The Expulsion of the English Jews was an event of small importance alike in English and in Jewish history. In England the effect that it produced was barely perceptible. The loss of their capital was too slight to produce any economic change.[286] The only class that benefited from their departure was the Florentine merchants, whose trade grew from this time even greater than before.[287] Political results of importance have sometimes been attributed to the Expulsion. The victory of the towns over the King has been said to have been hastened by the loss of the financial support of the Jews.[288] But it cannot have come any the sooner for the disappearance of a community from whom the King had long ceased to get any real help in his enterprises abroad, or in his struggles at home. The trading classes still complained after the Expulsion, as they had done before it, of the prevalence of the “horrible practice of usury, which has undone many, and brought many to poverty,”[289] and the “horrible practice” prevailed none the less; and perhaps the poorer agricultural classes of England, the newly enfeoffed rent-payers, found, as did the corresponding class in France,[290] that the expulsion of the Jews only compelled them to go to more cruel money-lenders than before. The coin was clipped as regularly after the Expulsion as before it, and the Christian goldsmiths were as rigorously treated as the Jewish money-lenders had been.[291] The Church, which had helped to drive out the Jews, soon found itself in conflict with Christian heresy, compared with which Jewish unbelief was harmless. The Jews, on their side, were driven from a land which thirty-five years earlier they had begged in vain to be allowed to leave.[292] They went forth to join the far greater bodies of their countrymen in other lands, and with them to fulfil the career of sorrow that they had begun. The loss of their inhospitable home in England was but one episode in their tragic history. From France they were again to be expelled, despoiled and destitute.[293] In Germany the blood-accusation met them as in England.[294] In Spain popular massacres and clerical persecution were already preparing the ground for the Inquisition.[295] The time was still far off when Jew and Christian could live side by side and neither suffer because he would not worship after his neighbour’s fashion. That time could not come until society was more heterogeneous, and the circles of interest of ordinary men wider, than they could be in the thirteenth century, until the citizen ceased to live his life, bodily and spiritual, within the walls of his native town, under the shadow of the Church. FOOTNOTES: [1] J. Jacobs, _Jews of Angevin England_, 43–4; 64–5. [2] Cf. the account of the litigation of Richard of Anesty in Palgrave’s _Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth_, Vol. II. (Proofs and Illustrations), pp. xxiv.–xxvii.