While the clamour against the Jewish usurers was gathering force from bigotry, penury, and policy, the Jews were fast losing the means which had hitherto enabled them to procure an inadequate protection at the hands of the King and his great barons. Early in the thirteenth century the merchants of Lombardy and Southern France, as has been shown, began to compete with the Jewish money-lenders. But the loss of the monopoly which the Jews had long enjoyed was, in England, followed by greater losses still. ♦1257–1267♦ During the Civil Wars the ranks of the malcontents were filled with all sorts of ruffians, some driven to rebellion by discontent, others drawn to it by the hope of booty; and it was the policy of the rebel barons to let all these disorderly elements loose upon the King’s friends and supporters. The royal demesnes were ruthlessly ravaged, and then the fury of the revolutionists, who numbered amongst their allies both the lay and the clerical mobs, was directed against the King’s _protégés_. Every success of the popular party over the King was duly celebrated by a slaughter of his Jewish serfs and destruction of their quarters. The appetite for plunder and havoc was further stimulated by superstition, and at Easter, 1263, the Jews were stripped and butchered in the City of London. This was the prologue to a long tragedy that continued throughout that troublous period. The spoliation of the London Jews was repeated, and the Jewries of Canterbury, Northampton, Winchester, Worcester, Lincoln, and Cambridge were attacked, looted, and destroyed. Many of the unfortunate race were massacred, while some saved themselves by baptism and others by exorbitant ransom. Deeds and bonds were burnt, and thus the Jews were deprived of the one bulwark that had stood between them and annihilation; so much so, that in the last year of Henry III.’s reign their contribution to the revenue of the crown fell from £5000 to 2000 marks.