=2. ‘Saints’ and Supplies.=――The civil wars, consequent on the disputed succession after Henry’s death, had drained the country of money. The wealth of the Jewish traders was in close and awkward contrast with the poverty of the Christian knights. An evil eye was cast on these riches, and as the conscience of the country was scarcely yet hardened to the open and unprovoked plunder of Jews, men cast about them for a plausible excuse for robbing them. Nothing more original was found, nor was perhaps necessary, than the one which had so often served on the Continent――the accusation of child-killing for Passover purposes. One day, in the town of Norwich, a certain small boy, named William, was missing, and straightway he was declared to have been murdered, and the Jews were accused of having murdered him. It is not even certain that the body of the little lost boy was ever found. William of Norwich, however, was made into a saint, and added to the muster-roll of miracle-working martyrs, whilst the supposed perpetrators of a never committed crime were hanged, and the English Jews generally were taxed to the estimated, and somewhat fancy, value of the sainted child. The real martyrs in the affair were certainly the Jews, and the real miracle was the easy raising of vast sums of money through such manifestly ridiculous charges. The Jews had to submit to be plundered, and it was better for them, perhaps, that their goods should be ‘confiscated’ at the order of the king, than at the mercy of the populace. The fashion that Stephen set was found to be a convenient and ready mode of raising supplies. St. William of Norwich was the first saint that the Jews in England contributed to the calendar, but he was, during the Middle Ages, the type of a class of what might be called the patron saints of impecunious kings, and lazy priests, and ‘chivalrous’ nobles. These so-called saints always managed to fill the empty coffers of their devotees, and to that extent miraculous powers may certainly be conceded to them. The most celebrated of them all is a certain Hugh of Lincoln, who is said to have lived and died in the reign of Henry III. The local celebrity of this small saint was secured by the hanging of twenty Jews of that town, the imprisonment of more than a hundred, and a general confiscation of Jewish property in Lincoln. The literary interest attaching to the little Hugh, which has outlasted the religious, was ensured by Chaucer selecting him for the hero of one of his famous Canterbury Tales.[25]