fensive place was found for the cross in an open plot by
Merton College.

[Sidenote: Expulsion of the Jews]

Up to Edward's day indeed the royal protection had never wavered. Henry the
Second granted the Jews a right of burial outside every city where they
dwelt. Richard punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York, and
organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for the registration of
their contracts. John suffered none to plunder them save himself, though he
once wrested from them a sum equal to a year's revenue of his realm. The
troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest greater than even the royal
greed could reap; the Jews grew wealthy enough to acquire estates; and only
a burst of popular feeling prevented a legal decision which would have
enabled them to own freeholds. But the sack of Jewry after Jewry showed the
popular hatred during the Barons' war, and at its close fell on the Jews
the more terrible persecution of the law. To the cry against usury and the
religious fanaticism which threatened them was now added the jealousy with
which the nation that had grown up round the Charter regarded all
exceptional jurisdictions or exemptions from the common law and the common
burthens of the realm. As Edward looked on the privileges of the Church or
the baronage, so his people looked on the privileges of the Jews. The
growing weight of the Parliament told against them. Statute after statute
hemmed them in. They were forbidden to hold real property, to employ
Christian servants, to move through the streets without the two white
tablets of wool on their breasts which distinguished their race. They were
prohibited from building new synagogues or eating with Christians or acting
as physicians to them. Their trade, already crippled by the rivalry of the
bankers of Cahors, was annihilated by a royal order which bade them
renounce usury under pain of death. At last persecution could do no more,
and Edward, eager at the moment to find supplies for his treasury and
himself swayed by the fanaticism of his subjects, bought the grant of a
fifteenth from clergy and laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his
realm. No share of the enormities which accompanied this expulsion can fall
upon the king, for he not only suffered the fugitives to take their
personal wealth with them but punished with the halter those who plundered
them at sea. But the expulsion was none the less cruel. Of the sixteen
thousand who preferred