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countrymen, to give them some information respecting the Britons. The Romans knew who the Jews were; it would have been a waste of time on Cæsar's part to have given them information on a subject they were already acquainted with. He might as well have described the Roman army; especially since it is supposed that many Jews accompanied him as soldiers to Britain.

Another argument has been advanced against their establishment in this country at so early a period, which was-" It is not probable that a total silence respecting them would have prevailed among the British writers of those days, had any portion of them been then established in Britain." I mention those objections because they are the strongest which have been produced, and you will find them in the eighth volume of the "English Archæologia," page 390.

Now, I must meet this again by another question. To what early British historians does Mr. Caley refer ?-for that is the name of the writer of the article on this subject in the "English Archæologia."-England had

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EARLY BRITISH WRITERS.

no literature for a very long period. Gildas, commonly called the Wise, is the most ancient British historian now extant. Any one who has ever taken the trouble to read through his "De Calamitate, Excidio, et Conquestu Britannia" (this is the only work of his printed, and probably existing), will despair of finding in it any thing of importance. Next to him comes the venerable Bede, who was, indeed, the brightest ornament of the eighth century, but he confined himself to ecclesiastical history. Bede, however, does incidentally mention the Jews, as I shall presently show, which proves that they must have been here anterior to his time.

I wish, however, first to call your attention to a striking feature in the history of the Jews in this country. The Jews are never mentioned in the early history of England, except to record some flagrant persecution, or horrible massacre; to reckon up the amount of sums extorted from them by kings in distress, or to detail some story about the crucifixion of infants, got up by

WHEN DO THEY NOTICE THE JEWS. 75

their enemies for the sake of making the objects of their injustice odious as well as unfortunate. And when these subjects did not occur to the monkish historians of the time -that is to say, when the Jews were unmolested, peaceably employing themselves in traffic, and gradually acquiring wealth which was not demanded from them too largely or too rudely, in return for their safety and opportunities of commerce-it would be conceived that they were unworthy of mention on any other account. Historians always find the most prosperous to be the most barren periods of history; as the richest and most fertile country affords but an uninteresting landscape to the poet or the artist, when compared with the wild rocks, rugged precipices, and unproductive solitudes of mountain scenery. So we may fairly conclude that, until the reign of Stephen, they were enjoying, without molestation, the benefits of their traffic, and increasing in riches and wealth, whilst the peace of their Gentile brethren was all that time rent asunder by different invasions and seditions.

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BEDE THE FIRST ENGLISH WRITER

The first mention I find of the Jews in English works, is that in Bede's "Ecclesiastical History," in connexion with the ridiculous and absurd controversies which prevailed between the Romish and British monks, viz., about the form of the tonsure and the keeping of Easter. The priests of all the then Christian churches were accustomed to shave part of their head; but the form given to this tonsure was different in the Britons from that used by the Roman monks, who came over to this country with Augustine. The latter made the tonsure on the crown of the head, and in a circular form, whilst the former shaved the forepart of their head from ear to ear. The Romish monks, in order to recommend their own form of tonsure, maintained that it imitated symbolically the crown of thorns worn by our Lord in his passion. But as to the Britons, their antagonists insisted that their form was invented by Simon Magus, without any regard to that representation. The Britons also celebrated Easter on the very day of the full moon in March,

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if that day fell on a Sunday, instead of waiting till the Sunday following. The Britons pleaded the antiquity of their usages; the Romans insisted on the universality of theirs. In order to render the former odious, the latter affirmed that their native priests once in seven years concurred with the Jews in the time of celebrating that festival.

This incidental circumstance proves that there must have been Jews here who had synagogues, and observed the feast of Passover. The Jews must also have had learned men amongst them to arrange their calendars and such an arrangement requires a fair astronomical knowledge, or else the charge would have been totally unintelligible to the Saxons.

The above charge will account for the edict published soon after by Ecgbright, Archbishop of York, in the "Canonical Excerptiones," A. D. 740, to the effect, that no Christian should be present at any of the Jewish feasts,* which establishes the fact that Jews

* See Appendix A.