Mildegod resided in the university town of Oxford. She married Copin son of Bonefey, who was dead by December 1252. In the wake of Copin’s death, Mildegod provided security on her inheritance fines so that she could keep the houses and belongings of her former husband. One of these properties, just outside the East Gate of Oxford (now the site of Magdalen College), the king excluded from her inheritance for use by the Hospital of St John. In 1253, however, the Hospital leased part of this property back to her (her seal is still on the charter recording the transaction), and Mildegod had paid all she owed. She likely remarried shortly thereafter and was dead by 1290. By 1292, her property at the East Gate had been formally given to the warden of the Hospital of St John, along with the properties of five other Oxford Jews which King Edward obtained...by exile of the Jews in the eighteenth year of his reign [1290]. At that time, the property was held by Jacob, called Mildegod’s—almost certainly her son.

If Mildegod was young and childless when her first husband Copin died, it is very likely that she is the same Oxford women as Mildegod wife of Josce, the mother of Jacob. If this is the case, her second husband Josce was dead by 1280, when she appeared again before the Exchequer of the Jews to negotiate inheritance taxes. Mildegod, who by this time would have been at least in her 50s, agreed to let the king take over all of Josce’s debts. In 1281, her son Jacob served as a guarantor for Josce of Newbury in a debt-related case against an Oxford Christian woman.

Further reading

• Williams Boyarin, Adrienne, The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism. The Middle Ages Series. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2021, pp. 120–21.
• Goldy, Charlotte Newman, Muriel, a Jew of Oxford: Using the Dramatic to Understand the Mundane in Anglo-Norman Towns, in Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, ed. Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp.227–245, pp. 234–235.
• Friedenberg, Daniel M., Medieval Jewish Seals from Europe. Wayne State UP. 1987.
• https://www.magd.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-muniment-room-of-magdalen-college-and-its-contents/