It has been claimed on behalf of the bankers’ craft that they date back to Abraham, because it is recorded that he weighed out four hundred shekels of silver as the purchase-money for the cave and field of Macpelah wherein to bury Sarah. But this is rather far-fetched. Livy, however, writes of the tables of the money-changers in the Roman forum existing 300 years before Christ, and later Latin writers refer to deposits, checks and drafts, with all the familiarity of a financier of the present day, as if they were in general use. In these days, when the capitalists of the world are puzzled to invest their money safely to yield them three per cent., it is refreshing to remember that the old Greek bankers or money-lenders exacted as much as thirty-six per cent. a year from the spendthrift youths or embarrassed merchants of that day. Aristophanes, in one of his comedies, makes a money-lender bitterly bewail the fact that he has only been able to get four per cent. on his loan. The Greek bankers used the temples as safe-deposit vaults for the storage of their treasures, and seem to have taken the priests into a sort of partnership. Something of the same sort probably prevailed among the Jews, and it is not difficult to believe that they were usurious, for the Saviour, when He overturned their tables in the temple, called them thieves--“My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.”
During succeeding ages, however, the methods of banking seem to have been lost until re-discovered and re-established by the Jews. A bank was established at Venice in the latter part of the twelfth century, another at Genoa in 1345, and they came into existence in several of the Dutch cities early in the seventeenth century. All of these were, in a sense, state banks, lending money to the state, and exercising their functions under its authority and protection. The Jews, and the Lombards, who had been taught in their schools, were almost the only money-lenders of Europe from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.
The first money-lender in England who at all approaches our modern idea of a banker was William de la Pole, a shipping-merchant of Hull, who loaned Edward the Third large sums to carry on his French wars, and in return the king made over to him the collection of customs and internal revenues. He collected the royal rents and acted as paymaster of the army, and in a general way became the royal banker. Naturally a title was conferred upon him.