and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed
gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on
the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real
as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the
prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power,
ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with
"Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on
unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism
on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and
citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the
group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the
crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of
such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from
any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the
Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime
was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive
place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.

With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in
Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among
its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older
world of material research. A medical school which we find established
there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been
other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the
stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace
the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is
perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most
directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew
brought with him something more than the art or science which he had
gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of
wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which
followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or
conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can
study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding
the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we
owe the noblest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of
many a great baron, the