Crimes of every description――many of a nature the most absurd and groundless――were laid to their charge, and the severest penalties inflicted for them. Tumults were, on the most frivolous pretences, excited against them; their houses pillaged and burned, and hundreds of them massacred by the populace, without regard to either age or sex. That, under such an accumulation of misfortunes, the Jews should not only have continued to reside in England, but greatly to increase in numbers, cannot fail to excite wonder and surprise. If Jews were the historians who handed down to us the accounts of their sufferings, we might doubt the veracity of their statements, or believe them greatly exaggerated. It is not, however, from themselves that much of my information is derived, for, as I have already stated in my last lecture, they did not bequeath us any annals of their own in this country; my information is derived principally from the testimony of Christian writers――from authorities which admit of no dispute. With the reign of the usurper Stephen, the Jewish troubles commenced. He being solicitous to obtain the good-will of the clergy, the best means to compass such an end in those days was to inflict cruel injuries on the poor Jews; and as he gave up the sources of income which his predecessors had enjoyed――viz., the appropriation of the revenues of the vacant sees and benefices, he therefore fixed his avaricious eye upon the wealth of the Jews: and in the fifth year of his reign exacted a heavy fine, amounting to £2000, from the Jews residing in London, under pretence that some one of their body had been guilty of manslaughter. The Empress Maud, to whom, as it was well said, “moderation in prosperity was a virtue unknown,”¹ during the eight months of her authority in England, compelled the Jews settled at Oxford to pay her an exchange of money. Stephen, upon coming again to the possession of power, followed the example of the empress, and required the Jews at the same place to give him three and a-half exchanges; threatening on default of immediate compliance to set fire to their houses. The Jews first attempted to evade the payment; the king, to show that he was in earnest, ordered the house of one of the richest of their body to be burned, and this command having been put into execution, the whole sum was forthwith produced. ¹ Henry’s Britain, vol. v., p. 104.