decay through a period of abuse. Thus it happened that the craft guild, too, became a close corporation, and its powers to regulate trade were used for the purpose of securing monopolies—a movement exactly parallel to that of modern capitalism, though the methods differ. For two centuries, ending about the middle of the sixteenth, the craft guild rose and sank. Outside it had grown up a new class of men who depended upon hire, who were not a craft aristocracy, who could neither amass money nor gather together stock, who had no land and who often worked with supplied capital. The guilds interfered with this class, not for the purpose of helping it, but of suppressing it. Entrance fees were raised against it. By the end of the fourteenth century, the journeymen, accepting their status as the final one which they were likely to experience, and, assuming that the crafts were barred against them, had formed some fraternities of their own.[1] By the middle of the sixteenth century the guild had broken down, and legislation began to take the place of its statutes. But the landless and propertyless hired servant became common, and he in turn formed his guild in the shape of a trade union, when the factory system and the town system gave him a chance to do so, and the final separation of the labour and the capitalist
- ↑ In 1887 the "serving men of the London cord-wainers" were accused of trying to form an independent fraternity, and similar complaint was made against the saddlers in 1396, and in 1415 against the tailors. (Webb, History of Trade Unionism, pp. 2–3.)
