jurisdictions or exemptions from the common law and the common burthens of the realm.  As Edward looked on the privileges of the Church or the baronage, so his people looked on the privileges of the Jews.  The growing weight of the Parliament told against them.  Statute after statute hemmed them in.  They were forbidden to hold real property, to employ Christian servants, to move through the streets without the two white tablets of wool on their breasts which distinguished their race.  They were prohibited from building new synagogues or eating with Christians or acting as physicians to them.  Their trade, already crippled by the rivalry of the bankers of Cahors, was annihilated by a royal order which bade them renounce usury under pain of death.  At last persecution could do no more, and Edward, eager at the moment to find supplies for his treasury and himself swayed by the fanaticism of his subjects, bought the grant of a fifteenth from clergy and laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his realm.  No share of the enormities which accompanied this expulsion can fall upon the king, for he not only suffered the fugitives to take their personal wealth with them but punished with the halter those who plundered them at sea.  But the expulsion was none the less cruel.  Of the sixteen thousand who preferred exile to apostasy few reached the shores of France.  Many were wrecked, others robbed and flung overboard.  One shipmaster turned out a crew of wealthy merchants on to a sandbank and bade them call a new Moses to save them from the sea.

[Illustration:  Scotland in 1290 (v2-map-1t.jpg)]

[Sidenote:  Scotland]

From the expulsion of the Jews, as from his nobler schemes of legal and administrative reforms, Edward was suddenly called away to face complex questions which awaited him in the North.  At the moment which we have reached the kingdom of the Scots was still an aggregate of four distinct countries, each with its different people, its different tongue, its different history.  The old Pictish kingdom across the Firth of Forth, the original Scot kingdom in Argyle, the district of Cumbria or Strathclyde, and the Lowlands which stretched from the Firth of Forth to the English border, had become united under the kings of the Scots; Pictland by inheritance, Cumbria by a grant from the English king Eadmund, the Lowlands by conquest, confirmed as English tradition alleged by a grant from Cnut.  The shadowy claim of dependence on the English Crown which dated from the days when a Scotch king “commended” himself and his people to AElfred’s son Eadward, a claim strengthened by the grant of Cumbria to Malcolm as a “fellow worker” of the English sovereign “by sea and land,” may have been made more real through this last convention.  But whatever change the acquisition of the Lowlands made in the relation of the Scot kings to the English sovereigns, it certainly affected in a very marked way their relation both to England and to their own realm.  Its first