of Hartland (Devon), tenant on the Poyntz lands, to answer for an outstanding debt of 100 shillings. By 1275, William’s heir Emma had sold or transferred her own liability to Joyce and Richard Lovel: Genta’s father wrote a starr releasing her of any debt to Genta held against Poyntz land in Blandford St Mary (Dorset). By this time, Genta had married Sampson (sometimes called Samuel) son of Sampson, and, in 1277, Genta and Sampson together sued Joyce and Richard. Genta was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London in June of that year, when she paid a fine for aid of some sort, and her arrest may have been related to the ongoing Poyntz inquiry (though many London Jews were imprisoned that year). By the end of 1277, however, the Justices of the Exchequer of Jews decided in favour of Genta and her husband and allowed them to seize Poyntz’s former lands, tenements, and chattels to cover Williamʼs defaulted loan plus interest. In 1278, Joyce and Richard sold part of their debt, and Sampson wrote two Hebrew quitclaims clearing all parties of further obligation related to the Blandford St Mary lands. Nonetheless, the problems did not disappear: in 1279 and 1280, Richard and Joyce summoned three more Christians who owed Genta, suggesting that other debts were levied against the Poyntz lands, or that the Lovel couple had sold off other parts of the same debt. No resolution of these later cases survives, but Genta’s lending and collection activities—running from 1251 to 1280 and beyond, both before and after her marriage—comprise an example of the complex business relationships that could exist between Jewish and Christian families in thirteenth-century England.

Further reading

• Hoyle, Victoria, The Bonds that Bind: Moneylending between Anglo-Jewish and Christian Women in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, 1218–1280, Journal of Medieval History 38 (2008), pp.119–129.
• Irwin, Dean A., Social Hierarchies and Networks in the Thirteenth-Century London Jewry, in Thirteenth Century England 18: Proceedings of the Cambridge Conference, 2019, ed. Andrew Spencer and Carl Watkins (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2023), pp. 189–207.