apprenticeship fees, Lord Eldon felt some doubt; but his decision is justified by the regulation requiring attendance at public worship on Sunday. The ingenious argument upon this point, that, inasmuch as the Jewish synagogue was open every day, Jews could comply with this requirement, was rightly overruled. On the other hand, the reasoning founded on the meaning of Christian names is far from conclusive. It will be remembered that the surplus of the funds of the charity was to be distributed in alms to the poor of the town. The effect of the order as drawn up was to exclude poor Jews from such distribution. Upon this point no argument was addressed to the court, nor is there anything in the judgment to indicate that this result was deliberately contemplated. In any case it is submitted that this particular result was not in accordance with law, and that the true principle is, as stated at the outset and borne out by the judgment delivered in the case, that charitable endowments may be confined to members of a particular faith only if words imposing such restriction are used in their creation, and that all persons, to whatever race or faith they may belong, who can and do comply with the conditions properly laid down for the distribution of an endowment are entitled to participate in it.

were the extinction of villenage and the reformation of the English Church.

The disappearance of villenage is one of those great changes which has been brought about without the intervention of the legislature. To a great extent this result was effected by the attitude of the courts of common law, which admitted every presumption in favour of liberty, and in practice made it difficult and finally impossible to sustain a claim to a villein, if it was seriously contested. The last reported case in which villenage was pleaded was tried in Hilary Term, 1617 (15 Ja. I), and, as in numerous other instances, the claim was not upheld1. From the 15th of James I, says Mr. Hargrave in his learned argument in Sommersett's case, "the claim of villenage has not been heard of in our courts of justice; and nothing can be more notorious, than that the race of persons, who were once the objects of it, was about that time completely worn out by the continual and united operation of deaths and manumissions"." Had the case of the Jews occurred to him, he might have added banishment also. Villenage had thus become obsolete, but the laws and rules relating to villenage had never been repealed, and by these laws the sovereign as much as the private citizen was bound; therefore if Queen Elizabeth had laid claim to Rodrigo Lopez as her villein, it would have been necessary for her to prove either that Lopez had made confession that he was her villein in a court of record, or that he and his ancestors had been villeins to herself and her predecessors time out of memory-that is to say, for a period of sixty years, as limited by 32 Hen. VIII, cap. 2. Such proof would obviously not have been forthcoming, and no such claim was ever made by any of our sovereigns against those Jews who from time to time landed on our shores. But if they were not villeins then the disabling statutes enacted before 1 Pigg v. Caley, Noy 27.

2 J. O. Howell's State Trials, p. 41.

the expulsion did not apply to those Jews who might return and reside here. The disabling acts no doubt applied to "Iudaei" or Jews, nor were any exceptions made in the statutes, but the Jews who came back to England in the seventeenth century were free men; they were no longer villeins or quasi-villeins, and were not "Iudaei" within the meaning of the Acts. This principle of interpretation is well known to English law, and after much discussion and considerable disagreement among our greatest judges as to its application, was acted on in a recent case in which it was held that the enclosure at Kempton Park was not a place within the meaning of the Betting Act1. In that case reliance had to be placed on the preamble of the Act, and also upon extrinsic evidence of the circumstances existing at the time when the Act was passed, and it was the necessity of going outside the words of the statute itself which occasioned the difference of opinion among the judges; but in the very body of the statute de Iudaismo, the Jews, as has been already pointed out, are repeatedly called the King's bondmen, and therefore this difficulty would not arise. Certain it is that many generations of Jews lived in this country in open and flagrant violation of these obsolete statutes. They did not wear yellow badges on their outer garments; they employed Christian servants, and in some cases they did put out money to usury and held lands and houses; and yet no attempt was ever made to enforce the laws prohibiting such things, and that though, as contemporary pamphlets prove, there were undoubtedly many persons willing, nay eager, to annoy and injure the Jews had it been in their power. And yet in the year 1846 it was thought advisable to solemnly repeal by Act of Parliament "the Statute or Ordinance of the fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth years of the reign of King Henry the Third, and the Statute or Ordinance commonly called Statutum

1 Powell v. The Kempton Park Racecourse Company, Limited, [1897] 2 Q. B., 242, and [1899] A. C., 143.

de Iudaismo 1." If the view here stated is correct this was a work of supererogation, but in any case if there ever existed any doubt after the resettlement as to the absolute freedom and equality of the Jews with their fellow citizens before the law, it has now been removed.

Much as the decay of villenage might have facilitated the return of the Jews by rendering the former disabling enactments no longer applicable to them, the various laws passed in consequence of the Reformation of the English. Church and the events which immediately preceded and led up to it were no less effective in retarding a resettlement. These laws may be classified under two heads: (1) those constituting the proclamation, teaching, or propagation of doctrines at variance or inconsistent with the tenets held for the time being by the Church as by law established, a criminal offence-the law of heresy; (2) those making criminal, failure to attend the service of the Church as by law established, and also the attendance at services other than those of the Established Church-the law of uniformity, to a great extent embodied in the statutes known as the laws against recusants.

At the time of the expulsion of the Jews, and indeed until the days of Wycliffe and the rise of the Lollards nearly a century afterwards, heresy was almost unknown in England; and if there was any legal machinery other than excommunication and ecclesiastical censure, by which such a crime could be punished, there were but few occasions when it was brought into operation, and the fact that Wycliffe and his earlier disciples escaped all temporal penalties goes far to show that though heresy even in those times was regarded as a heinous crime, there was no regular procedure by which those tainted with it could be brought to justice and punished. In any case the Jews, who had lived here as the King's villeins and under the special protection of the King, had not been liable to be charged with heresy; but if they converted a Christian 1 9 & 10 Vict. cap. 59.

F

to their religion, the apostate would have been treated with extreme rigour. Perhaps the best-authenticated case of capital punishment for heresy before the year 1400 A.D. is that of a deacon who in the year 1222, because he had become a Jew for the love of a Jewess ("pro quadam Iudaea"), was degraded by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, at a provincial council held at Oxford, and then delivered over to the sheriff as representing the civil power and forthwith burned'. There is grave doubt as to the legality of the latter part of this punishment; there seems to have been no sort of judicial proceeding of any kind when once the unfortunate cleric was handed over to the civil power; nor can it be determined under what precise enactment the capital punishment was ordered, and the sheriff who carried it out was Fawkes of Breauté, a man notorious for high-handed and lawless acts of violence. The infliction of the death penalty for heresy was, however, common on the continent, and this particular case (the offence being a flagrant one), though viewed with surprise by contemporaries, seems to have met with general approval. It cannot, however, be taken as an authority that heresy would in ordinary cases be visited with severe temporal punishment. The impotence of the law is made manifest by the complete failure of the measures taken against Wycliffe and his followers, and in May of the year 1382, when the Wycliffite controversy was at its height, the clergy actually managed to fraudulently introduce into the statute book an ordinance enabling the arrest and imprisonment of heretics; but in October of the same year the Commons represented to the King that the pretended statute had never received their assent and it was accordingly repealed. Wycliffe, the arch-heretic,

1 Bracton, f. 124, vol. II, p. 300.

Ann. Wykes, p. 63.

vol. III, p. 71, says he was hanged. See Maitland, Church of England, pp. 158-179.

Matthew Paris, Canon Law in the

2 The statute is 5 Rich. II, stat. 2, cap. 5. See Statutes of the Realm, II, p. 25; Rot. Parl. III, 125 and 141; "The case of Heresy," 12 Rep. 56.