That done Edward looked round for means of raising money. And this was found in a device which has ever since weighed heavily on his reputation. The Jews were banished from England, and in gratitude for the relief the nation undertook to make a grant of money. The measure was no doubt generally acceptable; it was backed by the clergy, by the strong influence of Eleanor of Provence, the king’s mother, and by his own bitter prejudice. Harsh, however, as this measure was, it was not a mere act of religious persecution. The Jews had, unfortunately for the nation and for themselves, devoted themselves to usurious banking when usury was forbidden to Christians. They had thus come to wear the appearance of oppressive money-lenders. They lived, too, under a system of law devised by the kings to keep them ever at the royal mercy; their accumulated stores of gold lay conveniently under the king’s hand, and Henry III., whenever he wanted money, had been able to obtain it by extortion from the Jews. But, last and worst, they had allowed themselves to be used by the rich as agents in the oppression of the poor; they had made over the mortgages on small estates to the neighboring great land-owners, and in other ways had played into the hands of the nobles, whose protection was necessary to their own safety. They were hated by the poor. Great men, like Grosseteste and Simon de Montfort, had longed to see them banished; the accusation of money-clipping and forgery was rife against them, and two hundred and eighty had been hanged for these offences since the beginning of the reign. Edward was too bigoted or perhaps too high-minded to wish to retain them as useful servants when the nation demanded their expulsion. They were banished, and the price paid for the concession was a tax of a fifteenth granted by clergy and laity in the autumn of 1290. [Sidenote: Claims of Edward upon Scotland. ] Just at this time the death of the young Queen of Scots opened to Edward the prospect of asserting his supremacy over the whole island, a prospect which within a few years tempted him to claim the actual sovereignty of Scotland. The design of a marriage between the young queen and Edward’s eldest surviving son, Edward of Carnarvon, which had been already concluded, shows that the king contemplated the union of the two kingdoms in the next generation; her death disappointed that hope, but there is no reason to suppose that Edward, when he undertook to settle the Scottish succession, had in his eye any project of conquest. [Sidenote: The Scottish kingdom. ]