But the Jews were a fund almost inexhaustible.  They were slaves to the king in the strictest sense; insomuch that, besides the various tallages and fines extorted from them, none succeeded to the inheritance of his father without the king’s license and an heavy composition.  He sometimes even made over a wealthy Jew as a provision to some of his favorites for life.  They were almost the only persons who exercised usury, and thus drew to themselves the odium and wealth of the whole kingdom; but they were only a canal, through which it passed to the royal treasury.  And nothing could be more pleasing and popular than such exactions:  the people rejoiced, when they saw the Jews plundered,—­not considering that they were a sort of agents for the crown, who, in proportion to the heavy taxes they paid, were obliged to advance the terms and enforce with greater severity the execution of their usurious contracts.  Through them almost the whole body of the nobility were in ’debt to the king; and when he thought proper to confiscate the effects of the Jews, the securities passed into his hands; and by this means he must have possessed one of the strongest and most terrible instruments of authority that could possibly be devised, and the best calculated to keep the people in an abject and slavish dependence.

The last general head of his revenue were the customs, prisages, and other impositions upon trade.  Though the revenue arising from traffic in this rude period was much limited by the then smallness of its object, this was compensated by the weight and variety of the exactions levied by an occasional exertion of arbitrary power, or the more uniform system of hereditary tyranny.  Trade was restrained, or the privilege granted, on the payment of tolls, passages, paages, pontages, and innumerable other vexatious imposts, of which, only the barbarous and almost unintelligible names subsist at this day.

These were the most constant and regular branches of the revenue.  But there were other ways innumerable by which money, or an equivalent in cattle, poultry, horses, hawks, and dogs, accrued to the exchequer.  The king’s interposition in marriages, even where there was no pretence from tenure, was frequently bought, as well as in other negotiations of less moment, for composing of quarrels, and the like; and, indeed, some appear on the records, of so strange and even ludicrous a nature, that it would not be excusable to mention them, if they did not help to show from how many minute sources this revenue was fed, and how the king’s power descended to the most inconsiderable actions of private life.[73] It is not easy to penetrate into the true meaning of all these particulars, but they equally suffice to show the character of government in those times.  A prince furnished with so many means of distressing enemies and gratifying friends, and possessed of so ample a revenue entirely independent of the affections of his subjects, must have been very absolute in substance and effect, whatever might have been the external forms of government.