hesitate to say that the King considered that the fifteenth which the commons granted him was a poor exchange for the "Exchequer of the Jews." And Perrault quaintly remarks, that " when Edward drove the Jews out of England, he killed the hen that laid the golden eggs."
The Jews being banished, usury soon found other masters. The Lombards, and other foreigners resi- dent in England, took up the trade and pushed it with vigor, so that, so far as the suppression of the " sinne of usurie " was concerned, very little after all had been gained ; and, in fact, the most exorbitant and cruel usury was daily and openly practised.
With some of these usurers the Justices in Eyre dealt as required by the Statute; but the clergy interfered, and declared that the Ecclesiastical Courts alone had jurisdiction of usurers, and the right to punish them " for the good of their souls,"^ according to the laws of the Church — namely, by excommu- nication'^ — and censures until they made restitution, and to grant them pardon only on condition that forever afterwards they forsook their evil courses. Thus the punishment of usurers by the Justices in Eyre was the subject of several complaints addressed by the clergy to the throne in this and the following reigns, as " an encroachment upon the laws of the ' Pro Reformatione morum et pro salute animse (RoU. Abr. tit. Us.)
^ Yea ! with the thuDderbolt of excommunication to terrific such as do wilfully deal in usurie. — {Rog. on Us.')
CHURCH INFLUENCE. 41 Holy Churcli and of the land ;" but whatever attention these complaints maj have received at the time, nothing was done towards redressing them; and in the fifteenth year of -the reign of Edward III. (A. D.
1341), the Archbishop of Canterbury and other powerful Bishops and Clergymen, pressed the complaint^ to the notice of the King, and demanded that the wrong should be repaired. Upon this a sort of