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But this was not the worst of their sufferings or the bitterest disgrace; the Prince, in his turn, mortgaged them to certain of their dire enemies, the Caorsini, and the King ratified the assignment by his royal authority. But for this compulsory aid, wrung from them by violence, the Jews were treated by the barons as allies and accomplices of the King.
The King Prince Edward was now at war with the barons, who had the King in their power revoked the grant of the Jews to his son; with that the grant to the Caorsini, which had not expired, was cancelled. The justiciaries appointed by the Prince to levy the tallage upon them were declared to have lost their authority; the Jews passed back to the property of the King.
Such was the distress caused by this inexorable mandate that even the rival bankers, the Caorsini, and the friars themselves, were moved to commiseration, though some complained that the wild outcries raised in the synagogue on this doleful occasion disturbed the devotion of the Christians in the neighboring churches.
In fact, the rivalry of more successful usurers seems to have afflicted the Jews more deeply than the exorbitant demands of the King. These were the "Caorsini," Italian bankers, though named from the town of Cahors, employed by the Pope to collect his revenue.
The rabbi Elias was deputed to wait on the Prince, expressing the unanimous determination of all the Jews to quit the country rather than submit to further burdens: "Their trade was ruined by the Caorsini, the Pope's merchants the Jew dared not call them usurers who heaped up masses of gold by their money-lending; they could scarcely live on the miserable gains they now obtained; if their eyes were torn out and their bodies flayed, they could not give more."
If some Christians felt pity for their sufferings, their rivals, the Caorsini, beheld them with dry eyes. The King's inquest declared all the Jews of the realm guilty of the crime. The mother made her appeal to the King. Eighteen of the richest and most eminent of the Lincoln Jews were hung on a new gallows; twenty more were imprisoned in the Tower awaiting the same fate.
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