The barons’ wars drew on, fatal to the Israelites as compelling the King, by the hopeless state of his finances, to new extortions, and tempting the barons to plunder and even murder them as wickedly and unconstitutionally attached to the King.  How they passed back from Richard of Cornwall into the King’s jurisdiction as property appears not.  It is not likely that the King redeemed the mortgage; but in 1261 they were again alienated to Prince Edward.  The King’s object was apparently by this and other gifts to withdraw the Prince from his alliance with the barons.  The justiciaries of the Jews are now in abeyance.  The chancellor of the exchequer was to seal ail writs of Judaism, and account to the attorneys of the Prince for the amount.  But this was not the worst of their sufferings or the bitterest disgrace; the Prince, in his turn, mortgaged them to certain of their dire enemies, the Caorsini, and the King ratified the assignment by his royal authority.

But for this compulsory aid, wrung from them by violence, the Jews were treated by the barons as allies and accomplices of the King.  When London, at least her turbulent mayor and the populace, declared for the barons; when the Grand Justiciary, Hugh le Despenser, led the city bands to destroy the palaces of the King of the Romans at Westminster and Isleworth, threw the justices of the king’s bench and the barons of the exchequer into prison, and seized the property of the foreign merchants, five hundred of the Jews,[83] men, women, and children, were apprehended and set apart, but not for security.  Despenser chose some of the richest in order to extort a ransom for his own people, the rest were plundered, stripped, murdered by the merciless rabble.  Old men, and babes plucked from their mothers’ breasts, were pitilessly slaughtered.  It was on Good Friday that one of the fiercest of the barons, Fitz John, put to death Cok ben Abraham, reputed to have been the wealthiest man in the kingdom, seized his property, but, fearful of the jealousy of the other barons surrendered one-half of the plunder to Leicester in order to secure his own portion.

The Jews of other cities fared no better, were pillaged, and then abandoned to the mob by the Earl of Gloucester; many at Worcester were plundered and forced to submit to baptism by the Earl of Derby.  At an earlier period the Earl of Leicester (Simon de Montfort) had expelled them from the town of Leicester; they sought refuge in the domains of the Countess of Winchester.  Robert Grostete, the wisest and best churchman of the day, then Archdeacon of Leicester, hardly permitted the Countess to harbor this accursed race; their lives might be spared, but all further indulgence, especially acceptance of their ill-gotten wealth, would make her an accomplice in the wickedness of their usuries.[84]