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.

The whole policy of the Angevin kings tended to mould their insular subjects into an united English nation. Their equal administration completed that wiping-out of local distinctions which had been begun by the wisdom of the Norman kings and helped on by the confusion of the civil war; their developement of old English methods of judicial and administrative procedure brought the English people again visibly and tangibly to the forefront of affairs. Even those very qualities and tendencies which were most un-English in the Angevins themselves helped indirectly to a like result. The almost world-wide range of their political interests gave England once more a place among the nations, and a place far more important than any which she had ever before held. For, above all, it was England that they represented in the eyes of the continental powers; it was as “Kings of the English” that they stood before the world; and it was as Kings of the English that their successors were to stand there still, when the Angevin empire had crumbled into dust. On the eve of that catastrophe the new England found a voice. The English tongue once more asserted its right to a place among the literary tongues of Europe. The higher English poetry, which had slumbered ever since the days of Cadmon, suddenly woke again to life among the Worcestershire hills. The story of the origin of Layamon’s Brut can never be told half so well as in the poet’s own words. “A priest there was in the land, Layamon was he named; he was Leovenath’s son; may the Lord be gracious to him! He dwelt at Ernley, at a noble church by Severn’s bank—good it there seemed to him!—hard by Radstone, where he read books. It came into his mind, and into his chief thoughts, that he would tell the noble deeds of Englishmen—what they were called, and whence they came, who first owned English land.... Layamon began to journey wide over this land, and got the noble books that he took for models. He took the English book that Saint Beda made; another he took, in Latin, that Saint Albin made, and the fair Austin, who brought baptism in hither; a third book he took, and laid there in the midst, that a French clerk made, Wace was he called, who well could write, and he gave it to the noble Eleanor who was the high King Henry’s queen. Layamon laid these books before him, and turned the leaves; he lovingly beheld them; may the Lord be merciful to him! Pen he took with fingers and wrote on a bookskin, and the true words set together, and the three books compressed into one.”[2304] We must not blame a dweller on the western border in the early days of King John if, when setting himself to tell “the noble deeds of Englishmen,” he thought it needful to begin with the fall of Troy after the pattern of Wace and Wace’s original, Geoffrey of Monmouth. We can only be thankful to this simple English priest for leaving to us a purely English poem of more than thirty thousand lines which is indeed beyond all price, not only as a specimen of our language at one of its most interesting stages, but as an abiding witness to the new spirit of patriotism which, ten years and more before the signing of the Great Charter, was growing up in such quiet corners of the land as this little parish of “Ernley” (or Areley Kings) by Severn-side. The subject-matter of Layamon’s book might be taken chiefly from his French guide, Wace; but its spirit and its language are both alike thoroughly English. The poet’s “chief thought,” as he says himself, was to “tell the noble deeds of Englishmen,” to Englishmen, in their own English tongue. A man who wrote with such an ambition as this was surely not unworthy of the simple reward which was all that he asked of his readers: “Now prayeth Layamon, for love of Almighty God, every good man that shall read this book and learn this counsel, that he say together these soothfast words for his father’s soul, and for his mother’s soul, and for his own soul, that it may be the happier thereby. Amen!”[2305]

Layamon’s Brut was written at some time between John’s crowning and his return to England, after the loss of Normandy, in 1206.[2306] It was a token that, on both sides of the sea, the Angevins’ work was all but ended, their mission all but fulfilled. The noblest part of that mission was something of which they themselves can never have been fully conscious; and yet perhaps through that very unconsciousness they had fulfilled it the more thoroughly. “The silent growth and elevation of the English people”—as that people’s own historian has taught us—“was the real work of their reigns;”[2307] and even from a survey so imperfect as ours we may see that when John came home in 1206 the work was practically done.