It was doubly hard that the race thus plundered and tortured by the king should be subjected to harsh treatment by the king’s enemies on the ground that they were pampered protégés of the Crown. Yet such was the case: on Sunday, 17th May, 1215, when the insurgents on their way to Runnymede entered London, they robbed and murdered the Jews, using the stones of their houses to fortify the city walls.[458] It is not to be wondered then that the same insurgents in forcing on King John the demands which formed the basis of Magna Carta, included provisions against usury. ----- Footnote 458: See Miss Morgate, _John Lackland_, p. 230. ----- The advisers of the young Henry in 1216 omitted these clauses, but not from love of the Jews. They were unwilling to impair so useful a financial resource, which has been compared to a sponge which slowly absorbed the wealth of the nation to be quickly squeezed dry again by the king. The Jews were always willing to disgorge a portion of their gains in return for protection in the rest, even of a contemptuous and intermittent kind; but their lot became hard indeed when Henry III., urged by popular clamour and the wishes of the Pope, began a course of active persecution, without relaxing the rigour of those royal exactions which had previously been the price of protection. In 1253, a severe ordinance inflicted a long list of vexatious regulations on the Hebrews, almost converting their quarters in each great city into ghettos, like those of the Continent of Europe. This was merely the commencement of a series of oppressive measures, the natural outcome of the growing hatred with which Christians regarded Jews,—a result partly of the heated imagination of the rabble, ready to believe unauthenticated stories of the crucifixion of Christian children, and partly of the fact that rich Jews, in spite of all persecution, had possessed themselves of the landed estates of freeholders and nobles and claimed to act as lords of Christian tenants, enjoying wardships, escheats, and advowsons, as any Christian baron might have done. The scope of this enquiry excludes any detailed account of the stages through which repressive legislation passed, until the lot of the Jews in England became intolerable. The Statute of Jewry, however,[459] was of exceptional importance; taking from usurers the right to recover interest by legal process, and limiting execution for the principal to one half of the debtor’s lands and chattels. In return some temporary concessions were granted. One by one, all these privileges were withdrawn, until the end came in 1290 with the issue of a decree of perpetual banishment by Edward I., who was compelled to sacrifice the cherished right of keeping a royal preserve of Jews in deference to the culmination of national prejudice in a storm of unreasoning hate. ----- Footnote 459: _Statutes of Realm_, I. 221.