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 days[66]—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.