Old Abbot Hugo is dead, and young Abbot Samson has succeeded to his honours and to his deficits. Samson’s first anxiety was to free the house from the claws of the insatiable Benedict and other Hebrew and Christian harpies, and he did it in a manner characteristic of the age. In some four years he paid off the debts of the convent; but at the same time he obtained from the King permission to revenge himself on the Jews. The royal abettor of what followed was oblivious of the fact that he was himself more than an accomplice in the usurer’s exactions. Huge sums were at that very moment being extorted for royal purposes from the Jewish communities which were in as constant a condition of indebtedness to the Crown as others were to them. Nevertheless, the Jews were driven out of the Liberties of Bury St. Edmunds by men-at-arms, and forbidden to return thither under severe penalties; while sentence of excommunication was pronounced against any one who should be found sheltering them. Such was the condition of an English monastery towards the end of the twelfth century. Things went from bad to worse, until, in the thirteenth century, we are told, “there was scarcely anyone in England, especially a bishop, who was not caught in the meshes of the usurers.” We hear of archiepiscopal buildings and priories falling into decay for want of funds, and of churches that could not afford clergymen; of a bishop seeking the intervention of the King in order to obtain respite of his debts to the Jews, and of a prior asking for permission to let one of his churches, as a common building, for five years, in order to pay off part of the debt; of another bishop pledging the plate of his cathedral, and of an abbot pledging the bones of the patron saint of his Abbey; and we even read of an archbishop carrying his zeal for retrenchment to the cruel length of imposing a limit to the number of dishes with which the good Abbot of Glastonbury might be served in his private room.