1194
This is the year in which the Crown establishes Exchequer of the Jews.
The Exchequer of the Jews is a catalogue of all Jewish holdings in England. This registry allowed the
Crown to systematically exploite Jewish resources by arbitrarily collecting taxes upon the revenues
that the Jewish community collected from those resources.
The Jews responded to this tax upon their revenues by charging higher and higher rates of interest
on the loans that they extended to their customers. This hike in interest rates only increased the
unpopularity of Jewish money-lenders in general.
The Jews effectively became pawns of the Crown in a kind of perverted "trickle-down economics"
whereby the Jews indirectly collected taxes for the Crown: by selectively taxing the Jewish financial
wealth at higher and higher rates, Jews were forced to charge more and more interest, and the
borrowers were forced to pay more and more money. This structure of exploitation inevitably
propped up the coffers of the Crown.
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