A HISTORY OF LONDON penalty."' In i 272 the pope at last restored the Bishop of London to the exercise of his office on the petition of Edward the king's son, ' that most gentle and forgiving of men';-^* he returned to London in January 1273, and was received in St. Paul's with a solemn procession. He died in September the same year/^^ and the short episcopate of his successor, John ChishuU, was marked by no noteworthy event. In 1280 Richard Gravesend became bishop, after the see had been offered to and refused by Fulk Lovel."^' His episcopate almost covered the reign of Edward I, when between the king and the archbishop the most exemplary of prelates could hardly have had a comfortable seat. The struggle with the king belongs to general ecclesiastical history, but the numerous convocations held at St. Paul's, Westminster, and the New Temple must have brought it clearly before the people of London. ^^' The outlawry of the clergy in 1296 also must have specially affected the City, full as it was of clerks of all kinds. Archbishop Peckham seems to have been much interested in the Jews, who had always been numerous in London. They had been encouraged by William the Conqueror to settle there, and William of Malmesbury gives as one instance of Rufus's impiety that he urged the Jews of London to dispute with the bishops, offering in jest (Judibundus, credo) to become a Jew if they should beat the Christians in fair argument.'^" On several occasions in the 12th and 13th centuries they suffered ma;; acre and looting,'-^ and there is a story of the body of a boy found in the cemetery of St. Benedict in the City in 1244, resembling the well-known story of St. Hugh of Lincoln, which illustrates the superstitious horror combined with hatred felt toward them.'^' The devotion of the Londoners to the Franciscans was cooled by their intervention, in 1256, in favour of certain Jews who were imprisoned in the Tower for alleged participation in the murder of the boy Hugh at Lincoln. Popular opinion said that the Jews had bribed the friars, and when they were set free people ' withdrew their hands from giving bounty as before.' ^" An effort at conversion seems to have been made in the reign of Henry III, when the Domus Conversorum was founded,"* and in the same reign several synagogues were converted into Christian places of worship.^" There are several letters from Peckham to the Bishop of London and to the king on the subject of the London Jews, from which it appears that all their synagogues except one were destroyed about 1282."" Their expulsion in 1290 was undoubtedly a popular measure.
- " Lib. de jintijuis Lepbuj (Camd. Soc), io8, 1 1 7. "" Cal. 0/ Papal Letters, , 41 1.
"' Chron. Edw. I and Edw. II (Rolls Scr.), i, 83. "' Ibid, i, 89. "' Wilkins, Concilia, ii, passim. "» De Gestis Regum (Rolls Ser.), ii, 371. '-' Gesta Hen. II et Ric. I (Rolls Ser.), ii, 83-4 ; Lib. de Antiquis Legibus (Camd. Soc), 50, 62 ; Thos. Wykes, Ann. Mon. (Rolls Ser.), iv, 141 ; French Chron. of Lond. (Camd. Soc), 5. "' Matt. Paris, Chron. Maj. (RoUs Ser.), iv, 377. '" Ibid. V, 546, 552. In one passage the number of Jews is given as seventy-one, in the other as ninety-one. '" For history see article on ' Religious Houses.' "' Devon, Issues of the Exch. 12 ; Guildhall MS. iii, iv, 750. See also the accounts of the Hospital of St. Anthony and the Friars of the Sack, in ' Religious Houses.' The synagogue beside the house of the Fri.irs of the Sack was given by Henry III to the friars because they were disturbed by the howling (' ululatio ') of the Jews at prayer. Stow, Suiv. (ed. Kingsford), i, 284, says that the church of St. Stephen Coleman Street was 'sometime a synagogue of the Jewes,' but he seems to have confused it with the synagogue given to the friars ; see Kingsford's note, ibid, ii, 336. '"^ Reg. Epist. J. Peckham (Rolls Ser.), i, 213, 239 ; ii, 407, 410. 196
