de of the Jew, almost to the very
end, was an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. He knew that the
royal policy exempted him from the common taxation, the common justice, the
common obligations of Englishmen. Usurer, extortioner as the realm held him
to be, the royal justice would secure him the repayment of his bonds. A
royal commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence
against the king's "chattels." The Red King actually forbade the conversion
of a Jew to the Christian faith; it was a poor exchange, he said, that
would rid him of a valuable property and give him only a subject. We see in
such a case as that of Oxford the insolence that grew out of this
consciousness of the royal protection. Here as elsewhere the Jewry was a
town within a town, with its own language, its own religion and law, its
peculiar commerce, its peculiar dress. No city bailiff could penetrate into
the square of little alleys which lay behind the present Town Hall; the
Church itself was powerless to prevent a synagogue from rising in haughty
rivalry over against the cloister of St. Frideswide. Prior Philip of St.
Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew who stood at his door as
the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles which were
said to be wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his
feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open
his fingers, the Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd that
flocked to St. Frideswide's shrine on the ground that such recoveries of
life and limb were quite as real as any that Frideswide ever wrought.
Sickness and death in the prior's story avenge the saint on her blasphemer,
but no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to
deal with him. A more daring act of fanaticism showed the temper of the
Jews even at the close of Henry the Third's reign. As the usual procession
of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's on the Ascension
Day of 1268 a Jew suddenly burst from a group of his comrades in front of
the synagogue, and wrenching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under
foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the
Crown sheltered the Oxford Jews from any burst of popular vengeance. The
sentence of the king condemned them to set up a cross of marble on the spot
where the crime was committed, but even this sentence was in part remitted,
and a less of