At the same time that the towns were making their attack on the Jews in their own way, there was growing up within the baronial order a new party, stronger than the towns in the elements of which it was composed and in its capacity for joint action, and filled, on account of the private circumstances of its members, with a deeper hatred of the Jews than the greater barons, who had hitherto represented the order, had ever known. For the old Baronial party which had forced Magna Carta on John was too rich to be seriously indebted to the Jews, and the anti-Jewish feeling of its members must have been blunted by the fact that, when they had to pay their debts, they could raise the money by benevolences levied on their tenants.[49] Moreover some of them imitated on their own estates the King’s policy of sharing in the profits of usury.[50] Hence they were little influenced by personal grievances, and it was no doubt partly from political considerations, and partly as a concession to the lesser and poorer members of their order, that they had introduced into Magna Carta certain limitations of the power of the Jews, or of their legatee, the King, over the estates of debtors, a measure which, small as it was, was repealed on the re-issues of the charters, when, during the minority of Henry III., the great Barons had to undertake the duty of Government. And yet even the great Barons must have felt, after twenty years’ experience of the personal Government of Henry III., that an alteration in the Royal system of managing the Jewry was necessary if their order was ever to succeed in the constitutional struggle in which it was engaged. They knew that many of those among the King’s acts which they hated worst would have been impossible but for the Jews. It was by money extorted from them that he had been enabled to prolong his expeditions in Brittany and Gascony, to support and enrich his foreign favourites, and to baffle the attempts of the Council to secure, by the refusal of supplies, the restoration of Government through the customary officers. In 1230, and again in 1239, he took from them a third of their property; in 1244, he levied a tallage of 60,000 marks; in 1250, 1252, 1254, and 1255 he ordered the royal officers to take from them all that they could exact, after thorough inquisition and the employment of measures of compulsion so cruel as to make the whole body of Jews in England ask twice, though each time in vain, for permission to leave the country. Thus the whole Baronial order was for a time united, on the ground of constitutional grievances, in a policy which found its expression in the successful attempt of the National Council in 1244 to exact from the King the right of appointing one of the two justices of the Jews, so as to gain a knowledge of the amount of the Jewish revenue, and a power of controlling its expenditure.[51]