Coming of the Jews.
Their position in England. and religious worship. In matters of dogma Stigand was as orthodox as Lanfranc. But now, among the endless classes of adventurers whom the Conquest brought to try their luck in the conquered land, came men of a race whom Normans and Englishmen alike looked on as cut off from all national and religious fellowship. In the wake of the Conqueror the Jews of Rouen found their way to London,[1] and before long we find settlements of the Hebrew race in the chief cities and boroughs of England, at York, Winchester, Lincoln, Bristol, Oxford, and even at the gates of the Abbots of Saint Edmund's and Saint Alban's.[2] They came as the King's special men, or more truly his special chattels, strangers alike to the Church and to the commonwealth of England, but strong in the protection of a master who commonly found it to his interest to defend them against all others. Hated, feared, and loathed, but far too deeply feared to be scorned or oppressed, they stalked defiantly among the people of the land, on whose wants they throve. They lived safe from harm or insult, save now and then, when popular wrath burst all bounds, and when their proud mansions and fortified quarters could shelter them no longer from raging crowds eager to wash out their debts in the blood of their creditors.[3] The romantic picture of the de-*
- ↑ See N. C. vol. v. p. 818. In some manuscripts of William of Malmesbury (iv. 317) he says distinctly, "Judæi qui Lundoniæ habitabant, quos pater a Rothomago illuc traduxerat."
- ↑ The Jews meet us at every turn in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At Lincoln and Saint Eadmundsbury they have left their works. Those of Winchester—their Jerusalem—shared in the perfection which marked all classes of men in that city (see Ric. Div. c. 82). In the genuine "Annals of an English Abbey" (Gest. Abb. i. 193) we may see something of the "superbia magna et jactantia" which the Jew Aaron (of Lincoln) displayed at Saint Alban's.
- ↑ As in the great massacre at York in 1189. Or the King himself might, like John, do as he would with his own chattels.
