The Jews House Restaurant is housed within a 900 hundred year old, grade one listed building situated where old town meets contemporary Lincoln. This building dates back to the 1150, found next door to The Jews Court which is a 17th Century building and the site of a medieval synagogne.
Many people hear the stories of The Jews House, the haunted and more factual stories that give you a real feeling of history in the air. This is a perfect atmosphere to dine with families and friends.
“One and a half years ago in my home town of Lincoln on my way home looking up at the surrounding views of the Cathedral and other historical building. I was not expecting to be the owner of the oldest building in Europe."
Gavin Aitkenhead
The following mention is given in “Lincolnshire – The King’s England” edited by Arthur Mee, published by Hodder and Stoughton, 1949.
“On the west side of the Strait is the Jew’s House, built about 900 years ago and now a shop with big windows instead of the loopholes, with which the lower storeys were originally lighted. Its round arched doorway has interlaced ornament, and from it springs the chimney shaft for the fireplace in the upper storey, which still has two round-headed windows. Here, it is said, lived Belaset of Wallingford, the Jewess hanged in 1290 for ‘clipping the king’s coin’; that was the year of the expulsion of the Jews from England, after which any Jew found was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Adjoining the Jew’s House is a dwelling of late 12th century origin known as the Jews’ Court, which may have been used as a synagogue, or perhaps for a Jewish school”.
Rather more detail and more sinister associations of the Jew’s House are offered by W F Rawnsley in “Highways and Byways of Lincolnshire” (Macmillan, 1926) – “Getting tack to the ‘Bail’, or open space between the castle gate and the Exchequer Gate, we can go down that bit of the old Ermine Street called ‘Steep Street’ (and I don’t think any street can better deserve its name) and come into the High Street of Lincoln. If we go right down this, we shall see all that is of most interest in the town below the hill. First is the ‘Jew’s House’ where the murderer of Little St. Hugh is said to have lived, a most interesting specimen of Norman domestic architecture, and more ornate than that at Boothby Pagnell of a similar date. The house has a round-headed doorway, with a chimney breast starting from above the doorway arch, and showing that the upper floor had a fireplace. On either side of the door now are modern shop windows. Between the string courses are two double light windows, with a plain tympanum under a round arch. Belaset of Wallingford, a Jewess, lived here in the reign of Edward 1. She was hanged for clipping coin in 1290, the year of the Jew’s Expulsion”.
Rawnsley also gives a version of the popular legend of Little Saint Hugh: “...the persecution which the Jews had long endured produced such a bitter feeling that they were believed to be capable of kidnapping and crucifying, or by less conspicuous methods, putting to death a Christian boy when they had a chance. Hugh was said to be a chorister who disappeared, and his mother, led by a dream discovered his body in a well outside the Newport Gate. A Jew called Jopin, or Chopin, but in a French ballad Peiterin, was accused of his murder, and is said to have confessed and to have been put to death with others of his nation with no small barbarity. He has left his memory at Lincoln in the name of the Jews’ House’, which is given to the Norman building on the Steephill. This story was not uncommon, and told in much detail, as having really happened in several places; nor is the belief in it yet dead. The boy’s body was given to the canons of the cathedral, who buried him with much solemnity in the south aisle of the choir, and set a small shrine over him, to which folk came to worship, and he received the title of ‘The Little St Hugh’. He was buried, in 1255, next to Bishop Grosteste, who had died two years before.”