The various nations of Europe have every one of them, in the course of their long histories, passed through successive phases towards the Jew which I have called the tragic cycle. Each has in turn welcomed, tolerated, persecuted, attempted to exile--often actually exiled--welcomed again, and so forth. The two chief examples of extremes in action, are, as I have also pointed out in an earlier part of this book, Spain and England. Spaniards, and in particular the Spaniards of the Kingdom of Castile, went through every phase of this cycle in its fullest form. England passed through even greater extremes, for England was the only country which absolutely got rid of the Jews for hundreds of years, and England is the only country which has, even for a brief period, entered into something like an alliance with them. Though it is the present position of the British State--that is, the position of official British politics towards the Jew--with which we are concerned, it may be of service to introduce the matter by a word upon past relations. The Jewish element in this island, whatever it may have been during the Roman occupation, was of small account during the Dark Ages. Things changed at their close in the eleventh century. The Jew is the camp follower of each new economic movement among us and that is why one finds him in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Throughout the economic development which it began appears the secondary rôle of the Jew. Every one knows the mediaeval rule of Jewish Status. It was established here as everywhere else in Christendom. The Jew was the King's; that is, under the special protection of the State. If he were the subject of popular attack, that attack was an attack on the King's peculiar, and liable to speedy repression. The individual attacker was punished with special severity because the danger of mass-movement is always great where the populace is free to act in masses as it was throughout the middle ages, and the necessity for preventing individual attacks from spreading was correspondingly great. Now and then the popular feeling got out of hand and the monarch had to deal with numbers which he could not control; but as a rule the Jew, especially the rich Jew, enjoyed a privileged position, both in Northern France and throughout England. The Jew of the early Middle Ages in England was normally a well-to-do man and often an exceedingly rich man. Then, as now, a small number of Jews were much the richest men of their time. He had most of the finances in his hands, and this immense privilege (which he has lost), that he alone was allowed to practise usury. Here we must pause a moment to define usury.