163-4. _Goth and Magoth_: see Ezekiel xxxviii and xxxix. The forms of
the names are French.
170. _God of Nature_: Near the end of the _Travels_ it is explained that
all the Eastern peoples are Deists, though they have not the light of
Christianity: _þei beleeven in God þat formede all thing and made the
world, and clepen him 'God of Nature'_.
191-2. _þat þei schull not gon out on no syde, but be the cost of hire
lond_: the general sense requires the omission of _but_, which has no
equivalent in the original French text: _qils ne<nt> issent fors deuers
la coste de sa terre_ (MS. Sloane 1464, f. 139 b). But some MSS. like
Royal 20 B. X have _fors qe deuers_, a faulty reading that must have
stood in the copy used by the Cotton translator. Cp. note to l. 108.
199-200. _a four grete myle_: renders the French _iiii grantz lieus_.
There is no 'great mile' among English measures.
209 ff. In the Middle Ages references to the Jews are nearly always
hostile. They were hated as enemies of the Church, and prejudice was
hardened by stories, like that in the text, of their vengeance to come,
or of ritual murder, like Chaucer's _Prioress's Tale_. England had its
supposed boy martyrs, William of Norwich (d. 1144), and Hugh of Lincoln
(d. 1255) whom the Prioress invokes:
_O yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also
With cursed Jewes, as it is notable,
For it is but a litel while ago,
Preye eek for us_, &c.
Religion was not the only cause of bitterness. The Jews, standing
outside the Church and its laws against usury, at a time when financial
needs had outgrown feudal revenues, became the money-lenders and bankers
of Europe; and with a standard rate of interest fixed at over 40 per
cent., debtors and creditors could hardly be friends. In England the
Jews reached the height of their prosperity in the twelfth century, so
that in 1188 nearly half the national contribution for a Crusade came
from them. In the thirteenth century their privileges and operations
were cut down, and they were finally expelled from the country in 1290
(see J. Jacobs, _The Jews of Angevin England_, 1893). The Lombards,
whose consciences were not nice, took their place as financiers in
fourteenth-century England.