Very soon after the passing of the Statute of 1270, Edward left England
to join the second Crusade of St. Louis, and did not return till
1274, two years after he had been proclaimed king. At once he took up
with characteristic vigour, and with the help and advice of a band of
statesmen and lawyers, the work of administrative reform that he had
already begun as heir-apparent. He recognised that the state of affairs
established in 1270 could not endure, since, under it, the Jews, while
practically prevented from lending money at interest, now that the
law forbade them to take in pledge real property, the only possible
security for large loans, were nevertheless still nothing but usurers,
allowed by ancient custom and royal recognition to carry on that one
pursuit as best they could, and prevented by the same forces from
carrying on any other. Edward, with his usual love for “the definition
of duties and the spheres of duty,”[79] felt that it was necessary to
define for the Jews a new position, which should not, as did their
present position, condemn them to hopeless struggles, nor demand from
him acquiescence in what he believed to be a sin.
For the Church had never ceased to maintain the doctrine of the
sinfulness of usury which Ambrose and Clement, Jerome and Tertullian,
had taught in strict conformity with the communistic ideas of primitive
Christianity. It is true that till the eleventh century usury and
speculative trading generally had not been active enough to call for
repression, nor would the Church have been strong enough to enforce on
the Christian world the observance of its doctrine. It could not follow
up the attempt made by the Capitularies of Charles the Great to prevent
laymen from practising usury, and it had to rest content with enforcing
the prohibition on clerics.[80] But the growth under Hildebrand of
the power of the Church over every-day life, and the elevation of the
moral tone of its teaching that resulted from its struggles with the
temporal power, enabled it to adopt with increasing effect measures
of greater severity. Hildebrand, in 1083, decreed that usurers
should, like perjurers, thieves, and wife-deserters, be punished with
excommunication;[81] and the Lateran General Council of 1139, when
exhorted by Innocent II. to shrink from no legislation as demanding
too high and rigorous a morality, decreed that usurers were to be
excluded from the consolations of the Church, to be infamous all their
lives long, and to be deprived of Christian burial.[82] The religious
feeling aroused by the Crusades still further strengthened the hold on
the Christian world of characteristically Christian theory, while the
prospect of the economic results that they threatened to bring about in
Europe, awoke the Church to the advisability of putting forth all its
power to protect the estates of Crusaders against the money-lenders.
Many Popes of the twelfth century ordained, and St. Bernard approved
of the ordinance[83] that those who took up the Cross should be freed
from all engagements to pay usury into which they might have entered.
Innocent III. absolved Crusaders even from obligations of the kind that
they had incurred under oath, and subsequently ordered that Jews should
be forced, under penalty of exclusion from the society of Christians,
to return to their crusading debtors any interest that they had already
received from them.[84]
Stronger even than the influence of the Crusades was that of the
Mendicant Orders. The Dominicans, who preached, and the Franciscans,
who “taught and wrought” among all classes of people throughout
Europe, carried with them, as their most cherished lesson, the
doctrine of poverty. It was by the teaching of this doctrine, and
by the practice of the simple unworldly life of the primitive
Church, that the founders of the two orders had been able to give
new strength to the ecclesiastical institutions of the thirteenth
century. And their teaching, if not their practice, made its way from
the Casiuncula to the Vatican. Cardinal Ugolino, the dear friend of
S. Francis, became Gregory IX.; Petrus de Tarentagio, of the order
of the Dominicans, became Innocent IV.; and Girolamo di Ascoli, the
“sun” of the Franciscans, was soon to become Nicholas IV. Moreover,
the work of formulating and publishing to the world the official
doctrines of the Church was in the hands of the Mendicants. A
Dominican, Raymundus de Peñaforte, was entrusted by Gregory IX. with
the preparation of the Decretals, which formed the chief part of the
canon law of the Church.[85] And friars of both orders codified with
indefatigable labour the moral law of Christianity, and set it forth
in hand-books, or _Summæ_, which were universally accepted as guides
for the confessional, and which all agreed in condemning usury.[86]
Hence, the doctrine of its sinfulness was taught throughout Christian
Europe, by priests and monks, by Dominican preachers and Franciscan
confessors, who could enforce their lesson by the use of their power
of granting or refusing absolution. How strong and violent a public
opinion was thus created is best shown in the lines in which Dante, the
contemporary of Edward I., tells with what companions he thought it fit
that the Caursine usurers should dwell in hell.[87]
There was every reason why the hatred of usury should be as strong in
England as anywhere. The Franciscan movement had spread throughout the
country, and had found among Englishmen many of its chief literary
champions.[88] And the Englishman’s pious dislike of usury had been
strengthened by many years of bitter experience. Italian usurers
had in the previous reign gone up and down the country collecting
money on behalf of the Pope, and lending money on their own account
at exorbitant rates of interest.[89] From some of the magnates they
obtained protection (for which they are said to have paid with a share
of their profits),[90] but to the great body of the Baronage, to the
Church, and to the trading classes their very name had become hateful.
One of them, the brother of the Pope’s Legate, had been killed at
Oxford.[91] In London Bishop Roger had solemnly excommunicated them
all, and excluded them from his diocese.[92]
No English king who wished to follow the teachings of Christianity
could willingly countenance any of his subjects in carrying on a
traffic which was thus hated by the people and condemned by all the
doctors of Christendom. Even Henry III. was once so far moved by
indignation and religious feeling as to expel the Caursines from his
kingdom,[93] and had religious scruples about the retention of the
Jews.[94] But, as has been shown, he could not do without the Jewish
revenue. Edward was not only free from dependence on that source of
income, but he was also a far more religious king than his father. He
was a man to obey the behests of the Church, instead of setting them at
naught with an easy conscience, as his father had done. In the second
year of his reign the Church, by a decree passed at the Council of
Lyons, demanded from the Christian world far greater efforts against
usury than ever before.[95] Till this time, though Popes and Councils
had declared the practice accursed, churches and monasteries had had
usurers as tenants on their estates, or had even possessed whole
ghettos as their property.[96] Now this was to be ended, and it was
ordained by Gregory X. that no community, corporation, or individual
should permit foreign usurers to hire their houses, or indeed to dwell
at all upon their lands, but should expel them within three months.
Edward, in obedience to this decree, ordered an inquisition to be made
into the usury of the Florentine bankers in his kingdom with a view
to its suppression, and allowed proceedings to be taken at the same
time and with the same object against a citizen of London.[97] And the
events of the last reign enabled him to proceed to what at first seems
the far more serious task of bringing to an end the trade that the Jews
had carried on under the patronage, and for the benefit, of the Royal
Exchequer.
For the Jews could no longer support the Crown in times of financial
difficulty as they had been able to do in previous reigns. The
contraction of their business that was the result of their exclusion
from many towns, and the losses that they had suffered through the
extortions of Henry III. and the plundering attacks of the barons,
had very greatly diminished their revenue-paying capacities, and the
legislation of 1270 must have affected them still more deeply. At the
end of the twelfth century they had probably paid to the Treasury about
£3,000 a year, or one-twelfth of the whole royal income,[98] and for
some parts of the thirteenth century the average collection of tallage
has been estimated at £5,000;[99] but in 1271--by which time the royal
income had probably grown to something like the £65,000 a year which
the Edwards are said to have enjoyed in time of peace[100]--Henry
III., when pledging to Richard of Cornwall the revenue from the
Jewry, estimated its annual value, apart from what was yielded by
escheats and other special claims, at no more than 2,000 marks.[101]
And while the resources of the Jews had fallen off, the needs of the
Crown had increased. Not only must Edward have conducted his foreign
enterprises at a much greater cost than did his predecessors, under
whom the English knighthood had been accustomed to serve without
serious opposition, but, in addition, he had to make the best of a vast
heritage of debt that his father had left him.[102] He had to seek
richer supporters than the Jews, and such were not wanting.
The Italian banking companies were the only organisations in Europe
that could supply him with such sums of money as he needed. From all
the greatest cities of Italy--from Florence, Rome, Milan, Pisa, Lucca,
Siena, and Asti--they had spread to many of the chief countries of
Europe, to France, England, Brabant, Switzerland, and Ireland.[103]
They were merchants, money-lenders, money-changers, and international
bankers, and in this last occupation their supremacy over all rivals
was secured by the great advantage which the wide extent of their
dealings enabled them to enjoy, of being able to save, by the use
of letters of credit on their colleagues and countrymen, the cost
of the transport of money from country to country.[104] They were
thus the greatest financial agents of the time. They transacted the
business of the Pope. At the Court of Rome ambassadors had to borrow
from them.[105] In France their position was established by a regular
diplomatic agreement between the head of their corporation and Philip
III.[106] In England they had in their hands the greater part of the
trade in corn and wool;[107] and the protection and favour of English
kings was often besought by the Popes on their behalf in special
bulls.[108]
Edward began his reign in financial dependence on the Italians. His
father had in the earliest period of his personal government incurred
obligations to them which he himself, as heir apparent, had to increase
considerably at the time of his Crusade.[109] When in later years
he needed money to pay his army, he borrowed it from them; when he
diverted to his own use the tenth that was voted for his intended
second Crusade, they gave security for repayment.[110] So great were
the amounts that they advanced to him, that between 1298 and 1308 the
Friscobaldi Bianchi alone, one of the thirty-four companies that he
employed,[111] received in repayment nearly £100,000.[112] He was
compelled to favour them, although he attempted to stop their usury. He
gave them a charter of privileges.[113] He presented them with large
sums of money. He bestowed on the head of one of their firms high
office in Gascony. At various times he placed under their charge the
collection of the Customs in many of the chief ports in England.[114]
Edward’s close connection with a body of financiers so rich and
powerful made the Jews unnecessary to him. If he was not to disobey the
decree of the Council of Lyons he must either withdraw his protection
from them or else forbid them any longer to be usurers. To withdraw his
protection from them would be to expose them to the popular hatred,
the danger from which had been the justification of the relations that
had been established between Crown and Jewry after 1190, and still
existed. He chose the second alternative. In 1275 he issued a statute,
in which he absolutely forbade the Jews, as he had just forbidden
Christians,[115] to practise usury in the future. He gave warning
that usurious contracts would no longer be enforced by the king’s
officers, and he declared the making of them to be an offence for which
henceforth both parties were liable to punishment. To ensure that all
those contracts already existing should come to an end as quickly as
possible, he ordered that all movables that were in pledge on account
of loans were to be redeemed before the coming Easter.[116]