“When we read or speak of any sum of money in our histories, from the Saxon times to the year 1344, we are to consider it, on an average, as about thrice the weight and value of the like sum in our time.”――_Introduction to the History of Commerce, by Anderson._ ⁴ “Though, by Magna Charta, the relief of an earl’s son, for a whole county, was settled but at one hundred pounds; of a baron’s heir, for a whole barony, at but one hundred marks; and no more than one hundred shillings was to be paid for the relief of a knight’s fee――all which were called the antiqua, or accustomed reliefs of the kingdom.” In order to diminish the enormity of the incessant persecutions the poor Jews were subject to, recourse was continually had to many mean and unworthy acts of vilifying them. Some of them were imprisoned at Oxford, under the pretence of having forcibly taken away a young Jew who had been converted and baptized――a charge which, as it was unjustly grounded, was properly opposed, and in which their innocence so plainly appeared, that the king very soon after commanded them to be released. No offence was, indeed, too improbable to be laid to their charge. They were even accused of plotting against the state, and of attempts to overturn the government; but the most absurd accusation brought against them was, that a party of them had collected together large quantities of combustible materials at Northampton, for the purpose of employing them in the destruction of London, by fire. Upon this incredible charge, many Jews were burned alive, and their effects seized and delivered into the king’s hands. Matthew Paris, who lived in this reign, and was an eye-witness of the oppressions to which the Jews were subjected by the crown, gives a distressing picture of their sufferings. He concludes his account of the manner in which the king practised his extortions with these words: _Non tamen abrando, vel excoriando sed eviscerando extorsit.¹_ ¹ Matt. Paris, p. 831; Blunt, p. 42. To put a stop to the repeated calumnies which were brought against them, as clippers and falsifiers of the coin, they came to the conclusion of paying the king one hundred pounds, in order “that all Jews who should be _lawfully_ convicted of clipping, robbery, or harbouring of clippers or robbers, should be for ever banished the realm.”¹ ¹ See Appendix G.