In the event of any unforeseen misfortune, or any great catastrophe occurring amongst Christians, the odium was frequently cast on the Jews.  If the Crusaders met with reverses in Asia, fanatics formed themselves into bands, who, under the name of Pastoureaux, spread over the country, killing and robbing not only the Jews, but many Christians also.  In the event of any general sickness, and especially during the prevalence of epidemics, the Jews were accused of having poisoned the water of fountains and pits, and the people massacred them in consequence.  Thousands perished in this way when the black plague made ravages in Europe in the fourteenth century.  The sovereigns, who were tardy in suppressing these sanguinary proceedings, never thought of indemnifying the Jewish families which so unjustly suffered.

[Illustration:  Fig. 362.—­The Jews of Cologne burnt alive.—­From a Woodcut in the “Liber Chronicarum Mundi:”  large folio, Nuremberg, 1493.]

In fact, it was then most religiously believed that, by despising and holding the Jewish nation under the yoke, banished as it was from Judaea for the murder of Jesus Christ, the will of the Almighty was being carried out, so much so that the greater number of kings and princes looked upon themselves as absolute masters over the Jews who lived under their protection.  All feudal lords spoke with scorn of their Jews; they allowed them to establish themselves on their lands, but on the condition that as they became the subjects and property of their lord, the latter should draw his best income from them.

We have shown by an instance borrowed from the history of England that the Jews were often mortgaged by the kings like land.  This was not all, for the Jews who inhabited Great Britain during the reign of Henry III., in the middle of the thirteenth century, were not only obliged to acknowledge, by voluntarily contributing large sums of money, the service the King’s brother had rendered them in clearing them from the imputation of having had any participation in the murder of the child Richard, but the loan on mortgage, for which they were the material and passive security, became the cause of odious extortions from them.  The King had pledged them to the Earl of Cornwall for 5,000 marks, but they themselves had to repay the royal loan by means of enormous taxes.  When they had succeeded in cancelling the King’s debt to his brother, that necessitous monarch again mortgaged them, but on this occasion to his son Edward.  Soon after, the son having rebelled against his father, the latter took back his Jews, and having assembled six elders from each of their communities, he told them that he required 20,000 silver marks, and ordered them to pay him that sum at two stated periods.  The payments were rigorously exacted; those who were behind-hand were imprisoned, and the debtor who was in arrear for the second payment was sued for the whole sum.  On the King’s death his successor