=4. Another Device for raising Money.=――The supply of Jewish wealth still proved unequal to the constant demand for it, and a little later, Henry, who must have had a really original mind, thought out an entirely new scheme. The Jews, we must remember, were, by constitutional law, ‘his Jews.’ He had got money out of his property by every conceivable way known to conscienceless holders of property; now, why should he not sell it? Profits might be turned over afresh in fresh hands. So actually King Henry III. sold his Jews to his brother Richard, receiving 5,000 marks as their price, and, by the terms of this remarkable bargain, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, became the legal owner, with ‘all rights reserved,’ of all the Jews in the kingdom. The terms of the sale would seem, however, to have considered the property rather as leasehold than as freehold in its nature, for presently we find the king reclaiming ‘his Jews,’ and subsequently selling them again to the Caorsini. =5. Under Edward I.=――In 1272 the long, cruel reign of Henry ended; and if, like Herod, he had desired that the sound of Jewish weeping should be heard at his funeral, he could hardly have devised surer means of securing that satisfaction than his latest statute afforded. By this statute it was decreed that all real property possessed by Jews, in the form of land or houses, was to be wrested from them, and any mortgages held by them on securities of this sort were to be formally given up and confiscated to the Crown. Edward I. confirmed the unrighteous statute, and to show some aptitude for persecution beyond that of imitation, he made an order that the distinctive badge worn by the Jews, and hitherto white in colour, should henceforward be yellow. =6. Some Ironical Legislation.=――The State at this period showed also some care, although it must be confessed of a somewhat unpractical kind, for the moral condition of the Jewish portion of its property. The Jewish habit of ‘usury’ is gravely condemned by the statute-book of this date, and advice offered that manufacturing and agricultural arts should be followed by Jews instead of, or besides, their all but universal pursuit of retail trade. At the same time new taxes were imposed, and the old statute, which forbade Jews to hold ‘real’ property of any sort, remained unrepealed. So the good advice was somewhat ironical, and the concern expressed for outraged morality sounds a trifle hypocritical. For how were men who might not hold an inch of land to feel any interest in sowing and in planting it? and how could artisans or labourers, working at a small wage, earn a tithe of the tolls and the taxes which alone gained for Jews the right of existing at all? Whilst legislation compelled men to dwell apart and to dress apart, and claimed, at its own caprice, an unjust share of their earnings, it forced such men into mean occupations, and made it difficult to them to follow even these in an upright and honourable fashion.