Another measure that followed Edward’s home-coming was the expulsion of the Jews.  Despite constant odium and intermittent persecution, the Jewish financiers who had settled in England after the Norman conquest steadily improved their position down to the reign of Henry III.  The personal dependants of the crown, they were well able to afford to share their gains from usury with their protectors.  They lived in luxury, built stone houses, set up an organisation of their own, and even purchased lands.  Henry III.’s financial embarrassments forced him to rely upon them, and the alliance of the Jews and the crown stimulated the religious bigotry of the popular party to ill-treat the Jews during the Barons’ War.  Stories of Jews murdering Christian children were eagerly believed; and the cult of St. Hugh of Lincoln and St. William of Norwich,[1] two pretended victims of Hebrew cruelty, testified to the hatred which Englishmen bore to the race.

    [1] See for this saint, Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles
    of St. William of Norwich, ed.  Jessopp and James (1896).

Under Edward I. the condition of the Jews became more precarious.  The king hated them alike on religious and economical grounds.  He rigorously insisted that they should wear a distinctive dress, and at last altogether prohibited usury.  Driven from their chief means of earning their living, the Jews had recourse to clipping and sweating the coin.  Indiscriminate severities did little to abate these evils.  Meanwhile active missionary efforts were made to win over the Jews to the Christian faith.  They were compelled to listen to long sermons from mendicant friars, and their obstinacy in adhering to their own creed was denounced as a deliberate offence against the light.  Peckham shut up their synagogues, and Eleanor of Provence, who had entered a convent, joined with the archbishop in urging her son to take severe measures against them.  There was a similar movement in France, and Edward, during his long stay abroad, had expelled the Jews from Aquitaine.  In 1290 he applied the same policy to England, and their exile was so popular an act that parliament made him a special grant as a thankoffering.  But though Edward thus drove the Jews to seek new homes beyond sea, he allowed them to carry their property with them, and punished the mariners who took advantage of the helplessness of their passengers to rob and murder them.  Though individual Jews were found from time to time in England during the later middle ages, their official re-establishment was only allowed in the seventeenth century.[1]

[1] For the Jews see J. Jacobs, Jews in Angevin England; Tovey, Anglia Judaica; J.M.  Rigg, Select Pleas of the Jewish Exchequer; and for their exile B.L.  Abrahams, Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.

Two generations at least before their expulsion, the Jews had been outrivalled in their financial operations