The war declared by the Papacy against the Jews on religious principle was continued on grounds of practical necessity. Owing to the enormous expenditure of money, incurred partly by the architectural extravagance of the age, partly by an almost equally extravagant hospitality; partly by the exactions of Kings and Popes, and partly by bad management, the estates of the Church in England had begun to be encumbered with debt in the twelfth century, and loans were frequently contracted at ruinous interest. A typical case has been preserved for us in the contemporary chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, a Norman-English monk of Bury St. Edmunds. In his crabbed dog-Latin, the good brother tells the story of his monastery’s distress: how under old Abbot Hugo’s feeble rule the finances became entangled, how deficit followed in the footsteps of deficit, and debt was added to debt, until there was no ready money left to keep the rain out of the house. William the sacristan was ordered by the old Abbot to repair a room which had fallen into ruins; but as the order was not accompanied by the means of carrying it out, Brother William would fain go to Benedict the Jew for a loan of forty marks. The room was repaired, the rain was kept out, but the creditor clamoured for his money. In the absence of cash, the original loan grew rapidly at compound interest, and the forty marks were swelled to a hundred pounds. Then the Jew came to the Abbot with his bills and demanded to be repaid; not only these hundred pounds, but also another hundred pounds, which the Abbot owed him on his private account. Old Hugo, at his wits’ end, tries to silence the Jew by granting him a bond for four hundred pounds to be paid at the end of four years. The Jew goes away not displeased, only to reappear at the expiration of the term. On his second visit he, of course, found the Abbot as penniless as on the first, and extracted from him a bond for eight hundred and eighty pounds, payable in eleven years by annual instalments of eighty pounds. Furthermore, he now produced other claims, sundry sums lent fourteen years before, so that the whole debt amounted to twelve hundred pounds, besides interest. The matter was left pending until old Hugo was called to a world where there is neither borrowing nor lending at compound interest; but only paying just debts.