to the crown,
Edward prompted by his zeal and his rapacity, resolved some time
after[*] to purge the kingdom entirely of that hated race, and to seize
to himself at once their whole property as the reward of his labor.[**]
He left them only money sufficient to bear their charges into foreign
countries, where new persecutions and extortions awaited them: but the
inhabitants of the cinque ports, imitating the bigotry and avidity of
their sovereign, despoiled most of them of this small pittance, and even
threw many of them into the sea; a crime for which the king, who was
determined to be the sole plunderer in his dominions, inflicted a
capital punishment upon them. No less than fifteen thousand Jews were at
this time robbed of their effects, and banished the kingdom: very few of
that nation have since lived in England: and as it is impossible for a
nation to subsist without lenders of money, and none will lend without
a compensation, the practice of usury, as it was then called,
was thenceforth exercised by the English themselves upon their
fellow-citizens, or by Lombards and other foreigners. It is very much
to be questioned, whether the dealings of these new usurers were equally
open and unexceptionable with those of the old. By a law of Richard, it
was enacted, that three copies should be made of every bond given to a
Jew; one to be put into the hands of a public magistrate, another
into those of a man of credit, and a third to remain with the Jew
himself.[***] But as the canon law, seconded by the municipal, permitted
no Christian to take interest, all transactions of this kind must, after
the banishment of the Jews, have become more secret and clandestine, and
the lender, of consequence, be paid both for the use of his money, and
for the infamy and danger which he incurred by lending it.

* In the year 1290.

** Walsing. p. 54. Heming. vol. i. p. 20. Trivet, p 266.

*** Trivet, p. 128.

The great poverty of the crown, though no excuse, was probably the cause
of this egregious tyranny exercised against the Jews; but Edward also
practised other more honorable means of remedying that evil. He employed
a strict frugality in the management and distribution of his revenue: he
engaged the parliament to vote him a fifteenth of all movables; the pope
to grant him the tenth of all ecclesiastical revenues for three years;
and the merchants to consent to a perpetual imposition of half a mark on
every sack of