idend Day at the Bank.

The English Jews, that eminently commercial race, were, as we have shown
in our chapter on Old Jewry, our first bankers and usurers. To them, in
immediate succession, followed the enterprising Lombards, a term
including the merchants and goldsmiths of Genoa, Florence, and Venice.
Utterly blind to all sense of true liberty and justice, the
strong-handed king seems to have resolved to squeeze and crush them, as
he had squeezed and crushed their unfortunate predecessors. They were
rich and they were strangers--that was enough for a king who wanted
money badly. At one fell swoop Edward seized the Lombards' property and
estates. Their debtors naturally approved of the king's summary measure.
But the Lombards grew and flourished, like the trampled camomile, and in
the fifteenth century advanced a loan to the state on the security of
the Customs. The Steelyard merchants also advanced loans to our kings,
and were always found to be available for national emergencies, and so
were the Merchants of the Staple, the Mercers' Company, the Merchant
Adventurers, and the traders of Flanders.

Up to a late period in the reign of Charles I. the London merchants seem
to have deposited their surplus cash in the Mint, the business of which
was carried on in the Tower. But when Charles I., in an agony of
impecuniosity, seized like a robber the L200,000 there deposited,
calling it a loan, the London goldsmiths, who ever since 1386 had been
always more or less bankers, now monopolised the whole banking business.
Some merchants, distrustful of the goldsmiths in these stormy times,
entrusted their money to their clerks and apprentices, who too often
cried, "Boot, saddle and horse, and away!" and at once started with
their spoil to join Rupert and his pillaging Cavaliers. About 1645 the
citizens returned almost entirely to the goldsmiths, who now gave
interest for money placed in their care, bought coins, and sold plate.
The Company was not particular. The Parliament, out of plate and old
coin, had coined gold, and seven millions of half-crowns. The goldsmiths
culled out the heavier pieces, melted them down, and exported them. The
merchants' clerks, to whom their masters' ready cash was still sometimes
entrusted, actually had frequently the brazen impudence to lend money to
the goldsmiths, at fourpence per cent. per diem; so that the merchants
were often actually lent their own money, and had to pay for the use of
it. Th