The disasters that followed the first Crusade brought with them an increase in the ferocity of the attacks to which the Jews of Continental Europe were subjected, and S. Bernard, when he preached the second Crusade, found that he had revived a spirit of fanaticism that he was powerless to quell. He had wished for the reconquest of the Holy Land as a result that would bring honour to the Christian religion; but his followers and imitators thought less of the end than of the bloodshed that was to be the means. A monk, “who skilfully imitated the austerity of religion, but had no immoderate amount of learning,”[11] went through the Rhineland preaching that all Jews who were found by the Crusaders should be killed as enemies of the Christian faith. It was in vain that Bernard appealed to the Christian nations whom his eloquence had aroused, in the hope that “the zeal of God which burnt in them would not fail altogether to be tempered with knowledge.” He himself narrowly escaped attack: and the Jews suffered from the second Crusade as they had suffered from the first.[12] England was so closely related to the Churches of the Continent that it could not fail to be affected by the great movement. But the first Crusade was preached when the Conquest was still recent, and the Normans had no leisure to leave their new country; the second, during the last period of anarchy in the reign of Stephen. Thus there were, during the first hundred years after the Council of Clermont, few English Crusaders. Yet the Crusading spirit, working in a superstitious mediæval population, called forth a danger that was destined to be as fatal to the English Jews as were the massacres to their brethren on the Continent. The Pope who preached the first Crusade had told his hearers that Eastern nations were in the habit of circumcising Christians and using their blood in such a way as to show their contempt for the Christian religion. This charge was naturally extended to the Jews as well. What alterations it underwent in its circulation it is hard to say; but in 1146, a tale was spread among the populace of Norwich, and encouraged by the bishop, that the Jews had killed a boy named William, to use his blood for the ritual of that most suspicious feast, their Passover. The story was supported by no evidence more trustworthy than that of an apostate Jew, which was so worthless that the Sheriff refused to allow the Jews to appear in the Bishop’s Court to answer the charge brought against them, and took them under his protection. But the popular suspicion of the Jews lent credibility to the story, and so terrible a feeling was aroused that many of the Jews of Norwich dispersed into other lands, and of those who remained many were killed by the people in spite of the protection of the Sheriff.[13] The accusation once made naturally recurred, first at Gloucester, in 1168, and then at Bury St. Edmund’s, in 1181. “The