42 A MEDIAEVAL CITY

assessment of individual traders, who did not wish
to disclose the amount of their wealth, b}^ agreeing
that the whole town should pay to the Exchequer
a sum to be raised by the Mayor and Corporation.
The middle class achieved its aims politically by
transformation from within. Instead of making a
direct assertive attack, these master-traders usually
so developed their own interests within the estab-
lished institutions (such as the guilds) that they
ultimately gained their object quietly and shrewdly.
This class established itself against the King and the
nobles on the one hand, and during the century in
effective fashion against the workers on the other.
This appears in the more definite distinctions of class
among the citizens that arose. The masters had
got the control of the guilds into their own power.
While maintaining the original outward appearance
of the guilds as societies of men affected by the same
interests in daily life, the employers had actually
become a powerful vested class that ruled both city
and guild life. In the fifteenth century the workmen
were founding fraternities of their own.

Memory of the Jews, the money-dealers of other
times, survived if only from'the harrowing stories
of the various persecutions that had taken place
all over England, and not least in York. The Jews
had been expelled from the country by Edward L,
with the encouragement of the Church, in 1290,
partly for economic, partly for religious reasons.
Their supplanters, the Italian bankers, whom
Edward favoured, soon acquired from their trading
an unpopularity equal to that of the Jews as traders.
The rise of the middle class had coincided with the
release of money in coin from the hoards of the
Jews, and from the coffers of the Knights Templars,
whose order was abolished in 1312,