wide and general accusations. The populace
took the law into their own hands.

Everywhere there was full license for plunder and worse than plunder.
The King was obliged to interpose. A writ was issued, addressed to the
justiciaries who had presided at the trials for the adulteration of
the coin, Peter of Pentecester, Walter of Heylynn, John of Cobham,
appointed justiciaries for the occasion. It recited that many Jews had
been indicted and legally condemned to death and to the forfeiture of
their goods and chattels; but that certain Christians, solely on
account of religious differences, were raising up false and frivolous
charges against men who had not been legally arraigned, in order to
extort money from them by fear. No Jew against whom a legal indictment
had not been issued before May 1, 1280, was to be molested or subject
to accusation. Those only arrested on grave suspicion before that time
were to be put upon their trial. Jewish tradition attributes the final
expulsion of the Jews to these charges, which the King, it avers, did
not believe, yet was compelled to yield to popular clamor.

But not all the statutes, nor public executions, nor the active
preaching of the Dominican friars, who undertook to convert them if
they were constrained to hear their sermons--the king's bailiffs, on
the petition of the friars, were ordered to induce the Jews to become
quiet, meek, and uncontentious hearers--could either alter the Jewish
character, still patient of all evil so that they could extort wealth,
or suppress the still increasing clamor of public detestation, which
demanded that the land should cast forth from its indignant bosom this
irreclaimable race of rapacious infidels. Still worse, if we may trust
a papal bull, the presence and intercourse of the Jews were dangerous
to the religion of England. In the year 1286 the Pope (Honorius IV)
addressed a bull to the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suffragans,
rebuking them for the remissness of the clergy in not watching more
closely the proceedings of the Jews. The Archbishop, indeed, had not
been altogether so neglectful in the duty of persecution. The number
and the splendor of the synagogues in London had moved the
indignation, perhaps the jealousy, of Primate Peckham. He issued his
monition to the Bishop of London to inhibit the building any more of
these offensively sumptuous edifices, and to compel the Jews to
destroy those built within a prescribed time.

The