special grant as a thankoffering. But
though Edward thus drove the Jews to seek new homes beyond sea, he
allowed them to carry their property with them, and punished the
mariners who took advantage of the helplessness of their passengers to
rob and murder them. Though individual Jews were found from time to time
in England during the later middle ages, their official re-establishment
was only allowed in the seventeenth century.[1]

[1] For the Jews see J. Jacobs, _Jews in Angevin England_;
Tovey, _Anglia Judaica_; J.M. Rigg, _Select Pleas of the Jewish
Exchequer_; and for their exile B.L. Abrahams, _Expulsion of
the Jews from England in 1290_.

Two generations at least before their expulsion, the Jews had been
outrivalled in their financial operations by societies of Italian
bankers, whose admirable organisation and developed system of credit
enabled them to undertake banking operations of a magnitude quite beyond
the means of the Hebrews. First brought into England as papal agents for
remitting to Rome the spoils of the Church, they found means of evading
the canonical prohibitions of usury, and became the loanmongers of
prince and subject alike. To the crown the Italians were more useful
than the Jews had been. The value of the Jews to the monarch had been in
the special facilities enjoyed by him in taxing them. The utility of the
Italian societies was in their power of advancing sums of money that
enabled the king to embark on enterprises hitherto beyond the limited
resources of the medieval state. The Italians financed all Edward's
enterprises from the crusade of 1270 to his Welsh and Scottish
campaigns. From them Edward and his son borrowed at various times sums
amounting to almost half a million of the money of the time. In return
the Italians, chief among whom was the Florentine Society of the
Frescobaldi, obtained privileges which made them as deeply hated as ever
the Hebrews had been.[1]

[1] See on this subject E.A. Bond's article in _Archaeologia_,
vol. xxviii., pp. 207-326; W.E. Rhodes, _Italian Bankers in
England under Edward I. and II._ in _Owens Coll. Historical
Essays_, pp. 137-68; and R.J. Whitwell, _Italian Bankers and
the English Crown_ in _Transactions of Royal Hist. Soc._, N.S.,
xvii. (1903), pp. 175-234.

Among the troubles which had called Edward back from Gascony was the
condition of Scotland, where a long period of prosperity had ended with
the death