Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [272]
Now he reached them. What would the verdict be?
He was a large, well-built figure, somewhat inclined to stoutness, and he stepped heavily on the turf as he walked. As he reached them, he pulled back his hood, to reveal a dome-like, balding head, with hair greying at the temples, and a face with a fine aquiline nose, a firm, pleasant mouth and broadset blue eyes full of humour and intelligence. He was thirty, but already an experienced man of affairs.
“The current is strong; the ground’s firm.” He smiled. “You have your loan.”
He spoke in French, since it was Godefroi that he was addressing; and both this fact, the rich cloak he wore and the splendid horse which obviously belonged to him suggested that he was a member of the Norman ruling class. Yet there was one strange feature of his dress: on his chest was sewn a double rectangle of white cloth about two inches across and three in length: a badge, known as the tabula, that represented the two tablets of stone which bore the Ten Commandments. For Aaron of Wilton was a Jew.
The Jews of England belonged to the king. They had mostly come from northern France and both the Conqueror and his sons Rufus and Henry had encouraged them to settle in their new kingdom where, although they were forbidden to own land or engage in ordinary trade, they enjoyed a privileged and protected status in the Norman feudal system as financiers and moneylenders. The Jews were not the only group to perform this necessary function. Both the Italian merchants and the most Christian order of Knights Templar, whose international network was large, lent money too; but in England the Jews were the most significant raisers of finance at a time when the need for ready money for the king for his crusades, foreign wars and mercenaries, was increasing and when the expanding economy of the island had no other corporate body within its feudal system for raising liquid capital. French-speaking, often cultured, and necessary to the court and greater magnates, their leaders – though outside the feudal caste as such – were closer to being aristocrats than any other group apart from the bishops and greater churchmen. And for about a century, their relationship with the Church itself – whose bishops frequently required funds to raise their great cathedrals and whose monasteries soon found themselves tempted into borrowing on the security of their huge output of wool – were usually friendly.
The community had thrived, despite a few local demonstrations against them, through the long reign of Henry II in the twelfth century as well; they became treasury agents for the king, raising finance from him on the security of the revenues that the sheriffs received from the shires, and thus anticipating the sophisticated government borrowing of later centuries. They were even allowed to hold land as tenants-in-chief of the king as well. Technically the king still owned them. The estate of every Jew escheated to the king upon his death, but this was a privilege the king rarely exercised in practice, since it hardly made sense to destroy his own bankers when they could be of such use. And useful they certainly were. By the latter part of the twelfth century, the king began to raise money from the Jewish community by the system of arbitrary taxes, the tallages, which he could impose at will. And although Henry II was moderate in his demands, by the last part of his long reign, about one seventh of his entire yearly revenue came from the Jewish community.
“We may be useful,” Aaron’s father had warned him. “But do not ever think we can be secure.”
He had good reason for his caution. The crusaders had whipped up a general prejudice against all who could be accused of being infidels, and in England the preparations for King Richard’s crusade had seen a new series of anti-Jewish riots in some cities, culminating in the terrible affair at York, when a hundred and