accuse the Jews of crucifixion, of circumcising their children, and false coining. " "The citizens of London offered them so many indignities, and abused them in such a manner, that the king was forced to take publick notice of it. And thereupon wrote a very menacing letter to the mayor and barons; wherein he told them that he had always loved them much, and protected them in their rights and libertys; wherefore he believed they retained the same affection for him, and would do every thing for his honour, and the tranquillity of his kingdom; yet he could not but wonder that, since they well knew what special protection he had lately granted the Jews, they should so little regard his peace, as to suffer them to be evil entreated; especially when other parts of the nation gave them no disturbance. Wherefore he commanded them to take particular care how they were injured for the future; assuring them, that if any ill happened to the Jews, thro' their connivance or neglect, they should be answerable for it. For, (continues the king,) I know full well, that these insolencies are committed only by the fools of the city, and it is the business of wise men to put a stop to them. This happened in the 5th year of King John." This solicitous care of the Jews lasted during the first ten years of the reign of this monarch, without his demonstrating that they were his sole property, except by a great many private exertions of arbitrary power over them, which appear on the records. As in the instance of Robert, the son of Roger, who had married a wife, whose father was much in their debt, for which debts the king granted him a full and complete discharge. And in the taking away a house from a Jew, and giving it, without any consideration, to Earl Ferrars.+ John, in the eleventh year of his reign, began to act to the Jews in his real character, and disclosed his hitherto concealed purposes. An account of the measures which were adopted by the king is thus given by Dr. Tovey. "But the next year after, viz. 1210, in the eleventh year of his reign, the king began to lay aside his mask, and finding that no new comers made it worth his while to stay any longer, he set at once upon the old covey which he had drawn into his net, and commanded all the Jews of both sexes, throughout England, to be imprisoned, till they would make a discovery of their wealth; which he appointed officers to receive in every county, and return to his exchequer. Many of them, no doubt, pleaded poverty, or pretended to have given up all but as the tyrant was in earnest to have their last farthing, he extorted it by the most cruel torments. *Pat. 10. Joh. m. 5. VOL. I. PART II. Stow says, that the generality of them had one eye put out. And Matthew Paris tells us, that from one particular Jew at Bristol, the king demanded no less than ten thousand marks of silver, (a prodigious summ in those days!) which being resolutely denied him, he commanded one of his great teeth to be pulled out, daily, till he consented. The poor wretch, whose money was his life, had the courage to hold out seven operations, but then, sinking under the violence of the pain, ransomed the remainder of his teeth, at the price demanded. The whole summ extorted from them, at this time, amounted to threescore thousand marks of silver." Again : "John therefore being disappointed of any foreign assistance, his subjects were able for some time to cope with him, and the troubles continued. Which continuing, likewise, his occasion for money, the Jews were called upon a second time, after their fleeces had been suffered to grow for four years. In vain did they take refuge in their common plea of inability. For some of them, who dwelt at Southampton, being tardy in their payments, the sheriff was commanded to imprison them immediately in the castle of Bristol, and send up, forthwith, to London, all such summs of money as he had already received from any of them, or should receive hereafter." Again, when the king was contending with his barons, the Jews reverted into the hands of the latter as legitimate plunder. "But after this second storm was blown over, they met with nothing but fair weather for two years; and then, the war continuing between the king and his people, the barons (whose lands had been miserably ravaged by the king's forces) coming to London, made what reprisals they could upon the king's Jews; and after having ransacked their treasures, and demolished all their houses, employed the materials of them to repair the city walls and gates, which they had broken down at their entry." Our antiquary adds: "Yet, altho this year proved unfortunate to the Jews at London, it might be reckoned favourable to the Jews in general; for within two months after this accident, they were acknowledged by the king to be so considerable a body of people, as to deserve some notice in his Magna Charta; an honour thought proper to be omitted in the new great charter, which was afterwards published by King Henry the Third." The last act of King John to the Jews was to employ them in a deed, to execute which he could not compel any of his * Matthew Paris and Stow, ad annum 1210. Christian subjects. Having taken a great part of the Scotch army, who assisted the barons, prisoners at Berwick, he determined to inflict such a variety of tortures upon them, that he could find none, except the Jews, whom he was able to force, that did not refuse to be made the instruments of his cruelty. The Jews, in the neighbourhood, were therefore obliged to become his executioners.* The first act of the guardians of King John's successor, Henry the 3rd, was a measure in favor of the Jews. This monarch, like all his predecessors, began his reign with an indulgence to the Jews. The Earl of Pembroke, guardian during the minority, immediately issued orders for the liberation of all Jews that were, on any account, found imprisoned: and, in the succeeding year, it was directed, that in all the towns where the Jews chiefly resided, twenty-four burgesses should be elected, for the especial purpose of protecting their interests and securing their safety; a measure which very significantly intimates the danger of the objects, whose necessities demanded that they should be thus defended. In the writs, sent for this purpose to the respective sheriffs, the pilgrims to Jerusalem+ are mentioned by name, as a class whose insults are to be particularly guarded against: for it seems, these meritorious individuals conceived they had a right to pay themselves the expenses of so long and arduous a journey out of the funds of the obnoxious Jews; to whose ancient land they were proceeding, and whose ancestors had originally been the cause of their pilgrimage. It was soon after this, and for the ostensible purpose of distinguishing and protecting them, that the king, by proclamation, ordered, that all Jews, resident in the kingdom, should wear upon the fore-part of their upper garment two broad stripes of white linen or parchment. These encouragements, it appears, drew great numbers of foreign Jews to settle in this country, and consequently excited loud complaints among the mass of the people. For, independent of usury being held in abhorrence, and of the detestation which always burnt fiercely against the religious tenets of Judaism, the Jews understood the secrets of trade much better than the native merchants. In consequence of their extensive connexions abroad, and their knowledge of the use of bills of exchange and other negotiable paper, they were enabled to cultivate commerce with great advantage: thus their inland traffic was well supplied; in addition to the convenience resulting from the brotherhood, which existed among them, and amalgamated all the Jews Chron. de Mailross, ad ann. 1216. Ang. Jud. p. 76. Ne permittatis........ab aliquibus vexentur, et maxime de Cruce signatis. in England, as it were, into one extensive firm. Their skill in their own literature and the art of writing Hebrew, which was always kept up among them, gave a great superiority over the illiterate churls of the time-not to mention the secrecy which attended all mutual communications in an unknown language. Usury, likewise, which was forbidden to Christians, was permitted to the Jews;* and their superior craft in the management of business was so evidently great, that those kings who were careful of their revenue were very glad to procure Jewish stewards and accountants to fill the offices of the exchequer, and other places of a like nature, as we have seen in the case of William Rufus. The consequence of all this was, a great outcry in the nation against the Jews, on the part of the people, who were vigorously supported by the clergy and resisted by the king. Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, held a synod, in which, among other things, it was decreed, "That Jews do not keep Christian slaves. And let the slaves (says he) be compelled by ecclesiastical censure, to observe this; and the Jews by canonical punishment, or by some extraordinary penalty contrived by the diocesans. Let them not be permitted to build any more synagogues; but be looked upon as debtors to the churches of the parishes wherein they reside, as to tithes and offerings." And both he and the Bishop of Lincoln published an injunction, that no Christian should hold any intercourse with a Jew, or sell him any provisions, under pain of excommunication. These injunctions were quickly dissolved by the precepts of the king, directed to the principal officers of the towns where the Jews chiefly resided. Dr. Tovey observes, on this clerical plan of starving the Jews out of the country; "Persons unacquainted with the nature of false zeal, when backed by authority, will scarce believe that the Jews had been in any great danger of starving, tho' the king had not interposed in this matter. Yet Rapin tells us, that when the Gerhardine hereticks made their appearance in the time of Henry the Second, and orders were given not * See Lord Coke, 2nd Inst. 66 +"The diligence and expertness of this people in all pecuniary dealings," observes Mr. Hallam, of the Jews, in his late excellent work On the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, recommended them to princes who were solicitous about the improvement of their revenue. We find an article in the general charter of privileges, granted by Peter III. of Aragon, in 1283, that no Jew should hold the office of bayle or judge. And two kings of Castile, Alonso XI. and Peter the Cruel, incurred much odium by employing Jewish ministers in their treasury." Vol. 3, p. 404. to relieve them; the prohibition was so punctually observed, that all those wretches miserably perished with hunger." The Christians of the middle ages seem to have been very little solicitous about the conversion of the Jews from their erroneous faith, though there was a place in London, called the House of Converts," established for their reception. For it appears to have been the universal custom of the Christian princes, to seize upon the property of every Jew that embraced the received religion-a practice which held out but small inducement to produce a change. When one Augustine, however, a Jew of Canterbury, renounced his errors, the king was graciously pleased to give him his house again, to live in; notwithstanding (says the writ) that he was converted, (non obstante eo quod conversus est.) Our antiquary very justly terms this, but a poor invitation to the rules of holiness." 66 By this time, however, (1230) the Jews had become a wealthy prey. The king came to be in want of money; and the Jews were consequently ordered to pay down, without delay, into the exchequer, the full third part of all their moveable property, to which exaction they were compelled to submit. The history of the Jews, for the remainder of this long reign, is little else, with the exception of two or three massacres of them by the barons and populace, than a series of levies upon the Jews, to an amount which fills the modern reader, accustomed as he is to hear of immense taxes, with surprise. The supplies, indeed, required of them were frequently more than they were able, by any means, to collect-the constant punishment of which was, a general imprisonment, which, more than once in this reign, extended to all the Jews in the land.* Once, the whole community determined, or feigned a determination of retiring from the country. Whenever the barons refused, as they constantly did, any longer to supply the extravagance of the king with money, to lavish on his favorite foreigners, the Jews were his never-failing resource: on one of these occasions, the king demanded money which they were unable to furnish. "The king therefore parting from them in a fury, commissioned * "On the walls of an old vault, at Winchester, was found an affecting evidence of their imprisonment in the succeeding reign, in an inscription which some captive Jew had scratched, in Hebrew, upon a soft stone-the translation of which is, All the Jews of this nation were imprisoned in the year five thousand and forty-seven (1287 A.D.) I, Asher, wrote this. Selden de Jur. Nat. 1. 2. c. 6. |
