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COMMERCE 143 exchange they had made. We may all remember the absurd attempt of some agitators to force the companies to keep up the charitable gifts they had made to the tenants, while they still held their estates. The expulsion of the Jews by Edward must have been a blow to the prosperity of the city. They are always said to have come into London at the time of the Norman Conquest, and their place of residence, the Jewry, still called after them, is close to the supposed site of the king’s palace. They were looked upon and treated as the king’s special property, and their history here, and at other places in England where they had settlements, is a long record of systematic | plunder on the part of their master, and of slaughter and ill-treatment on the part of their fellow-subjects. Many interesting particulars have of late years been brought to
