r, met together at midnight, secretly elected a certain REGINALD,
and sent him off to Rome to get the Pope's approval. The senior monks
and the King soon finding this out, and being very angry about it, the
junior monks gave way, and all the monks together elected the Bishop of
Norwich, who was the King's favourite. The Pope, hearing the whole
story, declared that neither election would do for him, and that _he_
elected STEPHEN LANGTON. The monks submitting to the Pope, the King
turned them all out bodily, and banished them as traitors. The Pope sent
three bishops to the King, to threaten him with an Interdict. The King
told the bishops that if any Interdict were laid upon his kingdom, he
would tear out the eyes and cut off the noses of all the monks he could
lay hold of, and send them over to Rome in that undecorated state as a
present for their master. The bishops, nevertheless, soon published the
Interdict, and fled.

After it had lasted a year, the Pope proceeded to his next step; which
was Excommunication. King John was declared excommunicated, with all the
usual ceremonies. The King was so incensed at this, and was made so
desperate by the disaffection of his Barons and the hatred of his people,
that it is said he even privately sent ambassadors to the Turks in Spain,
offering to renounce his religion and hold his kingdom of them if they
would help him. It is related that the ambassadors were admitted to the
presence of the Turkish Emir through long lines of Moorish guards, and
that they found the Emir with his eyes seriously fixed on the pages of a
large book, from which he never once looked up. That they gave him a
letter from the King containing his proposals, and were gravely
dismissed. That presently the Emir sent for one of them, and conjured
him, by his faith in his religion, to say what kind of man the King of
England truly was? That the ambassador, thus pressed, replied that the
King of England was a false tyrant, against whom his own subjects would
soon rise. And that this was quite enough for the Emir.

Money being, in his position, the next best thing to men, King John
spared no means of getting it. He set on foot another oppressing and
torturing of the unhappy Jews (which was quite in his way), and invented
a new punishment for one wealthy Jew of Bristol. Until such time as that
Jew should produce a certain large sum of money, the King sentenced him
to be imprisoned, and, every day, to