afterwards that it should remain unpaid,^ and said they were no usu- rers, for they lent their money absolutely without interest, and what they were to receive afterwards Ahr., 800.) We find that the Jews ■were restrained by an order of Henry UL, A. D. 1272, on the petition of the poor scholars at Oxford, whose books they held in pawn, from taking more than two pence in the week for every twenty shillings they lent them for the future, which is more than forty- three per cent. — (^Hume's, Eng.^l vol., p. 225.) And in the account of the massacre of the Jews in 1262, we are informed that it was " because one Jew had wounded a Christian man within Colechurch in London, and woul.d have enforced him to have paid more than two pence for the usury of 20s. for one week."— ( ^Stow, Gron., Henry III, 192.)
" Letters patent of the French King John, bearing date 1360, are extant, authorizing the Jews to lend in pledge at the rate of four deniers per week for every livre of twenty sous, which is more than eighty-six per cent." — {Say. Polit. Econ., 301.)
*See P.'owden on Ussury, 125, where it is endeavored to prove that the statute of Merton could only relate to the Jews.
' Hume's Essay on Int. " Hume.
was a contingency that might be defeated.^ They lived in security, and were not kept in perpetual dread of being plundered as the Jews were, being themselves Christians; and, moreover, being em- ployed by the head of the Christian church, their extortions were the more scandalous in the eyes of the people ; and writers of the time complain that the Pope, by means of the Caursini,^ was as bad as the Jews.
At length so grossly oppressive were their extor- tions that they drew down upon themselves the cen- sures of the English clergy ; and Roger, the then Bishop of London, having in vain admonished them to desist from their oppressions, excommunicated them A. D. 1235. But through