There were many reasons which might have caused Edward to sympathise more strongly than his father had done, with the anti-Jewish feelings of the Church. He was a pious man and a pious king, filled with a sense of his kingly duty towards “the living God who takes to himself the souls of Princes.”[204] He was a Crusader, though the great crusading age was over, a founder of monasteries, a pilgrim to holy places; and through his confessors he was in close connection with, and under the influence of, the Dominican order.[205] Some of his bishops were determined enemies of the Jews. John of Peckham, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury, insisted at one time on the demolition of all the small private synagogues in London, at which the Jews were in the habit of worshipping after the confiscation of their great public synagogues at the end of the reign of Henry III.; at another time he demanded from the king the help of the temporal power against Jews who having once been converted to Christianity, wished to go back to their old faith; on another occasion he took the bold step of writing to the Queen concerning her business transactions with the Jews, solemnly warning her that unless she gave them up she could never be absolved from her sins, “nay, not though an angel should assert the contrary.”[206] At Hereford, Bishop Swinfield was so determined to prevent intercourse with Jews that, when he heard that certain Christians intended to be present at a marriage feast to be given by some rich Jews of the city, he issued a proclamation threatening with excommunication any who should carry out their intention, and, when his proclamation was disregarded, he carried out his threat.[207] Certain events that happened, or were said to have happened, in England in Edward’s lifetime, some, indeed, under his own observation, may well have seemed to him to justify the attitude of the Church. In 1275 a Dominican friar was converted to Judaism.[208] In 1268, while Edward was in Oxford, the Chancellor, masters and scholars of the University, and the Parochial Clergy, were going in procession to visit the shrine of St. Friedswide when, according to a story that gained general credence, a Jew of the city snatched from the bearer a cross that was being carried at their head and trod it under foot.[209] At Norwich, early in Edward’s reign, a Jew was burnt for blasphemy.[210] At Nottingham, in 1278, a Jewess was charged with abusing in scandalous terms all the Christian bystanders in the market-place.[211]