If Edward had allowed them to become citizens, and had set at naught the bull of Honorius, he would have seen the English towns refusing to support his policy and denying to the Jews the right to join the gild merchant, to learn trades and to practise them, and to enjoy the protection of municipal laws and customs. For towards all new-comers, of whatever race or religion, the English burgesses of the Middle Ages showed a spirit of unyielding exclusiveness.[254] But the feeling against the Jews was far greater than that against any other class. Every reference to them in English literature, before the Expulsion and long after it, shows its strength and bitterness. “Hell is without light where they sing lamentations,” says one poet of them.[255] Another who, writing a few years after the Expulsion, mentions the massacre at the coronation of Richard I., finds in it nothing to wonder at, and nothing to regret. To him it is only natural that “The king took it for great shame, That from such unclean things as them any meat to him came.”[256] The chroniclers of the time refer to them again and again, and always in the same tone of dislike. “The Jews,” says Matthew Paris, in his account of one of the most cruel of Henry III.’s acts of extortion, “had nearly all their money taken from them, and yet they were not pitied, because it is proved, and is manifest, that they are continually convicted of forging charters, seals and coins.”[257] “They are a sign for the nation like Cain the accursed,” he says elsewhere.[258] The eulogist of Edward I., when he recounts the great deeds of his hero, tells with pride and without a word of pity how “the perfidious and unbelieving horde of Jews is driven forth from England in one day into exile.”[259] And just as no punishment that they can suffer is regarded as too heavy for their sins, so no story of their misdoings, whether it be of the murder of Christian children, of insults to the Christian religion, or of fraud on Christian debtors, is too improbable or too brutal or too trivial to be repeated.[260] The popular hatred showed itself in deed as well as in word. The massacres of 1190 were imitated on a small scale at intervals during the sojourn of the Jews in England. Braziers and hosiers, bakers and shoemakers, tailors and copperers, priests and Oxford scholars were all ready to take part in the looting of a Jewry.[261] Nor was there any influence exercised by the higher classes to make the populace less intolerant. A great lady declared that it was a disgrace for one of her rank to sit in a carriage in which a Jewess had sat.[262] A great noble thought it a good jest, when a Jew on his estate fell into a pit on a Friday, to order that he should not be helped out either on the Jewish Sabbath or on the Christian, in order that the absurdity of the Mosaic legislation might be demonstrated--at the cost, as it resulted, of the Jew’s life.[263]