=2. Whither the Exiles went.=――The English exiles had little choice of asylum. The ‘sea-girt isle’ pushed them from her shores, and the nearest ports must have seemed to promise least misery in the way of transit, and most chance of safe landing somewhere. As the opposite coast of France came in view, it must have looked to those poor sea-sick and heart-sick fugitives as if the worst of their troubles were over. They disembarked at any and all of the French ports which would take them in, and journeyed hither and thither inland, eager and grateful to share the comparative security of their French brethren. They did not stay to think how unsafe it all was; they did not look back to see how, but sixteen years before, under a decree of Philip the Fair, the Jews of France had been in like evil case with themselves, nor did they look forward through a gloomy hundred years to see all this dreary drama of exile acted over again, with added details of hardship. It was, perhaps, well for them that they could only see a little way at a time. =3. Life in Germany.=――The English Jews who went further, and found a refuge in the German states, like the Continental Jews who joined them there, when exiled a century later, were certainly no better off. Germany, so called, extended from Russia in the east to the Netherlands in the west; and Jewish settlements existed in all the principal states and provinces. In the flourishing cities on the banks of the Danube or the Elbe, on the Maine or the Rhine, the Jews were all nominally ‘serfs of the Imperial Chamber,’ and avowedly under the protection of the Emperor. This ‘protection’ consisted in the Emperor, for the time being, possessing the first, and, in theory, the sole right of plunder. German Jews were the Emperor’s Jews――his absolutely. He might sell them, or pawn them, or make presents or legacies of them. And, as a rule, the Emperors did protect this property of theirs from other depredators. If the vassal princes of the various states desired to plunder the Jews, they had to do it after a fashion that should not be found out. For this ‘protection,’ the Jews, of course, had to pay a tax to their protector. On some occasions it was raised so high as a third of each man’s ascertainable property. To regular, or irregular, taxation the Jews generally submitted, for any outbreak of resistance only made matters worse.