504: INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



ment; but in England the emancipation had commenced 

 earlier. Hallam remarks that by escaping to the towns u a 

 large proportion of the peasantry, before the middle of the 

 14th century, had become hired labourers instead of vil 

 leins.&quot; But that these immigrant serfs had to accept a semi- 

 servile condition, we may be sure on observing how com 

 paratively servile was the condition of the indigenous work 

 ing class. 



For beyond the facts that a man could work at any trade 

 only after an apprenticeship, that admission to apprentice 

 ship was practically restricted to the children of gild- 

 brothers, that the apprentice was under the despotic rule of 

 his master, and that when he reached the stage of journey 

 man he still continued under this domestic control (as even 

 still in Germany), there was the fact that he could enter the 

 gild and become fully free, municipally and industrially, 

 only after payment of fees often intentionally raised beyond 

 his means: the result being that even descendants of bur 

 gesses, sometimes debarred from carrying on businesses, 

 were obliged to remain working artisans, subject to legal as 

 well as industrial disabilities. 



Nor were the fully free the members of the gilds them 

 selves free in the modern sense. A gild was a hierarchy. 

 Below the master and wardens came the class of superiors 

 from whom the governing council was formed; then the 

 mass of those who w r ere masters authorized to take work; 

 beneath them the trained assistants; and to keep the com 

 monalty under the despotic rule of the chief men, the 

 elective system was designed so as in large measure to de 

 prive them of power. Moreover the ordinary gild-member, 

 under this oligarchic rule, could not carry on his business as 

 he pleased. He was subject to restrictions in respect to times, 

 places, prices, and modes of work and so forth. Summing 

 up the results of patient investigations into gild-organization, 

 Mrs. Green says: &quot; From the very outset its society was 

 based on compulsion.&quot; And then with this semi-militant 



