Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, ordering England's Jewish population to leave the kingdom. Communities in London, York, Lincoln and other towns lost homes, property and institutions, and organised Jewish settlement did not officially resume until the seventeenth century. The expulsion followed decades of taxation and persecution.

Jewish absence did not remove antisemitic figures from English literature; distorted images persisted in Chaucer, Marlowe and Shakespeare. The expulsion therefore shaped both Jewish exile memory and an English literary tradition imagining Jews without living Jewish neighbours.