Very soon after the passing of the Statute of 1270, Edward left England to join the second Crusade of St. Louis, and did not return till 1274, two years after he had been proclaimed king. At once he took up with characteristic vigour, and with the help and advice of a band of statesmen and lawyers, the work of administrative reform that he had already begun as heir-apparent. He recognised that the state of affairs established in 1270 could not endure, since, under it, the Jews, while practically prevented from lending money at interest, now that the law forbade them to take in pledge real property, the only possible security for large loans, were nevertheless still nothing but usurers, allowed by ancient custom and royal recognition to carry on that one pursuit as best they could, and prevented by the same forces from carrying on any other. Edward, with his usual love for “the definition of duties and the spheres of duty,”[79] felt that it was necessary to define for the Jews a new position, which should not, as did their present position, condemn them to hopeless struggles, nor demand from him acquiescence in what he believed to be a sin. For the Church had never ceased to maintain the doctrine of the sinfulness of usury which Ambrose and Clement, Jerome and Tertullian, had taught in strict conformity with the communistic ideas of primitive Christianity. It is true that till the eleventh century usury and speculative trading generally had not been active enough to call for repression, nor would the Church have been strong enough to enforce on the Christian world the observance of its doctrine. It could not follow up the attempt made by the Capitularies of Charles the Great to prevent laymen from practising usury, and it had to rest content with enforcing the prohibition on clerics.[80] But the growth under Hildebrand of the power of the Church over every-day life, and the elevation of the moral tone of its teaching that resulted from its struggles with the temporal power, enabled it to adopt with increasing effect measures of greater severity. Hildebrand, in 1083, decreed that usurers should, like perjurers, thieves, and wife-deserters, be punished with excommunication;[81] and the Lateran General Council of 1139, when exhorted by Innocent II. to shrink from no legislation as demanding too high and rigorous a morality, decreed that usurers were to be excluded from the consolations of the Church, to be infamous all their lives long, and to be deprived of Christian burial.[82] The religious feeling aroused by the Crusades still further strengthened the hold on the Christian world of characteristically Christian theory, while the prospect of the economic results that they threatened to bring about in Europe, awoke the Church to the advisability of putting forth all its power to protect the estates of Crusaders against the money-lenders. Many Popes of the twelfth century ordained, and St. Bernard approved