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The life and miracles of St. William of Norwich
The life and miracles of St William of Norwich Author:Thomas Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE NORWICH JEWS. The original story of the Jews at Inmestar who were punished by the magistrates on a charge of beating a boy to death in the ... more »5th century is to be found in the ecclesiastical history of Socrates, who was alive at the time of the occurrence. It is quite incredible that the monk Thomas could have read it in the original Greek; but we shall see that there was a Latin translation of the story to which he might have had access. The circumstances of the time were favourable to its revival, and v the intense and increasingly bitter feeling against the Jewish communities—who enjoyed a kind of privileged position in some of the more important English towns1 during the 12th century— , was preparing people to believe that the objects of their fierce hatred were capable of perpetrating every kind of wanton cruelty. The cause of this ill feeling is not far to seek, inasmuch as the Jews were the only financiers, money-lenders and pawnbrokers2 who were tolerated. To receive any interest for money advanced on security was denounced as a breach of the moral law which the Church sternly condemned: yet the capital required by those who embarked in commercial ventures—or were engaged in those architectural works which were the rage of the time—had to be 1 Mr Jacobs in his remarkable monograph, The Jews of Angevin England (Nutt, 1893), shows that in the 12th century there were communities of Jews in Cambridgeshire, Oxford, Essex, Lincoln, Kent and Winchester. The Jews in London were a very wealthy body. In Norfolk and Suffolk, however—which were to the England of the period what Lancashire is to the England of to-day—the Jews were evidently numerous, and occupied a very important financial position. The tribute levied from the Jews at Norwich amounted to an ...« less