[Sidenote:  Popular Hatred of the Jews]

That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the earlier years of his settlement, beneficial to the nation at large there can be little doubt.  His arrival was the arrival of a capitalist; and heavy as was the usury he necessarily exacted in the general insecurity of the time his loans gave an impulse to industry.  The century which followed the Conquest witnessed an outburst of architectural energy which covered the land with castles and cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed their erection to the loans of the Jew.  His own example gave a new vigour to domestic architecture.  The buildings which, as at Lincoln and Bury St. Edmund’s, still retain their name of “Jews’ Houses” were almost the first houses of stone which superseded the mere hovels of the English burghers.  Nor was their influence simply industrial.  Through their connexion with the Jewish schools in Spain and the East they opened a way for the revival of physical sciences.  A Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford; Roger Bacon himself studied under English rabbis.  But the general progress of civilization now drew little help from the Jew, while the coming of the Cahorsine and Italian bankers drove him from the field of commercial finance.  He fell back on the petty usury of loans to the poor, a trade necessarily accompanied with much of extortion and which roused into fiercer life the religious hatred against their race.  Wild stories floated about of children carried off to be circumcised or crucified, and a Lincoln boy who was found slain in a Jewish house was canonized by popular reverence as “St. Hugh.”  The first work of the Friars was to settle in the Jewish quarters and attempt their conversion, but the popular fury rose too fast for these gentler means of reconciliation.  When the Franciscans saved seventy Jews from hanging by their prayer to Henry the Third the populace angrily refused the brethren alms.

[Sidenote:  The Jewish Defiance]

But all this growing hate was met with a bold defiance.  The picture which is commonly drawn of the Jew as timid, silent, crouching under oppression, however truly it may represent the general position of his race throughout mediaeval Europe, is far from being borne out by historical fact on this side the Channel.  In England the attitude of the Jew, almost to the very end, was an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance.  He knew that the royal policy exempted him from the common taxation, the common justice, the common obligations of Englishmen.  Usurer, extortioner as the realm held him to be, the royal justice would secure him the repayment of his bonds.  A royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence against the king’s “chattels.”  The Red King actually forbade the conversion of a Jew to the Christian faith; it was a poor exchange, he said, that would rid him of a valuable property and give him only a subject.  We see in such a