The first mention of Jews on this side of the Channel is said to occur in the Church Constitutions of Egbert, Archbishop of York, towards the middle of the eighth century; the second in a monastic charter of some hundred years later. But they do not seem to have crossed over in any considerable force till the Norman Conquest. ♦1066♦ Among the foreigners who followed William to his new dominions were many families of French Jews. Their ready money and their eagerness to part with it rendered them welcome to the king and his barons. The former received from them advances, when his feudal dues were in arrear; the latter had recourse to the Jew’s money-bag whenever the expense of military service or the extravagance of their life made a loan necessary. To men of lower rank also, such as litigants who were obliged to follow the King’s Court from county to county, or to repair to Rome in order to plead their cases before the Pope’s Curia, the Jew’s purse was of constant help. No less useful was the Jew to the English tax-payer. In those days of picturesque inefficiency taxes were levied at irregular intervals and in lump sums. The subject, suddenly called upon to pay a large amount at short notice, was only too glad to borrow from the Jew.
However, such intercourse with the Gentiles, high and low, notwithstanding, the Jews formed in England, as they did on the Continent, a people apart. In each town the synagogue formed a centre round which clustered the colony. Newcomers gravitated towards the same centre, and thus spontaneously grew the Jewries of London, Norwich, York, Northampton, and other English cities. These Jewish quarters were the King’s property and, like his forests, they were outside the jurisdiction of the common law. But, while their judicial and financial interests were under royal control, the Jews were allowed full liberty of worship, were permitted to build synagogues and to conduct their religious affairs under their own Chief Rabbi, thus constituting a self-governing and self-centred community. The literary activity of the Jews during their sojourn in England reveals a marvellous detachment from their environment. Commentaries and super-commentaries on the Old Testament and the Talmud, learned treatises on minute points of ritual and ceremonial, discussions on the benedictory formulas that are appropriate to each occasion of life: on rising in the morning, or lying down at night, on eating, washing, on being married, on hearing thunder, and a myriad other profound trivialities—such was the stuff that their studies were made of. And whilst Norman and Saxon, Celt and Dane were being welded into one English people, Israel remained a race distinct in face, speech, domestic economy, deportment, diet of the body and diet of the soul.
The singularity of the Jews’ habits, their usury, the wealth accumulated thereby, and the ostentatious display of it, must from the very first have evoked among the English feelings of distrust and jealousy, dislike and contempt, such as at a later period inspired a genial poet to pronounce that “Hell is without light where they sing lamentations.” But during the first century of their residence in the country they seem to have suffered from no active manifestation of these feelings. William the Conqueror favoured them, and William Rufus actually farmed out vacant bishoprics to them. ♦1087–1100♦ The latter prince’s easy tolerance of Judaism is denounced by the monkish historians in many quaint tales, which, though meant to throw light on William’s irreligion, also serve to illustrate his sense of humour. At one time a Jew, whose son had been lured to Christianity, went to the King, and, by means of prayers and a present of sixty marks, prevailed upon him to lend his assistance in recovering the strayed lamb. The King did his utmost to carry out his part of the contract, but, on finding the youth obdurate, told the father that inasmuch as he had failed he was not entitled to the present; but inasmuch as he had conscientiously striven to succeed, he deserved to be paid for his trouble, and he kept thirty marks. On another occasion William summoned some Christian theologians and some learned Rabbis to his presence, and, telling them that he was anxious to embrace that doctrine which upon comparison should be found to have truth on its side, he set them disputing for his own entertainment.
The King’s good-natured attitude was even shared by his antagonists. St. Anselm, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, and other eminent ecclesiastics, in their efforts to convert the Jews, did not overstep the limits of argument; at times of peril churches and monasteries afforded an asylum to the effects and to the families of Jews; no attempt was made to poison the relations, such as they were, between the two elements; and there are instances of Jews helping the monks with prayers and otherwise in their efforts to resist the encroachments of Archbishops, and even of Jews drinking with Gentiles.
Meanwhile, the Continent was undergoing the spiritual travail which resulted in the tremendous explosion of the Crusades. England, as a member of the Catholic family of nations, and in many ways under Continental influence, could not long remain deaf to the cry which rang throughout Christendom. The unsettled condition of the country under the first three Norman kings, and the convulsions to which it fell a prey under the fourth, had hitherto prevented England from responding to the Pope’s call in an adequate manner; but the religious fever was infectious, and on reaching England it translated any vague sentimental dislike of the Jews that may have existed into an open and determined hostility, which led to deeds of violence such as had already disgraced the Continent.
The atrocious charge of sacrificing Christian children and using their blood in their mysterious Passover rites, or in medicine, is now for the first time heard under the definite form which has since become familiar; and the English town of Norwich seems to be entitled to the unenviable credit of its birth. The populace of that city was one day, in 1144, horrified by the rumour that the Jews had kidnapped and murdered a boy, named William, for the purpose of obtaining his blood. A renegade Jew brought forth the libel, and the local bishop adopted it. The sheriff considered the evidence insufficient, and refused to sanction a trial before the Bishop’s Court. But the people, encouraged by the clergy, took the law into their own hands, and, despite the sheriff’s efforts to protect the Jews, many of the latter were slaughtered, while the rest fled in fear for their lives.
Within the next thirty-four years the same blood-accusation recurred at Gloucester and Bury St. Edmunds, and led to a similar catastrophe.65 But during the reign of Henry II. anti-Jewish feeling, with the last exception, was firmly checked. That King, renowned in history as “the greatest prince of his time for wisdom, virtue, and abilities,” followed in the footsteps of William the Conqueror and William Rufus, and, in the opinion of the monastic chroniclers, sullied his otherwise stainless character by the favour which he showed to the Jews. He delivered them from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts and granted to them the privilege of settling their disputes in their own Beth Din, or Religious Tribunal, and of burying their dead outside the cities in which they dwelt. Henceforward the Jews were to be regarded as the King’s own chattels, and to enjoy the protection of the King’s officers, as they did in Germany, and on the same terms.
Royal favours, of course, are never granted without an equivalent. The wealth of the Jews, being moveable and concentrated in few hands, was much more accessible to the King than that of his Christian subjects. They were, accordingly, made to pay more than the latter. When, in 1187, Henry levied a contribution, he received from the Jews alone nearly one-half of the whole amount, they contributing one-fourth of their property (£60,000), while the Christians one-tenth (£70,000). But, though the King’s Exchequer was the richer for the King’s clemency, the Jews enjoyed the right to live and grow wealthy. England was not a loser by this toleration of the children of Israel. Their ready money, despite the high rates of interest at which it was lent, supplied a powerful stimulus to industry and to architecture. Many a castle and cathedral owed their existence to Jewish capital. And not only the means of erection but also models for imitation were due to the Jews, who by their example taught the rude English burgesses the superiority of a stone house over a mud hovel, as is shown by the buildings at Bury St. Edmunds and Lincoln which still bear the name of “Jews’ houses.” Indeed, in this and subsequent reigns we hear marvellous tales of Jewish opulence and magnificence, such as that of Abraham fil Rabbi, Jurnet of Norwich, and Aaron of Lincoln, and even of unwelcomed proselytes to Judaism. Both these blessings, however, material prosperity and religious popularity, proved curses in disguise to their possessors. The riches of the Jew could not but rouse the cupidity of mediaeval barons, and his dissent the bigotry of mediaeval priests. Moreover, it would have been contrary to all the laws of probability and human nature had the Jews been left unmolested much longer in a land where the crusading spirit was abroad, where the popular hatred of the Jew had been recently fanned by abominable calumny and by royal favour, and where the civil authority was so frequently set at naught by feudal lawlessness. Last and most ominous sign, the Jews by an Act, passed in 1181, were forbidden to keep or bear arms.
Where prejudice is, pretexts for persecution are not wanting. A favourable opportunity for the expression of public feeling was offered by the coronation of Richard Coeur de Lion. Richard was the first English King who took up the cross against the infidels, and his reign was appropriately inaugurated by an anti-Jewish demonstration. The Jews were by royal edict forbidden to show their unchristian countenances in the Abbey during the ceremony. But some of them, armed with rich gifts from their people to the King, presumed to take up their station outside the Church. The street was thronged with the servants and retainers of the barons and knights who assisted at the coronation, as well as by a miscellaneous mob, drawn thither by curiosity. The foreign faces of the Jews were soon detected by the fanatical crowd, in holiday mood, and were at once made the marks of insult and riot. The wretches tried to escape; the populace pursued them; and one at least was obliged to save his life by baptism. Later in the day a rumour got abroad that the King had ordered a general slaughter of the Jews. The alleged command found many persons only too ready to carry it out. All the Jews that happened to be out of doors were cut to pieces, without remorse and without resistance, while those who had wisely remained at home were attacked by the zealous and greedy crowd, who broke into their houses, murdered the inmates, plundered their effects, and ended by setting fire to the Jewry. The riotous and avaricious instincts of the populace once roused, the havoc spread far and wide, and the city of London soon became a scene of pillage and rapine, in which no invidious distinction was made between Christian and infidel, but all were impartially robbed who were worth robbing. The King’s endeavours to bring these atrocities home to the guilty resulted in the discovery that the punishment would involve so great a number that, after having hanged three offenders, he was forced to desist. The very magnitude of the crime saved its authors.
Nor did the excitement terminate in the capital. The good news of the massacre of the Jews travelled to the provinces, and everywhere found the field ready to receive the seed. All the principal towns in England swarmed at that time with Crusaders preparing for their expedition. The sight of these warriors stirred the martial and religious spirit of the people, and, when they started the campaign against the Crescent by falling upon the native Jews, they found numerous and enthusiastic auxiliaries among the burgesses, the priests, and the impoverished gentlemen. Indeed, how could any one refuse to help in the destruction of God’s enemies, who in many cases also happened to be the assailants’ creditors? In York the immediate excuse for an attack was a certain Joceus, who, being forcibly baptized in London on the day of Richard’s coronation, on his return home renounced the creed thrust upon him and thereby earned the odium of apostasy. Accompanied by a number of his co-religionists the hunted man sought refuge with all his treasures in the castle. The mob, incited by a fanatical Canon and led by the castellan, laid siege to the castle. The Jews had recourse to desperate measures. Some of them, acting on the heroic advice of a Rabbi, killed their own wives and children, flung the corpses from the battlements upon the besieging crowd, and then prepared to consign the castle and themselves to the flames. The others capitulated, and were massacred by the mob, at the instigation of a gentleman deeply indebted to them. Then the crowd, headed by the landed proprietors of the neighbourhood, all of whom owed money to the Jews, hastened to the Cathedral, where the bonds were kept, and burnt them on the altar, under the benedictions of the priests.
Like deeds were perpetrated at Norwich, Bury St. Edmunds, Lynn, Lincoln, Colchester, and Stamford, and in all these places, as in London, the King’s officers found themselves powerless to prevent or punish. Richard, however, could not afford to have his Jews butchered or driven out of the country. He, therefore, issued a charter, confirming to the wealthiest among them the privileges which they had enjoyed under his predecessors: the privilege of owning land, of bequeathing and inheriting money-debts, of moving to and fro in the country without let or hindrance, and of exemption from all tolls. In return for his protection, the King claimed a closer supervision of their property and profits. His Treasury was to know how much they had, and how much they made. Staffs of Jewish and Christian clerks, appointed in various parts of the country, were to witness their deeds, enter them into a special register, and see that three copies were made of every bond: one to be placed into the hands of a magistrate, another into those of some respectable private citizen, and a third to be left with the Jew. Debts due to the Jews were really due to the King, and might not be compounded or cancelled without his consent. Disputes between Jews were to be settled at the royal Courts, and, in a word, a severe and vigilant eye was to be kept on the Israelites and their money-bags.
John, Richard’s miserable successor, whose reign brought nothing but ruin to himself and shame on his country, found it expedient to continue towards the Jews the lucrative generosity initiated by better men. The oppression of the Jews was a monopoly of the crown, and John made it quite plain that he would not tolerate any rivals. He invested Jacob of London with the dignity of Chief Rabbi over all the Jewish congregations throughout England and styled him his “dear, dear friend,” warning his subjects that any insult or injury offered to him would be regarded by the King as an insult to himself. He extended to the whole colony the favours and immunities granted to a privileged few by Richard, and, like him, accompanied this act of grace with an even more rigorous control of their affairs. The Jews had to pay dearly even for this limited and precarious protection. The sole difference between the treatment of them on the part of the King and that meted out to them by his subjects was that the latter despoiled them spasmodically, the former systematically. It was no longer a question of occasional contributions, such as the £60,000 wrung from them by Henry II., and like impositions levied to defray the expenses of Richard’s Crusade, but a steady and unsparing bleeding: tallages, inheritance duties and a heavy percentage on all loan transactions, in addition to confiscations and general fines, or fines for breaches of the law, with which the King would now and again diversify the monotony of normal brigandage. The procedure was perfectly immoral and yet perfectly legal. The King’s treasury was replenished out of the pockets of men who were as absolutely his as his own palaces, and whom he could sell or mortgage as any other property, according to his convenience. Even the King’s commissioners—Jews deputed to collect the tallage—had power to seize the wives and children of their own co-religionists. It is computed that at this period the Jews contributed about one-twelfth of the whole royal revenue.
But John’s cruelty was boundless as his meanness. Not content with ordinary measures of extortion, he suddenly ordered all the Jews—men, women and children—to be imprisoned and forced to yield all they possessed. Thus by one fell swoop were snatched from them the fruits of a life’s laborious accumulation, and many were brought to the verge of starvation. Men and women, until yesterday opulent, were seen begging from door to door in the day time, and at night prowling about the purlieus of the city like homeless and hungry curs. Those who were suspected of being the owners of hidden treasure were tortured until they confessed, and, in the case of a Jew of Bristol, at least, a tooth a day was found an efficient test of a Jew’s squeezability. Grinder after grinder was drawn from his jaw in horrible agony, till the victim, after having lost several teeth, paid the 10,000 marks demanded of him. By such a fiscal policy the King’s protégés were made to feel the full weight of royal favour. But even this condition of serfdom and occasional torture was preferable to the lot that was in store for them in the future. John, whatever his own standard of humanity might have been, when the citizens of London threatened an attack upon the Jews, stood boldly forth in their defence, and told the Mayor and burgesses that he held them responsible for the safety of the Jews, vowing a bloody vengeance if any harm befell them.
Henry III. was as exacting as his predecessors; but he lacked the firmness by which some of them had prevented their subjects from trespassing on the royal preserves. Under his weak rule the nobles and the towns grew in importance. The decline of the King’s prerogative and the increased power of the subjects were alike fatal to the Jews. The burgesses hated them as the instruments of royal avarice and as interlopers in a community for the freedom of which they themselves had paid a heavy price to King or lord paramount. Their exemption from municipal burdens, and their independence of municipal authority irritated their fellow-townsmen. The constant interference of the King’s officers on behalf of the King’s serfs was resented as a violation of privilege. These grievances, reasonable enough, were intensified by religious rancour, and by that antipathy which the English, perhaps more than any other, bourgeoisie has always displayed towards foreigners. The Jew’s isolation also added to his unpopularity, and all these causes, acting upon the minds of the townspeople, gave rise to frequent acts of aggression. The Kings, as has been seen, had always found it hard to curb popular license, each attempt at repression, each measure of precaution, only serving to embitter the ill-feeling towards those on whose behalf these efforts were made. ♦1234♦ Under Henry III. the wrath of the burgesses broke out again and again in many towns, notably at Norwich, where the Jews’ quarter was sacked and burnt, and the inhabitants narrowly escaped massacre, and at Oxford, where town and gown joined in the work of devastation and pillage.
The animosity of the towns was shared by the smaller nobility who lay under heavy obligations to the Jewish money-lenders, but, unlike their betters, had not the means of making their tenants pay their debts for them. The great barons played towards the Jews within their domains the same rôle as the King, only on a smaller scale. They lent them their protection, were sleeping partners in their usurious transactions, and upon occasion made them disgorge their ill-gotten gains. This rôle was beyond the ability of the smaller nobility. So far from sharing in the spoils of usury, they themselves were among its worst victims. The King’s Continental expeditions forced them to mortgage their estates to the Jews, from whose clutches none but the lands of tenants on the royal demesne were safe; and, if the holders of the pledge were afraid to enforce their claims in person, they passed the bonds to the more powerful nobles, who seized the land of their inferiors and sometimes refused to part with it, even when the debtors offered to redeem it by paying off the debt with interest.
In addition to these private motives, there were political reasons to foment the anti-Jewish movement; common interests which bound all the hostile elements together. It was felt by both Lords and Commons that, but for the Jews’ ready money, Henry would not have been able to carry on his unpopular wars abroad, or his anti-constitutional policy at home, and to indulge that preference for Provençal and other foreign favourites which his English subjects resented so strongly. That the source of the King’s power to defy public opinion was rightly guessed is shown by the enormous sums which Henry extorted from the Jews at various times; in 1230, under the pretext that they clipped and adulterated the coin of the realm—a very common offence in those days66—they were made to pay into the Royal Exchequer one-third of their moveable property. The operation was repeated in 1239. In 1241, 20,000 marks were exacted from them; and two years after 60,000 marks—a sum equal to the whole yearly revenue of the crown—above 4000 marks being wrung from Aaron of York alone. In 1250 new oppression, on a charge of forgery, elicited 30,000 marks from the same wretched millionaire, and from 1252 to 1255 Henry robbed the Jews three times by such exquisite cruelty that the whole race, in despair, twice begged for permission to depart from England. But the King replied, “How can I remedy the oppressions you complain of? I am myself a beggar. I am spoiled, I am stripped of all my revenues”—referring to the attempt made by the Council to secure constitutional Government by the refusal of supplies—“I must have money from any hand, from any quarter, or by any means.” He then delivered them over to Richard, Earl of Cornwall, that he might persuade them to stay, or, in the words of Matthew Paris, “that those whom the one brother had flayed, the other might embowel.” The same witty chronicler informs us that these spoliations excited no pity for the victims in Henry’s Christian subjects, “because it is proved and is manifest, that they are continually convicted of forging charters, seals and coins,” and elsewhere he describes the Jews as “a sign for the nations, like Cain the accursed.”
The burgesses and the barons in their anti-Jewish campaign found powerful allies among the high dignitaries of the Church, who had a two-fold set of grievances against Israel: practical grievances, and grievances begotten of religious bigotry. Pope Innocent III., in pursuance of his aggressive autocratism, had claimed the right of filling vacant benefices all over the Catholic world. In England the election to the see of Canterbury gave rise to a long struggle between Pope and King, which ended in John’s shameful and abject surrender. ♦1207♦ Cardinal Langton, Innocent’s nominee and instrument, on being raised to the primacy, made common cause with John’s disaffected nobility, and the two acting in concert frustrated the unpopular prince’s projected invasion of France in 1213. The same Archbishop passed at his provincial synod a decree, forcing the Jews to wear the badge and forbidding them to keep Christian servants or to build new synagogues. He also issued orders to his flock, threatening to excommunicate anyone who should have relations with the enemies of Christ, or sell to them the necessaries of life. The Jews were to be treated as a race outside the pale of humanity. Langton’s example was followed by the Bishops, many of whom exerted themselves both officially and unofficially to check intercourse between Jews and Christians. The crusade was carried on after Langton’s death. At one time the Archbishop of Canterbury demands the demolition of the Jewish synagogues, at another he calls upon the temporal power to prevent Jewish converts from relapsing into infidelity; on a third occasion he writes to the Queen remonstrating with her on her business transactions with the Jews, and threatening the royal lady with everlasting damnation. Similarly, time and again bishops hold the thunderbolt of excommunication over the heads of all true believers who should assist at a Jewish wedding, or accept Jewish hospitality.
These attacks by the Church were prejudicial to the King’s pecuniary interests, and during Henry III.’s minority met with vigorous opposition on the part of his guardians. When the young King assumed the responsibilities of Government, he found himself placed in a difficult position: his interests compelled him to protect the Jews, while his loyalty to the Church forbade him to ignore the behests of her ministers. ♦1222♦ He compromised by sanctioning the use of the badge, and by ♦1233♦ building a house for the reception of Jewish converts (Domus Conversorum) on one hand, while, on the other, he shielded, to the best of his ability, the hunted people from the effects of ecclesiastical and popular wrath.
The war declared by the Papacy against the Jews on religious principle was continued on grounds of practical necessity. Owing to the enormous expenditure of money, incurred partly by the architectural extravagance of the age, partly by an almost equally extravagant hospitality; partly by the exactions of Kings and Popes, and partly by bad management, the estates of the Church in England had begun to be encumbered with debt in the twelfth century, and loans were frequently contracted at ruinous interest.
A typical case has been preserved for us in the contemporary chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, a Norman-English monk of Bury St. Edmunds. In his crabbed dog-Latin, the good brother tells the story of his monastery’s distress: how under old Abbot Hugo’s feeble rule the finances became entangled, how deficit followed in the footsteps of deficit, and debt was added to debt, until there was no ready money left to keep the rain out of the house. William the sacristan was ordered by the old Abbot to repair a room which had fallen into ruins; but as the order was not accompanied by the means of carrying it out, Brother William would fain go to Benedict the Jew for a loan of forty marks. The room was repaired, the rain was kept out, but the creditor clamoured for his money. In the absence of cash, the original loan grew rapidly at compound interest, and the forty marks were swelled to a hundred pounds. Then the Jew came to the Abbot with his bills and demanded to be repaid; not only these hundred pounds, but also another hundred pounds, which the Abbot owed him on his private account. Old Hugo, at his wits’ end, tries to silence the Jew by granting him a bond for four hundred pounds to be paid at the end of four years. The Jew goes away not displeased, only to reappear at the expiration of the term. On his second visit he, of course, found the Abbot as penniless as on the first, and extracted from him a bond for eight hundred and eighty pounds, payable in eleven years by annual instalments of eighty pounds. Furthermore, he now produced other claims, sundry sums lent fourteen years before, so that the whole debt amounted to twelve hundred pounds, besides interest. The matter was left pending until old Hugo was called to a world where there is neither borrowing nor lending at compound interest; but only paying just debts.
Old Abbot Hugo is dead, and young Abbot Samson has succeeded to his honours and to his deficits. Samson’s first anxiety was to free the house from the claws of the insatiable Benedict and other Hebrew and Christian harpies, and he did it in a manner characteristic of the age. In some four years he paid off the debts of the convent; but at the same time he obtained from the King permission to revenge himself on the Jews. The royal abettor of what followed was oblivious of the fact that he was himself more than an accomplice in the usurer’s exactions. Huge sums were at that very moment being extorted for royal purposes from the Jewish communities which were in as constant a condition of indebtedness to the Crown as others were to them. Nevertheless, the Jews were driven out of the Liberties of Bury St. Edmunds by men-at-arms, and forbidden to return thither under severe penalties; while sentence of excommunication was pronounced against any one who should be found sheltering them. Such was the condition of an English monastery towards the end of the twelfth century.
Things went from bad to worse, until, in the thirteenth century, we are told, “there was scarcely anyone in England, especially a bishop, who was not caught in the meshes of the usurers.” We hear of archiepiscopal buildings and priories falling into decay for want of funds, and of churches that could not afford clergymen; of a bishop seeking the intervention of the King in order to obtain respite of his debts to the Jews, and of a prior asking for permission to let one of his churches, as a common building, for five years, in order to pay off part of the debt; of another bishop pledging the plate of his cathedral, and of an abbot pledging the bones of the patron saint of his Abbey; and we even read of an archbishop carrying his zeal for retrenchment to the cruel length of imposing a limit to the number of dishes with which the good Abbot of Glastonbury might be served in his private room.
At the same time the ancient superstition regarding usury had been invigorated in England, as on the Continent, by the diligent preaching of Franciscan and Dominican friars, no less than by the economic distress of debtors. It is true that the practice was not confined to the Jews. Besides English usurers, the Italian bankers of Milan, Florence, Lucca, Pisa, Rome, and other cities, had stretched their tentacles over Europe. In France their position was confirmed by a diplomatic agreement with Philip III. In England Italian usurers scoured the country collecting taxes for the Pope and lending money on their own account at exorbitant interest. As the Jews lent under royal so did these Lombards lend under papal patronage. The extortions of the former were not amenable to any tribunal; the latter were in the habit of, in the words of the chronicler, “cloaking their usury under the show of trade,” and thus carried on their business under forms not forbidden by Canon law—even supposing that the ecclesiastical courts would have cared or dared to condemn the Pope’s agents. To the Italian usurers the great barons extended the same protection as to the Jews, and for similar reasons; but the smaller nobility and gentry, the clergy, and the lower orders of the laity hated them intensely. One of these usurers, brother of the Pope’s own Legate, was murdered at Oxford, while in London Bishop Roger pronounced a solemn anathema against the whole class. Henry III. was, after all, a Catholic and a King. The sufferings of his subjects moved him to banish the Cahorsines from his kingdom, and, were it not for his chronic impecuniosity, he might have adopted similar measures against the Jews. As it was, in spite of his religious scruples, he could ill afford to lose the rich income which he still derived from them.
While the clamour against the Jewish usurers was gathering force from bigotry, penury, and policy, the Jews were fast losing the means which had hitherto enabled them to procure an inadequate protection at the hands of the King and his great barons. Early in the thirteenth century the merchants of Lombardy and Southern France, as has been shown, began to compete with the Jewish money-lenders. But the loss of the monopoly which the Jews had long enjoyed was, in England, followed by greater losses still. ♦1257–1267♦ During the Civil Wars the ranks of the malcontents were filled with all sorts of ruffians, some driven to rebellion by discontent, others drawn to it by the hope of booty; and it was the policy of the rebel barons to let all these disorderly elements loose upon the King’s friends and supporters. The royal demesnes were ruthlessly ravaged, and then the fury of the revolutionists, who numbered amongst their allies both the lay and the clerical mobs, was directed against the King’s protégés. Every success of the popular party over the King was duly celebrated by a slaughter of his Jewish serfs and destruction of their quarters. The appetite for plunder and havoc was further stimulated by superstition, and at Easter, 1263, the Jews were stripped and butchered in the City of London. This was the prologue to a long tragedy that continued throughout that troublous period. The spoliation of the London Jews was repeated, and the Jewries of Canterbury, Northampton, Winchester, Worcester, Lincoln, and Cambridge were attacked, looted, and destroyed. Many of the unfortunate race were massacred, while some saved themselves by baptism and others by exorbitant ransom. Deeds and bonds were burnt, and thus the Jews were deprived of the one bulwark that had stood between them and annihilation; so much so, that in the last year of Henry III.’s reign their contribution to the revenue of the crown fell from £5000 to 2000 marks.
Henry III. died in 1272, and Edward I. was proclaimed King. Edward as heir-apparent had distinguished himself by his piety, no less than by his valour and public spirit, and at the time of his accession he was actually fighting the infidels in the Holy Land. His loyalty to the Church prejudiced him against the Jews both as “enemies of Christ” and as usurers. His scrupulous regard for the interests of his subjects was calculated to deepen the prejudice. Edward’s political ideal was a harmonious co-operation and contribution of all classes to the welfare of the State. The Jewry, as constituted under his predecessors, formed an anomaly and a scandal. Measures of restriction had already been taken against the Jews, and supplied a precedent for further proceedings in the same direction. One of these measures was the statute of 1270, which forbade the Jews to acquire houses in London in addition to those which they already possessed, to enjoy a freehold howsoever held, to receive rent-charges as security, and obliged them to return to the Christian debtors, or to other Christians, the lands which they had already seized, on repayment of the principal without interest. A petition, preferred by the victims of this Act, to be allowed the full privileges which accompanied the tenure of land under the feudal system—namely, the guardianship of minors, the right to give wards in marriage, and the presentation to livings—had elicited an indignant protest from the Bishops, who expressed their outraged feelings in language that was wanting neither in clearness nor in vigour. The “perfidious Jews” were reminded that their residence in England was entirely due to the King’s grace—a sentiment with which Prince Edward had fully concurred. ♦1274♦ On his return from Palestine, he resumed the work of administrative reform which he had commenced as heir-apparent.
Despite the statute of 1270, he found the Jews still absorbed in the one occupation which they had practised for ages under the pressure of necessity and with the sanction of custom and royal patronage. The religious sensitiveness of a pilgrim fresh from the Holy Land, acting on the political anxiety of a statesman honestly desirous to do his duty by his subjects, compelled him to new measures of restriction. Moreover, the reasons of self-interest which had influenced his predecessors had lost much of their force. John’s and Henry III.’s merciless rapacity had sapped the foundations of Jewish prosperity; the barons’ even more merciless cruelty had accomplished their ruin; and while the fortunes of the Jews waned, those of their Italian rivals waxed; so the Jews, an unholy and unpopular class at the best of times, had now also become an unnecessary one. About the same time the Church renewed the campaign against usurers. ♦1274♦ Pope Gregory X., by a decree passed at the Council of Lyons, requested the princes of Christendom to double their efforts to suppress the accursed trade. Edward hastened to obey the orders of the Church. The transactions of the Florentine bankers in England were subjected to enquiry and restriction by his order, and then he proceeded against the Jews.
There were two ways open to him: either to withdraw his countenance from the Jewish money-lenders, or to compel them to give up the sinful practice. He was too humane to adopt the former course; for the withdrawal of royal protection would have been the signal for instant attack on the part of the people. How real this danger was can be judged from the fact that in 1275 the Jews were driven out of Cambridge at the instigation of Edward’s own mother. ♦1275♦ He, therefore, chose the latter alternative, and issued a general and severe prohibition of usury, accompanied with the permission that the Jews might engage in commercial and industrial pursuits or in agriculture. The Jews were asked to change at a moment’s notice a mode of life which had become a second nature to them, and one which they had been encouraged—one may almost say compelled—to pursue in England for two centuries. The hardship of the prohibition was aggravated by the impossibility of profiting by the permission. So long as the Jew was liable to violence from his neighbours, he could hardly engage in any occupation which involved the possession of bulky goods. Jewels and bonds were the only kinds of moveable property that could easily be secured against attack. As a writer who can scarcely be accused of undue partiality to the Jews has observed: “The ancient house at Lincoln seems to suggest by its plan and arrangements that the inhabitants were prepared to stand a siege, and men who lived under such conditions could hardly venture to pursue ordinary avocations.”67 But there were more specific reasons explaining the Jew’s inability to conform to Edward’s decree. A Jew could not become a tradesman, because a tradesman ought to be a member of a Guild; as a general rule, no one could join a Guild, who was not a burgess; and the law forbade the Jews to become burgesses. But, even if the law allowed it, the Jews could not, without violating their religion, participate in the feasts and ceremonies of the Guilds. Nor were the handicrafts more accessible to the Jews; for most of them were in the hands of close corporations into which the despised Jew could not easily gain admittance. Moreover, an apprenticeship of many years was required, and apprenticeship necessitated residence in the master’s house. Now the Church forbade the Christians, on pain of excommunication, to receive Jews in their houses, and, therefore, a Jewish boy, even if his own parents’ prejudices and the scruples of the Synagogue were overcome, could not become a Christian’s apprentice. Agriculture was likewise out of the question, because, even if the landlords would have them, the Jews, being forbidden by their religion to take the oath of fealty, could not become villeins. The popular hatred of the Jew rendered the profession of peddler or carrier equally perilous. His Semitic face and conspicuous yellow badge, which he was compelled to wear from the age of seven, would have made him a target for insult and assault on every road and at every fair in the country.
Thus the Jew, after two hundred years’ residence in England, found himself labouring under all the disabilities of an alien, the only occupation left open to him being that which foreign merchants were allowed to pursue—namely, the export trade in wool and corn; but for this occupation, limited at the best, a great capital was needed, and, therefore, after the recent sufferings of the race, few could find profit in it. For all these reasons, Edward’s alternative remained a dead letter, and, as the Jews could not suffer themselves to starve, usury continued rampant, and the second error proved worse than the first. The distemper was far too complex to be cured by Edward’s simple remedy. It might have been encouraged by impunity; it certainly was accentuated by severity. The money-lenders, no longer under official supervision, exceeded all bounds of extortion: the peril of detection had to be paid for. The demand for loans increased as the supply diminished, the rate of interest rose, and, as the transactions had to be kept secret, all sorts of subterfuges were resorted to: a bond was given for a multiple of the sum actually received, and the interest often figured under the euphemism of “gift” or “compensation for delay,” or, if the money-lender combined traffic in goods with traffic in money, the interest was paid in kind. It was contrary to common sense and human experience to expect that a royal statute should have prevailed over what really was an inevitable necessity, and the abuses that followed were only such as might have been anticipated in a society where the borrowers were many and needy, the lenders few and greedy, and the two classes were impelled to deal with each other by the strongest of motives—the motive of self-preservation.
But even clandestine usury required capital, and the poorer Jews, devoid of industrial skill or legal standing, despised by the people, denounced by the clergy, helpless, hopeless, and unscrupulous, betook themselves to highway robbery, burglary, coin-clipping, or baptism. The penultimate source of revenue, which, as has been noted, supplied already one of the most common charges brought against the Jews, forced Edward to strike hard and quickly. His severity was proportionate to the magnitude of the evil. The depreciation of the currency due to the prevalence of forgery had led to an alarming rise in the price of commodities; foreign merchants had left the country, and trade fallen into stagnation. The greater share of the blame was generally, and not unjustly, attributed to the Jews. In one night all the Jews in the country were thrown into prison, their domiciles were searched, and their effects seized. Edward, in his anxiety to punish none but the guilty, issued an edict, in which he warned his Christian subjects against false accusations, such as might easily have been concocted by people eager to gratify their religious bigotry, private malice, or cupidity. The enquiry resulted in the conviction of many Jews and Christians. Of the latter, three were sentenced to death and the rest to fines. But no mercy was shown to the Jews. Two hundred and eighty of them were hanged, drawn, and quartered in London alone, and all the houses, lands, and goods of a great number were confiscated. A very few took refuge in conversion, and received a moiety of the money realised by the confiscation of their brethren’s property.
This deplorable state of things convinced Edward of the futility of his policy. Other causes intensified his anger against the Jews. In the first year of his reign a Dominican friar embraced Judaism, a little later a Jew was burnt for blasphemy at Norwich, and, in 1278, a Jewess at Nottingham created great excitement by abusing in virulent terms the Christians in the market place; all this despite the King’s proclamation that blasphemy against Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the Catholic faith should be visited with loss of life or limbs, and the penalties, not less severe, which the Church reserved for apostates. ♦1281♦ Parliament now urged the expulsion of the Jews. Edward, his native moderation notwithstanding, could not defy public opinion. The precedent of his mentor, the brave and wise baron Simon de Montfort, also pointed in the same direction. ♦About 1253♦ The latter had expelled the Jews from Leicester and given to the burgesses a solemn promise that they should never return.68 The example could not but have its influence upon Edward, and his own mental attitude was too orthodox to render him impervious to the overwhelming prejudices of the age. He had endeavoured to reconcile duty with humanity, and had failed. Neither did the Christians wish to receive the Jews amongst themselves, nor would the Jews have embraced such an invitation. So long as they remained in England, mutual antipathy and mutual bigotry would bar amalgamation, and therefore, under the feudal system, the only calling which the Jews could pursue, in a Christian country, would be the sinful traffic in money. Since the Jews could not be improved, they ought to be removed.
While Edward was slowly coming to the one inevitable conclusion, there arrived in England, at the end of 1286, a Bull from the Pope Honorius IV., addressed to the archbishops and bishops. After a lengthy enumeration of the familiar charges brought against the Jews—their obedience to “a wicked and deceitful book, called Talmud, containing manifold abominations, falsehoods, heresies, and abuses”; their seduction of brethren snatched from infidelity, and their perversion of Christians; their immorality, their criminal intercourse with Christians, and other “horrible deeds done to the shame of our Creator and the detriment of the Catholic faith”—Honorius bade the bishops increase their severity, and their “spiritual and temporal penalties” against the “accursed and perfidious” people. ♦1287♦ In consequence of this mandate, we find a synod at Exeter passing ordinances restricting still further the Jew’s discretion in matters of dress and behaviour. The apostolic epistle accelerated Edward’s decision. It is also probable that the King, on the eve of his struggle with Scotland and France, thought it prudent to conciliate his English subjects by yielding to their demand for the expulsion of the hated people.
On the 18th of July, 1290, a decree was issued ordering that all Jews should leave England before the Feast of All Saints, sentence of death being pronounced against any who should be found lingering in the country after the prescribed date.
The severity of the measure was somewhat mitigated by the king’s sincere anxiety to spare the exiles gratuitous insult and injury. The officers charged with the execution of the decree were ordered to ensure the safe arrival of the Jews on the coast, and their embarkation. They were permitted to carry away all the effects that were in their possession at the time, together with any pledges that were not redeemed by the Christian debtors before a certain day. As a further inducement for the payment of debts, the latter were given to understand that, if they did not pay a moiety to the Jews before their departure, they would remain debtors to the Treasury for the full amount. A few Jews, personally known and favoured at Court, were even allowed to sell their real property to any Christian who would buy it. In a word, everything that could be done to alleviate the misery of the exiles, was suggested by Edward.
The autumn was spent in hurried preparations. Those who had money out at interest hastened to collect it, and those who had property too unwieldy for transport hastened to part with it for what it would yield. It is easy to imagine the enormous loss which this compulsory liquidation must have entailed on the wretched Jews. Their goods were sold at such prices as might have been expected from the urgency of the case, and the knowledge that all that could not be disposed of would have to be left behind. Their houses, their synagogues, and their cemeteries fell into the hands of the King, who distributed them among his favourites. Their bonds and mortgages were also appropriated by the Royal Exchequer; but the debts were imperfectly collected, and the remainder, after many years’ delay, were finally remitted by Edward III.
As the fatal day drew near, the emigrants, sixteen thousand all told, men, women, and children, might be seen hurrying from different parts of England to the coast, some riding, the majority trudging, sullen and weary, along the muddy roads, the men with their scanty luggage slung over their shoulders, the women with their babes in their arms. Thus they went their last journey on English soil, under the bleak sky of an English October, objects of scorn rather than of pity to the people among whom they had lived for more than two hundred years. The King’s biographer relates with great exultation how “the perfidious and unbelieving horde was driven forth from England, in one day into exile,” and the English Parliament, which nine years before had demanded the expulsion of the unbelievers, now expressed the gratitude of the nation for the fulfilment of their desire, by voting a tenth and a fifteenth to the King. But if the English were glad to get rid of the Jews, the Jews were not sorry to depart. It was only what they had already begged to be allowed to do. Though born and bred among the English, they did not even speak their language. They spoke the language of the Normans who had brought them to England for their own purposes, and ejected them when those purposes no longer held. They were as foreign to the land on this day of their departure, as their fathers had been on the day of their arrival, full two centuries earlier. Their residence in England was a mere episode in their long career of sorrow and trial, only a temporary halt on the weary pilgrimage which began at Zion and would end in Zion.
Nor were their last experiences such as to sweeten their feelings towards the land they were leaving. Despite the king’s merciful provision, there was no lack of opportunities for expressing, otherwise than by looks and words, the bitter hatred nourished against the emigrants. The old chroniclers have handed down to us an incident which may safely be regarded as only an extreme specimen of the cruel memories which the children of Israel carried away from England. On St. Denis’ Day the Jews of London set out on their way to the sea-coast, and got on board a ship at the mouth of the Thames. The captain had cast anchor during the ebb-tide, so that his vessel grounded on the sands. Thereupon he requested the passengers to land, till it was again afloat. They obeyed, and he led them a long way off so that, when they returned to the river-side, the tide was full. Then he ran into the water, hauled himself on board by means of a rope, and referred the hapless Jews to Moses for help. Many of them tried to follow him but perished in the attempt, and the captain divided their property with his crew. The chroniclers add that the ship-master and his sailors were afterwards indicted, convicted of murder, and hanged. Similar crimes of robbery and murder were brought home to the inhabitants of the Cinque Ports; but the punishment of the offenders brought little consolation to the victims.
The sea proved as cruel to the Jews as the land had been. Fierce storms swept the Channel, many of the ships were wrecked and many of the exiles were robbed and drowned by the captains, or were cast naked on the French coast. Those who escaped shipwreck and murder reached the shore they sought only to find it as inhospitable as the one from which they fled. A decree of the Parliament de la Chandeleur, issued in obedience to the Pope’s wishes, bade all Jewish refugees from England to quit the kingdom by the middle of next Lent. Some of them, thanks to their French tongue, may have escaped detection and remained in France, sharing the treatment of their co-religionists already described; another party, mostly poor, took refuge in Flanders; but the majority joined their brethren in Spain, whither we shall follow them.