Chapter IX.--THIRTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE.

Henry the Third became King of England on the death of John, A.D. 1216: he was quite a child when his father died; but those who governed for him, set the Jews who were in prison at liberty; and ordered that they should be protected against the violence of the Crusaders. Still, during the whole of Henry's long reign, which extended far into the latter half of the thirteenth century, the Jews were subject to great oppression and ill-usage in England.

As a privilege and favour to the citizens of Newcastle, the king commanded that no Jew should be allowed to dwell in their city.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishops of Lincoln and Norwich, took a sure way of driving the Jews out of their dioceses; for they forbade all Christians to sell them any provisions whatever.

The Prior of Dunstable, on the other hand, gave the Jews leave to reside in those places over which he had any control, on condition of their paying him every year two silver spoons.

The Jews were at this time accused of committing all sorts of dreadful crimes; how far these accusations were true or false, we do not know. They were human creatures, and the cruel treatment they met with, might well lead them into the commission of many wrong acts, which would, of course, be exaggerated by the hatred of their enemies; who believed them guilty, upon the slightest suspicion, and compelled them, in consequence, to pay heavy fines.

In the middle of the century, when Henry the Third demanded fresh supplies of money for the purposes of war, the Jews, irritated by such repeated oppression, wished to leave England, and seek some more hospitable country, in which they might dwell: the king refused to allow them to leave the country, and forced them to pay the tax demanded. The next year, the king again applied to them, declaring that in spite of the taxes he had already levied, he continued to be greatly in want of money, and must raise it from any quarter, and by any means.

The unfortunate Jews truly declared that they could not pay the taxes now demanded of them; upon which Henry the Third actually sold them and their possessions to his brother, to raise the sum required! It was now expected that the Jews would be completely robbed of everything they possessed, in order to repay the prince the money for which he had bought them; but he, being convinced that they really could not have furnished the sum required, had compassion upon them, and left them in peace.

To such a height had hatred of the Jews risen in this reign, that when (about 1264) the barons took up arms to force the king to agree to their demands, they could think of no better way of gaining the favour and help of the people, than by killing the Jews; and 700 were accordingly massacred. The pretence for this massacre was, that one of the Jews had tried to force a Christian to pay an enormous and unfair interest for a loan of money: supposing this to have been true, the crime of one man should not have caused the death of hundreds. At the same time, houses were plundered, and the magnificent synagogue, built in the beginning of Henry the Third's reign, was burnt to the ground: it was afterwards rebuilt; but in 1270, the king most unjustly took it from the Jews, and gave it to a body of friars, who lived near it, and complained that their devotions were disturbed by the howling of the Jews during their worship.

The fact was, that the chapel belonging to the friars was small and dark, and they coveted the fine large synagogue close by their dwelling; and as no ideas of justice ever interfered with the treatment of the Jews, they begged the king to give them this synagogue, and furnished him with an excuse for doing so.

On the death of Henry the Third, A.D. 1272, his son Edward the First became King of England, and very soon afterwards a law was made, which promised to improve the condition of the Jews; as it fixed a yearly tax to be paid by them, instead of leaving them liable to be called upon for contributions on every occasion, at the will of their enemies. This law also permitted them to possess houses and lands wherever they pleased. But, on the other hand, it was forbidden for any Christian to lodge in the house of a Jew; and every one of the Hebrew race above seven years of age, was obliged to wear a distinguishing mark upon his upper garment: this mark was a figure of two ropes joined together.

In the latter part of his reign, Edward changed his conduct towards the Jews, and they were treated with much injustice and even cruelty. The oppression suffered by these unhappy people, had not unnaturally raised up in them a spirit of retaliation; it made them think, that it was justifiable to use every possible means, right or wrong, to repay themselves for all the money unjustly taken from them by the Christians: their attempts to do this, increased the hatred entertained for them. They were accused of coining false money, and of cheating in every possible way. A great outcry being raised against them, they were, in all parts of the kingdom, thrown into prison, and many of them were executed, whilst their houses, lands, and goods, were sold for the use of Government. But to show the people that these measures were not taken merely for the sake of the plunder, the king ordered, that half the money produced by this sale should be put by, and given to such Jews as would renounce their religion and become Christians. Very few, however, could be brought, for the sake of worldly advantages, to embrace the religion of their persecutors; nor can we be surprised, that the very unchristianlike conduct of the followers of the blessed Jesus, should have increased the hatred and contempt felt by the Jews for the Christian religion.

Towards the end of the thirteenth century, about A.D. 1290, Edward the First, who had already banished the children of Israel from those parts of France which were under his dominion, now commanded them all to leave England, and never to come back on pain of death. He took whatever property they had, only allowing them to keep enough money to pay the expenses of removal into foreign countries; and of this miserable sum many of them were robbed by the seamen at Dover and other ports, whilst some hundreds of the poor wretches were even thrown into the sea and drowned: for this crime, however, many of the guilty seamen were punished by death.

The clergy in England were so delighted to get rid of the Jews, that they willingly gave the king very considerable sums of money to make up for the loss of a people, from whom former monarchs had always obtained help in time of need.

After this banishment of the Jews by Edward the First, they never appeared in any considerable numbers in England, until the seventeenth century.

In France we have seen the Jews banished by Philip the Second, and then recalled by the same monarch at the end of the twelfth century (p. 408). They immediately returned to all their former ways of making money by usury, so that early in the thirteenth century they had again become rich, and purchased lands of the lords who had large estates; but on certain conditions, which made them in some degree the property of the liege lord, of whom they held their lands. This "feudal tenure," as it was called, was common over Europe in those times; and all, whether Jews or Christians, who thus held lands under a liege lord, were called his "vassals," and were bound to do him certain services, whenever called upon to do so.

For some time Philip allowed, or at least did not try to put a stop to, the usurious practices of the Jews, because they gave him large sums of money in return for letting them alone; but at last the complaints of his subjects forced him to make some laws to check the evil. Philip the Second died A.D. 1223; Louis the Eighth, who succeeded him, reigned only three years: but when Louis the Ninth, surnamed Saint Louis, became king, A.D. 1226, he immediately made a law, forbidding any of his subjects to borrow money of a Jew. The condition of the Jews in France at this time was miserable enough; their property was at the mercy of those lords, in whose territories they had fixed their residence; without his leave, they could not change their place of abode, and if they ventured to do so, their liege lord had a right to follow them, and seize upon them as runaway, slaves! If one lord sold land to another, the Jews living on such land, also became the property of the purchaser: sometimes even, they were sold apart from the land, the price asked for them varying according to the talent and industry of each individual. But there was something worse still; if one of these Jews did become a Christian, the whole of his property was forfeited to his liege lord. So that these unhappy people were at the same time oppressed and persecuted for being Jews, or for becoming Christians; and this, by persons calling themselves Christians, who should have rejoiced at every conversion, and done all in their power to make them more frequent. Louis the Ninth, although called St. Louis on account of his remarkable piety and devotion, not only approved of these cruel and unjust laws, but added others; forbidding Christians to have any intercourse with the Jews, who were, in short, treated with the greatest harshness and injustice.

But the most terrible persecution of this unhappy race, took place in A.D. 1238, when they were accused of having, in mockery of the Christians, crucified some children on Good Friday: on this supposition, multitudes of the Jews were put to death with the most cruel tortures, until the Pope, Gregory the Ninth, interfered to save them from further slaughter. During the imprisonment of Louis the Ninth in the Holy Land, whither he had gone upon a Crusade, he ordered the Jews to be driven out of his dominions; but when Philip the Third (the Bold) became king, in A.D. 1270, he recalled the Jews, because he stood in need of their money. In other parts of France, which were governed by Dukes or Princes of their own, subject more or less to the king, the Jews met with much the same kind of treatment; but in some provinces they did become magistrates, and possessed Christian slaves. Philip the Fourth (the Fair), who succeeded his father as king, A.D. 1285, followed the example of Edward the First, who was then King of England, and banished the Jews altogether from France; seizing all their wealth, with the exception of a small sum to pay the expenses of their journey: many died of fatigue and want by the way, and the rest sought refuge in Germany. Some avoided banishment by being baptized: most of these returned afterwards to Judaism; but the conversion of some of them, at least, was sincere. Amongst those who became true Christians, was one Nicolas de Lyra, who spent the remainder of his life in explaining the Scriptures; and even wrote a book to prove from Scripture, that the Jews were wrong in not acknowledging Jesus Christ to be indeed the promised Messiah.