Among the foreigners who flocked to England at, or soon after, the
Conquest were many families of French Jews. They brought with them
money, but no skill in any occupation except that of lending it out
at interest. They lent to the King, when the ferm of his counties, or
his feudal dues were late in coming in;[1] to the barons, who, though
lands and estates had been showered on them, nevertheless often found
it hard, without doubt, to procure ready money wherewith to pay for
luxuries, or to meet the expense of military service; and to suitors
who had to follow the King’s Court from one great town to another, or
to plead before the Papal Curia at Rome.[2]
But though they thus came into contact with many classes, and had
kindly relations with some, they remained far more alien to the masses
of the people around them than even the Normans, in whose train they
had come to England. Even the Norman baron must, a hundred years after
the Conquest, have become something of an Englishman. He held an
estate, of which the tenants were English; he presided over a court
attended by English suitors. In battle he led his English retainers. He
and the Englishman worshipped in the same church, and in it the sons
of the two might serve as priests side by side. But the Jews remained,
during the whole time of their sojourn in England, sharply separated
from, at any rate, the common people around them by peculiarities of
speech, habits and daily life, such as must have aroused dread and
hatred in an ignorant and superstitious age. Their foreign faces alone
would have been enough to mark them out. Moreover, they generally
occupied, not under compulsion, but of their own choice, a separate
quarter of each town in which they dwelt.[3] And in their isolation
they lived a life unlike that of any other class. None of them were
feudal landowners, none farmers, none villeins, none members of the
guilds. They did not join in the national Watch and Ward. They alone
were forbidden to keep the mail and hauberk which the rest of the
nation was bound to have at hand to help in preserving the peace.[4]
They were not enrolled in the Frank-pledge, that society that brought
neighbours together and taught them to be interested in the doings
of one another by making them responsible for one another’s honesty.
They did not appear at the Court Leet or the Court Baron, at the
Town-moot or the Shire-moot. They went to no church on Sundays, they
took no sacrament; they showed no signs of reverence to the crucifix;
but, instead, they went on Friday evening and Saturday morning to a
synagogue of their own, where they read a service in a foreign tongue,
or sang it to strange Oriental melodies. When they died they were
buried in special cemeteries, where Jews alone were laid.[5] At home
their very food was different from that of Christians. They would not
eat of a meal prepared by a Christian cook in a Christian house. They
would not use the same milk, the same wine, the same meat as their
neighbours. For them cattle had to be killed with special rites; and,
what was worse, it sometimes happened that, some minute detail having
been imperfectly performed, they rejected meat as unfit for themselves,
but considered it good enough to be offered for sale to their Christian
neighbours.[6] The presence of Christian servants and nurses in their
households made it impossible that any of their peculiarities should
remain unobserved or generally unknown.[7]
Thus, living as semi-aliens, growing rich as usurers, and observing
strange customs, they occupied in the twelfth century a position that
was fraught with danger. But, almost from their first arrival in the
country, they had enjoyed a kind of informal Royal protection,[8]
though, as to the nature of their relations with the King during the
first hundred and thirty years of their residence, very little is
known. It was probably less close than it afterwards became, for the
liability to attack and the need for protection had not yet manifested
themselves.
But, at the end of the eleventh century, there began to spread
throughout Europe a movement which, when it reached England, converted
the vague popular dislike of the Jews into an active and violent
hostility. While the Norman conquerors were still occupied in settling
down in England, the King organising his realm, and the barons
enjoying, dissipating, or forfeiting their newly-won estates, popes and
priests and monks had been preaching the Crusade to the other nations
of civilised Europe. At one of the greatest and most imposing of all
the Church Councils that were ever held, where were present lay nobles
and clerics of all nations, attending each as his own master, and able
to act on the impulse of the moment, Urban II., in 1095, told the
tale of the wrong that Christians had to suffer at the hands of the
enemies of Christ. He told his hearers how the Eastern people, a people
estranged from God, had laid waste the land of the Christians with fire
and sword; had destroyed churches, or misused them for their own rites;
had circumcised Christians, poured their blood on altars and fonts,
scourged and impaled men, and dishonoured women.[9] Such denunciations,
followed by the appeal to all present to help Jerusalem, which was
“ruled by enemies, enslaved by the godless, and calling aloud to be
freed,” excited, for the first time in Europe, a furious and fanatical
hatred of Eastern and non-Christian races. The Jews were such a race,
as well as the Saracens, and between the two the Crusaders scarcely
distinguished. Before they left home and fortune to fight God’s enemies
abroad, it was natural that they should kill or convert those whom they
met nearer home. Through all central Europe, from France to Hungary,
the bands that gathered together to make their way to the Holy Land
fell on the Jews and offered them the choice between the sword and the
font.[10]
The disasters that followed the first Crusade brought with them
an increase in the ferocity of the attacks to which the Jews of
Continental Europe were subjected, and S. Bernard, when he preached
the second Crusade, found that he had revived a spirit of fanaticism
that he was powerless to quell. He had wished for the reconquest of
the Holy Land as a result that would bring honour to the Christian
religion; but his followers and imitators thought less of the end than
of the bloodshed that was to be the means. A monk, “who skilfully
imitated the austerity of religion, but had no immoderate amount of
learning,”[11] went through the Rhineland preaching that all Jews
who were found by the Crusaders should be killed as enemies of the
Christian faith. It was in vain that Bernard appealed to the Christian
nations whom his eloquence had aroused, in the hope that “the zeal of
God which burnt in them would not fail altogether to be tempered with
knowledge.” He himself narrowly escaped attack: and the Jews suffered
from the second Crusade as they had suffered from the first.[12]
England was so closely related to the Churches of the Continent that
it could not fail to be affected by the great movement. But the first
Crusade was preached when the Conquest was still recent, and the
Normans had no leisure to leave their new country; the second, during
the last period of anarchy in the reign of Stephen.
Thus there were, during the first hundred years after the Council of
Clermont, few English Crusaders. Yet the Crusading spirit, working
in a superstitious mediæval population, called forth a danger that
was destined to be as fatal to the English Jews as were the massacres
to their brethren on the Continent. The Pope who preached the first
Crusade had told his hearers that Eastern nations were in the habit of
circumcising Christians and using their blood in such a way as to show
their contempt for the Christian religion. This charge was naturally
extended to the Jews as well. What alterations it underwent in its
circulation it is hard to say; but in 1146, a tale was spread among
the populace of Norwich, and encouraged by the bishop, that the Jews
had killed a boy named William, to use his blood for the ritual of
that most suspicious feast, their Passover. The story was supported by
no evidence more trustworthy than that of an apostate Jew, which was
so worthless that the Sheriff refused to allow the Jews to appear in
the Bishop’s Court to answer the charge brought against them, and took
them under his protection. But the popular suspicion of the Jews lent
credibility to the story, and so terrible a feeling was aroused that
many of the Jews of Norwich dispersed into other lands, and of those
who remained many were killed by the people in spite of the protection
of the Sheriff.[13] The accusation once made naturally recurred, first
at Gloucester, in 1168, and then at Bury St. Edmund’s, in 1181. “The
Martyrs” were regularly buried in the nearest church or religious
house, and the miracles that they all worked would alone have been
enough to continually renew the belief in the terrible story.[14]
Under the firm reign of Henry II., anti-Jewish feeling found no further
expression in act. The King, like his predecessors, gave and secured
to the Jews special privileges so great as to arouse the envy of their
neighbours. They were allowed to settle their own disputes in their own
_Beth Din_, or Ecclesiastical Court, and in so far to enjoy a privilege
that was granted only under strict limitations to the Christian
Church.[15] They were placed, apparently, under the special protection
of the royal officers of each district.[16] They lived in safety, and
they made considerable contributions to the Royal Exchequer.
The death of Henry II. and the accession of Richard I., the first
English Crusading King, brought trouble, as was but natural, to the
rich and royally favoured infidels of the land where the blood
accusation had its birth. The interregnum between the death of one
King and the proclamation of the “peace” of his successor was always
a time of danger and lawlessness during the first two centuries after
the Conquest, and the growth of the crusading spirit, and of the
popular belief in the truth of the blood accusation, caused all the
forces of disorder to work in one direction, viz., against the Jews.
The day of Richard’s coronation was the first opportunity for a great
exhibition of the anti-Jewish fanaticism of the populace. The nobles
from all parts of the country brought with them to London large trains
of servants and attendants, who were left to occupy themselves as
best they might in the streets, while their lords were present at the
ceremony. The Jews, who had been refused permission to enter the Abbey,
took up a prominent position outside. Their appearance exasperated the
crowd, and in the mediæval world a crowd was irresistible. While the
service was proceeding, the Jews were fiercely attacked by the “wild
serving men” of the nobles and the lower orders of citizens. One at
least was compelled to accept baptism to save himself from death. Later
in the same day, when the King and magnates were banqueting in the
palace, the attack on the Jews was renewed. The strong houses of the
Jewry were besieged and fired, and the inhabitants were massacred. But
soon “avarice got the better of cruelty,” and in spite of the efforts
of the King’s officers the city was given up to plunder and rapine.[17]
Though the King was bitterly angry at what had happened, the first
attempt at punishment showed him how powerless he was against the
forces hostile to the Jews. Had the offenders been nobles or prominent
citizens, he could, when the first irresistible disorder had subsided,
have taken vengeance at his leisure. But what could he do against a
collection of serving-men and poor citizens, whom no one knew, who had
come together and had separated in one day? When he departed for the
Crusades, he left behind him all the materials for more outbreaks of
the same kind. In the more populous towns Crusaders were continually
gathering together in order to set out for the Holy Land in company:
and they, aided by the lower citizens, clerics, and poor countrymen,
and in some cases by ruined landholders, fell on and killed the Jews
wherever they had settlements in England, at Norwich, York, Bury St.
Edmunds, Lynn, Lincoln, Colchester, and Stamford.[18] Again the Royal
officers were unable to touch the offenders. When the Chancellor
arrived with an army at York, the scene of the most horrible of all
the massacres, he found that the murderers were Crusaders, who had
long embarked for the Holy Land, peasants and poor townsmen who had
retired from the neighbourhood, and some bankrupt nobles, who had
fled to Scotland. The citizens humbly represented that they were
not responsible for the outrage and were too weak to prevent it. No
punishment was possible except the infliction of a few fines, and the
Chancellor marched back with his army to London.[19]
It was clear that the King must strengthen his connection with the
Jews. He could not afford to lose them or to leave them continually
liable to plunder. They were too rich. In 1187, when Henry II. had
wanted to raise a great sum from all his people he had got nearly as
much from the Jews as from his Christian subjects. From the former he
got a fourth of their property, £60,000, from the latter a tenth, or
£70,000.[20] It is of course improbable that, as these figures would
at first seem to show, the Jews held a quarter of the wealth of the
kingdom, but they were as useful to the King as if they had. He had
a far greater power over their resources than over those of his other
subjects; their wealth was in moveable property, and what was still
more important, it was concentrated in few hands. It was easily found
and easily taken away.[21]