yourself” (Salisbury), “the state of peace in our realm shall be made firmer and more secure.”[478] Similar prohibitions occur again and again;[479] but they were ineffectual, by 1220 the condemned practice had become so general that, according to one monastic chronicler, “tourneyers, their aiders and abettors, and those who carried merchandise or victuals to tournaments were ordered to be all together excommunicated every Sunday.”[480] [Sidenote: 1218] Other restless spirits seem to have found occupation in persecuting the Jews. In March, 1218, the Jews of Gloucester, Lincoln, Oxford, and Bristol were placed under the special charge of twenty-four citizens in each city, whose names were to be enrolled, and who were to guard the Jews against molestation from any one, “especially from Crusaders”;[481] and it was probably to facilitate the duties of these guardians, by rendering the persons under their charge distinguishable at a glance, that the Jews were all ordered to wear, when out of doors, two white “tablets” of linen or parchment on the front of their upper garment.[482] These ordinances were no doubt called forth by some unrecorded outrages whose origin we may, from the words about “Crusaders,” gather to have been closely connected with a matter which was now beginning to engage more worthily the militant spirits of the time. In November, 1215, a General Council assembled at Rome under Innocent III had decreed a new Crusade, in response to an appeal for succour which the King of the Latins in Holy Land, John de Brienne, had made three years before. Some English barons and knights had taken the Cross, but they had been too much occupied with the troubles in their own land to attempt the fulfilment of their vow till the civil war was ended. Whenever and wherever a Crusade was preached, the ruder and more ignorant among the votaries of the Cross, in their impatience to attack its enemies, were too apt to begin with those who were nearest at hand, and who were also most unpopular on other grounds than religious ones--the Jews. It is, however, highly probable that the general peace of the realm was the more easily preserved during the next year or two because several of the leading barons of both parties in the civil war now took themselves out of the country altogether, and went to sink their differences, for a while at least, in the common cause of Christendom against Islam. The first of the magnates who actually set out, it seems, were two steady loyalists, the Earls of Chester and Ferrers, who with Brian de Lisle, John de Lacy the constable of Chester, William de Harcourt, “and many others,” started at the end of May or beginning of June 1218.[483] Within a few months the Earl of Arundel,[484] Baldwin de Vere, Geoffrey de Lucy, Odonel the son of William d’Aubigny,[485] and the king’s half-brother Oliver,[486] all took the Cross, and so did two of the leaders of the other