k of war or of revolt. It was in the Hebrew coffers
that the foreign kings found strength, to hold their baronage at bay.

[Sidenote: Popular Hatred of the Jews]

That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the earlier years of his
settlement, beneficial to the nation at large there can be little doubt.
His arrival was the arrival of a capitalist; and heavy as was the usury he
necessarily exacted in the general insecurity of the time his loans gave an
impulse to industry. The century which followed the Conquest witnessed an
outburst of architectural energy which covered the land with castles and
cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed their erection to the loans
of the Jew. His own example gave a new vigour to domestic architecture. The
buildings which, as at Lincoln and Bury St. Edmund's, still retain their
name of "Jews' Houses" were almost the first houses of stone which
superseded the mere hovels of the English burghers. Nor was their influence
simply industrial. Through their connexion with the Jewish schools in Spain
and the East they opened a way for the revival of physical sciences. A
Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford; Roger Bacon himself
studied under English rabbis. But the general progress of civilization now
drew little help from the Jew, while the coming of the Cahorsine and
Italian bankers drove him from the field of commercial finance. He fell
back on the petty usury of loans to the poor, a trade necessarily
accompanied with much of extortion and which roused into fiercer life the
religious hatred against their race. Wild stories floated about of children
carried off to be circumcised or crucified, and a Lincoln boy who was found
slain in a Jewish house was canonized by popular reverence as "St. Hugh."
The first work of the Friars was to settle in the Jewish quarters and
attempt their conversion, but the popular fury rose too fast for these
gentler means of reconciliation. When the Franciscans saved seventy Jews
from hanging by their prayer to Henry the Third the populace angrily
refused the brethren alms.

[Sidenote: The Jewish Defiance]

But all this growing hate was met with a bold defiance. The picture which
is commonly drawn of the Jew as timid, silent, crouching under oppression,
however truly it may represent the general position of his race throughout
mediaeval Europe, is far from being borne out by historical fact on this
side the Channel. In England the attitu