As the fatal day drew near, the emigrants, sixteen thousand all told, men, women, and children, might be seen hurrying from different parts of England to the coast, some riding, the majority trudging, sullen and weary, along the muddy roads, the men with their scanty luggage slung over their shoulders, the women with their babes in their arms. Thus they went their last journey on English soil, under the bleak sky of an English October, objects of scorn rather than of pity to the people among whom they had lived for more than two hundred years. The King’s biographer relates with great exultation how “the perfidious and unbelieving horde was driven forth from England, in one day into exile,” and the English Parliament, which nine years before had demanded the expulsion of the unbelievers, now expressed the gratitude of the nation for the fulfilment of their desire, by voting a tenth and a fifteenth to the King. But if the English were glad to get rid of the Jews, the Jews were not sorry to depart. It was only what they had already begged to be allowed to do. Though born and bred among the English, they did not even speak their language. They spoke the language of the Normans who had brought them to England for their own purposes, and ejected them when those purposes no longer held. They were as foreign to the land on this day of their departure, as their fathers had been on the day of their arrival, full two centuries earlier. Their residence in England was a mere episode in their long career of sorrow and trial, only a temporary halt on the weary pilgrimage which began at Zion and would end in Zion.