Despite the statute of 1270, he found the Jews still absorbed in the one occupation which they had practised for ages under the pressure of necessity and with the sanction of custom and royal patronage. The religious sensitiveness of a pilgrim fresh from the Holy Land, acting on the political anxiety of a statesman honestly desirous to do his duty by his subjects, compelled him to new measures of restriction. Moreover, the reasons of self-interest which had influenced his predecessors had lost much of their force. John’s and Henry III.’s merciless rapacity had sapped the foundations of Jewish prosperity; the barons’ even more merciless cruelty had accomplished their ruin; and while the fortunes of the Jews waned, those of their Italian rivals waxed; so the Jews, an unholy and unpopular class at the best of times, had now also become an unnecessary one. About the same time the Church renewed the campaign against usurers. ♦1274♦ Pope Gregory X., by a decree passed at the Council of Lyons, requested the princes of Christendom to double their efforts to suppress the accursed trade. Edward hastened to obey the orders of the Church. The transactions of the Florentine bankers in England were subjected to enquiry and restriction by his order, and then he proceeded against the Jews. There were two ways open to him: either to withdraw his countenance from the Jewish money-lenders, or to compel them to give up the sinful practice. He was too humane to adopt the former course; for the withdrawal of royal protection would have been the signal for instant attack on the part of the people. How real this danger was can be judged from the fact that in 1275 the Jews were driven out of Cambridge at the instigation of Edward’s own mother. ♦1275♦ He, therefore, chose the latter alternative, and issued a general and severe prohibition of usury, accompanied with the permission that the Jews might engage in commercial and industrial pursuits or in agriculture. The Jews were asked to change at a moment’s notice a mode of life which had become a second nature to them, and one which they had been encouraged--one may almost say compelled--to pursue in England for two centuries. The hardship of the prohibition was aggravated by the impossibility of profiting by the permission. So long as the Jew was liable to violence from his neighbours, he could hardly engage in any occupation which involved the possession of bulky goods. Jewels and bonds were the only kinds of moveable property that could easily be secured against attack. As a writer who can scarcely be accused of undue partiality to the Jews has observed: “The ancient house at Lincoln seems to suggest by its plan and arrangements that the inhabitants were prepared to stand a siege, and men who lived under such conditions could hardly venture to pursue ordinary avocations.”[67] But there were more specific reasons explaining the Jew’s inability to conform to Edward’s decree. A Jew