Disputes of this kind, however, were not always so peacefully settled. Some forty years later—in 1201—the monks of Ely set up, under the protection of a royal charter, a market at Lakenheath, within the “liberties” of S. Edmund’s abbey. The chapter of S. Edmund’s, “together with their friends and neighbours,” sent to Ely an amicable remonstrance against this proceeding, adding that they would willingly make good the fifteen marks which the monks of Ely had paid for their charter, if these latter would consent to forego the use of it. The remonstrance however produced no effect. The brotherhood of S. Edmund’s therefore demanded a recognition to declare whether the new market had been set up to their injury, and to the injury of the market at their own town. The verdict of the recognitors decided that it was so. The next step was to inform the king, and ascertain from him the exact tenour of his charter to Ely; search was made in the royal register, and it was found that the market had been granted only on condition that it should not damage the interests of other markets in the neighbourhood. Hereupon the king, for a promise of forty marks, gave to S. Edmund’s a charter providing that no market should thenceforth be set up within the liberties of the abbey save by the abbot’s consent; and he issued orders to the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, for the abolition of the market at Lakenheath. The justiciar sent on the order to the sheriff of Suffolk; and the sheriff, having no jurisdiction within the liberties of S. Edmund’s, forwarded it to the abbot for execution. Next market-day the hundred-reeve came to Lakenheath, and shewing the letters of king and sheriff, supported by the testimony of the freemen, forbade the market in the king’s name; he was however met with nothing but contempt and abuse. The abbot, who was in London at the time, after consulting with some “wise men” there, wrote to his bailiffs bidding them assemble all the men of S. Edmund’s with their horses and arms, overthrow the market by force, and take prisoners as many of the buyers and sellers as they could. In the middle of the night some six hundred well-armed men set out from S. Edmund’s for Lakenheath. When they reached it the market was deserted; all the stall-holders had fled. The prior of Ely was at Lakenheath with his bailiffs, having come that same night in expectation of the intended attack; but he “would not come out of his house”; so the bailiffs of S. Edmund’s, after vainly demanding pledges from him that he would “stand to right” in the abbey-court, seized the butchers’ trestles and the planks which formed the stalls, as well as the cart-horses, sheep and oxen, “yea, and all the beasts of the field,” and carried them away to Icklingham. The prior’s bailiffs hurried in pursuit, and begged to have their goods on pledge for fifteen days, which was granted. Within the fifteen days came a writ summoning the abbot to answer for this affair at the Exchequer, and to restore the captured animals. “For the bishop of Ely, who was a man of ready and eloquent speech, had complained in his own person to the justiciar and the great men of England, saying that an unheard-of insult had been done to S. Etheldreda in time of peace; wherefore many were greatly stirred up against the abbot.”[2280]

The developement of foreign commerce, resulting from the wide-spread relations of the Angevin kings with lands on both sides of the sea which encompassed their island-realm, woke a rivalry no less keen between some of the great trading cities, although they might shew it in less rough and ready fashion than the champions of the mercantile privileges of S. Edmund’s. One interesting illustration has recently come to light, in a writ of Henry II. to the bailiffs of Dublin in favour of the citizens of Chester. Henry, as we know, had granted to the men of Bristol the right of colonizing Dublin and holding it of him and his heirs with the same liberties and privileges as were enjoyed by Bristol itself. Bristol and Chester had for ages been rivals in the trade with Ireland; Chester now saw itself in imminent danger of being altogether shut out of that trade, an exclusion which would have meant little less than ruin to the city. We can hardly doubt that its citizens appealed to the king for a reservation of their commercial privileges in Dublin as against the Bristol merchants. At any rate, Henry in 1175 or 1176 issued a writ to the bailiffs of Dublin commanding that the burghers of Chester should be free to buy and sell at Dublin as they had been wont to do, and should have the same rights, liberties and free customs there as they had had in his grandfather’s days.[2281] Yet more important than the trade of the western seaports with Ireland was that of the eastern coast, not only with the continental dominions of the Angevin house, but with almost the whole of Europe. Not the least beneficial result of the Angevins’ renewal of the old political ties between England and the Empire was the increase of trade which it helped to bring from the merchant-cities of northern Germany and the Low Countries to the port of London. Nor were the kings themselves blind to the advantage of these commercial relations. Richard on the eve of his return from captivity in 1194 granted to the citizens of Cöln a gildhall in London, “with all their other customs and demands,” for an annual payment of two shillings.[2282] The hall of the other Teutonic merchants—famous in later days under the name of the Steel-yard—was probably established about the same period; and early in the following century we find an elaborate and interesting code of regulations for the trade of the Lorrainers, the “men of the Emperor of Germany,” the Danes and the Norwegians.[2283] The developement of commerce brought with it a corresponding growth of riches, and of the material comforts and refinements of life. Domestic architecture began to improve. Henry Fitz-Aylwine issued at the opening of his mayoralty an “Assize” which has been described as “the earliest English Building Act,” and which at any rate shews that the civic authorities were earnestly endeavouring to secure health and comfort in the houses within their jurisdiction, and also to guard against the risk of fire which had ruined so many citizens in times past.[2284] Ecclesiastical architecture progressed still more rapidly; church-building or rebuilding went on all over the country on a scale which proves how great was the advance, both in artistic taste and material wealth, which England had made under the just rule and peaceful administration of her first Angevin king. At the opening of John’s reign the citizens of London were contemplating an important architectural work of another kind: they were planning to replace the wooden bridge over the Thames with a bridge of stone. Degenerate representative as he was in more important respects of the “great builders” of Anjou, John had yet inherited a sufficient share of their tastes to feel interested in such an undertaking as this; and in April 1202 we find him writing to the mayor and citizens of London to recommend them an architect, Isenbert, master of the schools at Saintes, whose skill in the construction of bridges had been lately proved at Saintes and at La Rochelle.[2285] The citizens however seem not to have adopted the king’s suggestion; they found an architect among themselves, in the person of Peter, chaplain or curate of S. Mary Colechurch—the little church beneath whose shadow S. Thomas the martyr was born. It was Peter who “began the stone bridge at London”; and in a chapel on that bridge his body found its appropriate resting-place when he died in 1205.[2286]

There can be little doubt that a large part of the means for this developement of commercial and architectural energy was furnished by the Jews. The Jewish settlements increased rapidly both in numbers and in importance under Henry II. In the Pipe Rolls of his first five years we find, in addition to the London Jews who appeared in the thirty-first year of his grandfather, and those of Oxford and Lincoln of whom there are traces in the next reign, Jewries at Norwich, Cambridge, Thetford and Bungay, as well as at an unnamed place in Suffolk, which from other evidence seems to have been Bury S. Edmund’s;[2287] and we have already seen that before Henry’s death there were important Hebrew colonies at Lynn, Stamford, York, and many other places. At Winchester the Jews were so numerous and so prosperous that a writer in Richard’s early years calls it their Jerusalem.[2288] The great increase in their numbers throughout England during Henry’s reign is shewn by the fact that in 1177 he found it necessary to grant them permission for the making of a Jewish burial-ground outside the walls of every city in England, instead of sending all their dead to be buried in London, as had been the practice hitherto.[2289] Legally, the Jews were still simply chattels of the king. Practically, they were masters of the worldly interests of a large number of his Christian subjects, and of a large portion of the wealth of his realm. Without their loans many a great and successful trading venture could never have been risked, many a splendid church could never have been built, nay, many a costly undertaking of the king himself might have been brought to a standstill for lack of funds necessary to its completion. The abbey-church of S. Edmund was rebuilt with money borrowed in great part, at exorbitant interest, from Jewish capitalists. Abbot Hugh, when he died in 1173, left his convent in utter fiscal bondage to two wealthy Jews, Isaac son of Rabbi Joses, and Benedict of Norwich.[2290] The sacred vessels and jewels belonging to Lincoln minster were in the same year redeemed by Geoffrey, then bishop-elect, from Aaron, a rich Jew of the city who had had them in pledge for seven years or more.[2291] In 1187 Aaron died; his treasure was seized for the king, and a large part of it sent over sea. The ship which bore it went down between Shoreham and Dieppe, and the sum of the lost treasure was great enough for its loss to be chronicled as a grave misfortune by the treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Nigel;[2292] while two years later the affairs of the dead Jew still made a prominent figure in the royal accounts.[2293] His house, as it stands at the head of the “Steep Hill” of Lincoln to this day, is one of the best examples of a mode of domestic architecture to which Christian townsfolk had scarcely yet begun to aspire, but which was already growing common among those of his race: a house built entirely of stone, in place of the wooden or rubble walls and thatched roofs which, even after Fitz-Aylwine’s Assize, still formed the majority of dwellings in the capital itself.

It is no wonder that these people, with their untold stores of wealth, their independence of all ordinary jurisdictions, their exemption from all the burthens of civil life, their voluntary exclusion from the common brotherhood of Christendom, their strange aspect and their mysterious language, were objects of universal jealousy, suspicion and hatred, which they on their part took but little pains to conciliate or allay. The religious feelings of the whole population of Oxford were outraged by a Jew who publicly mocked at S. Frideswide amid the solemnities of her festival-day, well knowing that neither prior nor bishop, chancellor nor portreeve, dared lift a finger to check or to punish him.[2294] Darker stories than this, however, were whispered against his race. They were charged not only with ruining many Englishmen of all classes by their usury, and with openly insulting the Christian sacraments and blaspheming the Christians’ Lord, but with buying Christians for money in order to crucify them.[2295] A boy, afterwards canonized as S. William, was said to have been thus martyred at Norwich in 1137;[2296] another, Robert, at S. Edmund’s in 1181;[2297] and a third at Winchester in 1192.[2298] Little as we may be inclined to believe such tales, we can scarcely wonder that they found credit at the time, and that the popular hatred of the Jews went on deepening till it broke out in the massacres of 1190. That outbreak compelled the king to interfere in behalf of his “chattels”; but the fines with which he punished it, though they deterred the people from any further attempts to get rid of the Jews by force, could not alter the general feeling. At S. Edmund’s Abbot Sampson, immediately after the massacre, sought and obtained a royal writ authorizing him to turn all the remaining Jews out of the town at once and for ever;[2299] and in 1194 Richard, or Hubert Walter in his name, found it needful to make an elaborate ordinance for the regulation of Jewish loans throughout the realm and the security of Jewish bonds. Such loans were to be made only in six or seven appointed places, before two “lawful Christians,” two “lawful Jews,” two “lawful writers,” and two clerks specially named in the ordinance; the deed was to be drawn up in the form of an indenture; one half, sealed with the borrower’s seal, was to be given to the Jewish lender; the other half was to be deposited in a common chest having three locks; the two Christians were to keep one key, the two Jews another, and the two royal clerks the third; and the chest was to be sealed with three seals, one being affixed by each of the parties who held the keys. The clerks were to have a roll containing copies of all such deeds; for every deed threepence were to be paid, half that sum by the Jew and half by his creditor; the two scribes got a penny each, and the keeper of the roll the third; and no transactions whatsoever in connexion with these Hebrew bonds was henceforth to take place save in accordance with these regulations.[2300]

It is just possible that this growth of anti-Jewish feeling may have helped in some degree to the growth of a sense of national unity among the other dwellers in the land. All Christians, to whatever race they might belong, whatever tongue they might speak, could not but feel themselves to be one people as against these Oriental intruders. It is at any rate clear that of the foreign elements which had been infused into the population of England during the hundred and forty years which had passed since Duke William landed at Pevensey, the Hebrew element was the only one which had not amalgamated with the native mass. The fusion in blood between Normans and English, which we saw making rapid progress under Henry I., was before the end of his grandson’s reign so far complete that the practice of “presentment of Englishry”—that is, the privilege whereby the hundred in which a man was found slain escaped paying the murder-fine to the treasury, if it could prove that the victim was not of Norman blood—had to be given up because the two nationalities had become so intermixed in every class above that of serfs that it could hardly ever be made out to which of them any man really belonged.[2301] In this fusion the English element, as it was far the larger, was also the weightier and the stronger. In the matter of speech it was fast regaining its supremacy. Foreign priests and foreign prelates were learning to speak and to preach to the English people in their own tongue; Norman barons and knights were learning to talk English with their English-speaking followers and dependents; some of them were learning to talk it with their own wives.[2302] If the pure Teutonic speech of our forefathers had suffered some slight corruption from foreign influences, Walter Map’s legend of the well at Marlborough whereof whosoever drank spoke bad French for ever after[2303] may hint that the language of the conquerors was becoming somewhat Anglicized in the mouths of some at least of their descendants; and the temper of these adoptive Englishmen was changing yet more rapidly than their speech. Of the many individual figures which stand out before us, full of character and life, in the pages of the twelfth-century historians, the one who in all ages, from his own day to ours, has been unanimously singled out as the typical Englishman is the son of Gilbert of Rouen and Rohesia of Caen.