170. God of Nature: Near the end of the Travels it is explained that all the Eastern peoples are Deists, though they have not the light of Christianity: þei beleeven in God þat formede all thing and made the world, and clepen him 'God of Nature'.
191-2. þat þei schull not gon out on no syde, but be the cost of hire lond: the general sense requires the omission of but, which has no equivalent in the original French text: qils ne<nt> issent fors deuers la coste de sa terre (MS. Sloane 1464, f. 139 b). But some MSS. like Royal 20 B. X have fors qe deuers, a faulty reading that must have stood in the copy used by the Cotton translator. Cp. note to l. 108.
199-200. a four grete myle: renders the French iiii grantz lieus. There is no 'great mile' among English measures.
209 ff. In the Middle Ages references to the Jews are nearly always hostile. They were hated as enemies of the Church, and prejudice was hardened by stories, like that in the text, of their vengeance to come, or of ritual murder, like Chaucer's Prioress's Tale. England had its supposed boy martyrs, William of Norwich (d. 1144), and Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255) whom the Prioress invokes:
O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also
With cursed Jewes, as it is notable,
For it is but a litel while ago,
Preye eek for us, &c.
Religion was not the only cause of bitterness. The Jews, standing outside the Church and its laws against usury, at a time when financial needs had outgrown feudal revenues, became the money-lenders and bankers of Europe; and with a standard rate of interest fixed at over 40 per cent., debtors and creditors could hardly be friends. In England the Jews reached the height of their prosperity in the twelfth century, so that in 1188 nearly half the national contribution for a Crusade came from them. In the thirteenth century their privileges and operations were cut down, and they were finally expelled from the country in 1290 (see J. Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England, 1893). The Lombards, whose consciences were not nice, took their place as financiers in fourteenth-century England.
222. trayne: read taynere, OFr. taignere 'a burrow'.