THE first mention of Jews on this side of the Channel is said to occur in the Church Constitutions of Egbert, Archbishop of York, towards the middle of the eighth century; the second in a monastic charter of some hundred years later. But they do not seem to have crossed over in any considerable force till the Norman Conquest. ♦1066♦ Among the foreigners who followed William to his new dominions were many families of French Jews. Their ready money and their eagerness to part with it rendered them welcome to the king and his barons. The former received from them advances, when his feudal dues were in arrear; the latter had recourse to the Jew’s money-bag whenever the expense of military service or the extravagance of their life made a loan necessary. To men of lower rank also, such as litigants who were obliged to follow the King’s Court from county to county, or to repair to Rome in order to plead their cases before the Pope’s Curia, the Jew’s purse was of constant help. No less useful was the Jew to the English tax-payer. In those days of picturesque inefficiency taxes were levied at irregular intervals and in lump sums. The subject, suddenly called upon to pay a large amount at short notice, was only too glad to borrow from the Jew. However, such intercourse with the Gentiles, high and low, notwithstanding, the Jews formed in England, as they did on the Continent, a people apart. In each town the synagogue formed a centre round which clustered the colony. Newcomers gravitated towards the same centre, and thus spontaneously grew the Jewries of London, Norwich, York, Northampton, and other English cities. These Jewish quarters were the King’s property and, like his forests, they were outside the jurisdiction of the common law. But, while their judicial and financial interests were under royal control, the Jews were allowed full liberty of worship, were permitted to build synagogues and to conduct their religious affairs under their own Chief Rabbi, thus constituting a self-governing and self-centred community. The literary activity of the Jews during their sojourn in England reveals a marvellous detachment from their environment. Commentaries and super-commentaries on the Old Testament and the Talmud, learned treatises on minute points of ritual and ceremonial, discussions on the benedictory formulas that are appropriate to each occasion of life: on rising in the morning, or lying down at night, on eating, washing, on being married, on hearing thunder, and a myriad other profound trivialities--such was the stuff that their studies were made of. And whilst Norman and Saxon, Celt and Dane were being welded into one English people, Israel remained a race distinct in face, speech, domestic economy, deportment, diet of the body and diet of the soul.