At the same time that the towns were making their attack on the Jews
in their own way, there was growing up within the baronial order a
new party, stronger than the towns in the elements of which it was
composed and in its capacity for joint action, and filled, on account
of the private circumstances of its members, with a deeper hatred of
the Jews than the greater barons, who had hitherto represented the
order, had ever known. For the old Baronial party which had forced
Magna Carta on John was too rich to be seriously indebted to the Jews,
and the anti-Jewish feeling of its members must have been blunted by
the fact that, when they had to pay their debts, they could raise the
money by benevolences levied on their tenants.[49] Moreover some of
them imitated on their own estates the King’s policy of sharing in the
profits of usury.[50] Hence they were little influenced by personal
grievances, and it was no doubt partly from political considerations,
and partly as a concession to the lesser and poorer members of their
order, that they had introduced into Magna Carta certain limitations
of the power of the Jews, or of their legatee, the King, over the
estates of debtors, a measure which, small as it was, was repealed
on the re-issues of the charters, when, during the minority of Henry
III., the great Barons had to undertake the duty of Government. And yet
even the great Barons must have felt, after twenty years’ experience
of the personal Government of Henry III., that an alteration in the
Royal system of managing the Jewry was necessary if their order was
ever to succeed in the constitutional struggle in which it was engaged.
They knew that many of those among the King’s acts which they hated
worst would have been impossible but for the Jews. It was by money
extorted from them that he had been enabled to prolong his expeditions
in Brittany and Gascony, to support and enrich his foreign favourites,
and to baffle the attempts of the Council to secure, by the refusal of
supplies, the restoration of Government through the customary officers.
In 1230, and again in 1239, he took from them a third of their
property; in 1244, he levied a tallage of 60,000 marks; in 1250, 1252,
1254, and 1255 he ordered the royal officers to take from them all that
they could exact, after thorough inquisition and the employment of
measures of compulsion so cruel as to make the whole body of Jews in
England ask twice, though each time in vain, for permission to leave
the country. Thus the whole Baronial order was for a time united, on
the ground of constitutional grievances, in a policy which found its
expression in the successful attempt of the National Council in 1244
to exact from the King the right of appointing one of the two justices
of the Jews, so as to gain a knowledge of the amount of the Jewish
revenue, and a power of controlling its expenditure.[51]
But such a measure did nothing to relieve the personal grievances
of the lower baronage, and it was naturally from this class that
further complaints proceeded. Its members, unlike the greater barons,
made no profit from the encouragement of usury. On the other hand,
they were among the greatest sufferers from the practice. Many a one
among them must, when summoned to take part in the King’s foreign
expeditions, have been compelled to pledge some land to the Jews in
order to be able to meet the expenses of service; and no doubt the
Jews derived from such transactions a large share of the profits that
enabled them to make their enormous contributions to the exchequer.
A landholder’s debt to a Jew would, when once contracted, have been,
under any circumstances, difficult to pay off. But the lower baronage,
or knight’s bachelors, were threatened, when they had fallen into debt,
with new dangers, the knowledge of which intensified their hatred of
the whole system of money-lending. “We ask,” they said in the petition
of 1259, “a remedy for this evil, to wit, that the Jews sometimes give
their bonds, and the land pledged to them, to the magnates and the
more powerful men of the realm, who thereupon enter on the land of the
lesser men, and although those who owe the debt be willing to pay it
with usury, yet the said magnates put off the business, so that the
land and tenements may in some way remain their property, ... and on
the occasion of death, or any other chance, there is a manifest danger
that those to whom the said tenements belonged may lose all right in
them.”[52]
The special wrongs of the lower baronage were, in the course of the
Civil War, temporarily lost sight of. Nevertheless, the action of the
whole baronial party throughout the war contributed greatly, though
indirectly, to the ultimate banishment of the Jews from England.
Just as the towns had, by their measures of exclusion, weakened
the mercenary bond that united the Jews to the King, so now the
barons, by their wholesale destruction of Jewish property, worked, as
unconsciously as the towns had done, to the same end. They attacked
and plundered the Jewry of London twice in the course of the war, and
destroyed those of Canterbury, Northampton, Winchester, Cambridge,
Worcester, and Lincoln. Everywhere they carried off or destroyed the
property of their victims. In London they killed every Jew that they
met, except those who accepted baptism, or paid large sums of money.
They took from Cambridge all the Jewish bonds that were kept there, and
deposited them at their head-quarters in Ely. At Lincoln they broke
open the official chests, and “trod underfoot in the lanes, charters
and deeds, and whatever else was injurious to the Christians.”[53] “It
is impossible,” says a chronicler, in describing one of these attacks,
“to estimate the loss it caused to the King’s exchequer.”