Two years afterwards the mutinous Barons seized the Tower, which they occupied until the Battle of Evesham, in 1264, enabled Henry to return to his favourite stronghold. Once again the King was driven into war by Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, who summoned Otho, the Papal Legate, then within the Tower, to surrender it into his hands, declaring that the Tower “was not a post to be trusted in the hands of a foreigner, much less of an ecclesiastic.” The Legate defied the Earl to do his worst, and refused to surrender either the fortress or himself into Gloucester’s keeping. This priest appears to have been not only brave, but somewhat rash, for although the city was at that time in the power of de Clare, he left the Tower when a siege was imminent, and preached a sermon at St Paul’s, inveighing against the Earl. A siege ensued, during which, according to Matthew of Westminster, a number of Jews, then within the Tower, defended one of its wards with great courage, and the King’s army arriving opportunely, the fortress was saved from falling into the hands of the Earl. CHAPTER III THE EDWARDS At the close of Henry’s troubled reign we find the Tower in the keeping of the Archbishop of York, a post he held while the young King, Edward the First, was absent upon an expedition in Palestine. Although this monarch was not often at the Tower, he added to its buildings, and strengthened its fortifications, which, after the two sieges they had lately undergone, no doubt stood much in need of repair, and it was during his reign that the fortress became the recognised place of incarceration for State prisoners, and the principal prison in the realm. The dungeons beneath the White Tower were crowded with hundreds of unfortunate Jews in 1278,—a strange way, it seems, of repaying these people for the courage and loyalty some of their brethren had so recently displayed in the reign of the King’s father, in defending the same fortress against the King’s enemies. These Jews—there were some six hundred of them—were imprisoned in the Tower on the charge of clipping and defacing the coin of the realm. The prisons were often filled after Edward’s campaigns, many captives being brought from Wales and from Scotland. Amongst the latter, after the defeat of the Scottish army at Dunbar in 1296, was King Baliol, with the Earls of Athol, Sutherland, Menteith, Ross, and others, Baliol’s son, Prince Edward, with other Scottish chiefs and knights, being added to the former batch of State prisoners in the following year.