458 INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



ways, while protecting tlieir members against aggressors and 

 giving them aid in poverty and sickness, and while imposing 

 on them certain wholesome restraints, were mainly con 

 cerned with gaining and maintaining artificial advantages. 

 Of these the chief was the right to buy and sell in the town 

 articles of all kinds not only victuals, which might be sold 

 by. the unprivileged, but everything else; and a large part 

 of their function was that of so supervising commercial trans 

 actions as to detect and punish, by fines or otherwise, all who 

 infringed these monopolies. 



In upholding and extending their exclusive privileges, 

 these bodies inevitably came into conflict with outsiders 

 sometimes with the municipal government after they be 

 came separate from it, and sometimes with unincorporated 

 bodies of workers. An early example was yielded by certain 

 immigrant artizans. * In various towns Winchester, Marl- 

 borough, Oxford, and Beverley &quot; the greatest precautions 

 were taken to prevent a weaver obtaining the franchise of 

 the town, and he had no standing in the courts as against a 

 freeman. &quot; And then, in self-defence, the weavers obtained, 

 by payment, charters of incorporation from the Crown, put 

 ting them legally upon a like footing with their antagonists. 

 Groups of native artizans, as, under Edward IV, the tailors 

 of Exeter, similarly bought authority to organize them 

 selves. 



But the fact of chief significance for us here, is this. 

 These local trade-governments assumed that liberty to work 

 at this or that is not an inherent right, but a right which the 

 citizen must pay for. In our days it is hard to believe that 

 during the monarchial regime in France, there was definitely 

 established the maxim that &quot; the right to labour is a royal 

 right which the prince may sell and subjects must buy.&quot; 

 But the difficulty of believing this diminishes on remember 

 ing that gilds bought their rights of trading from feudal 

 authorities of one or other kind, and it further diminishes on 

 finding that the gilds themselves interpreted in like manner 



