advanced commercial bodies grew up in the boroughs and formed themselves into gilds; and these gilds gradually drew into their own hands the government of the town, which in old days had been decided by the general voice of the whole body of its burghers—­that is, of those who held land within its walls.  The English borough began, in fact, to resemble the foreign “Commune.”  Gilds of bakers, of weavers, of mercers, of fullers, of butchers, goldsmiths, pepperers, clothiers, and pilgrims appeared in London, York, Gloucester, Nottingham, even in little boroughs such as that of St. Edmunds; while in distant Cornwall, Totnes, Lidford, and Bodmin set up their gilds.  How Henry regarded the movement it is hard to say.  The gilds had to pay, as everything had to pay, to the needy Treasury; but otherwise they were not interfered with, and went on steadily increasing in power and numbers.

Prosperity brought with it the struggle for supremacy, and the history of nations was rehearsed on a petty stage, with equal passions if with less glory.  A thriving village or township would begin to encroach on the common land of its weaker neighbours, would try to seize some of its rights of pannage in the forest, or fishing in the stream.  But its most strenuous efforts were given to secure the exclusive right of trading.  Free trade between village and village in England was then, in fact, as much unknown as free trade at this day between the countries of modern Europe.  Producer, merchant, manufacturer saw in “protection” his only hope of wealth or security.  Jealously enclosed within its own borders, each borough watched the progress of its neighbours “with anxious suspicion.”  If one of them dared defiantly to set up a right to make and sell its own bread and ale, or if it bought a charter granting the right to a market, it found itself surrounded by foes.  The new market was clearly an injury to the rights of a neighbouring abbot or baron or town gild, or it lessened the profits of the “king’s market” in some borough on the royal demesne.  Then began a war, half legal, half of lawless violence.  Perhaps the village came off victorious, and kept its new market on condition that it should never change the day without a royal order (unless in deference to the governing religious feeling of the time, it should change it from Sunday to a week day).  Perhaps, on the other hand, it saw its charter vanish, and all the money it had cost with it, its butchers’ and bakers’ stalls shattered, its scales carried off, its ovens destroyed, the “tumbril” for the correction of fraudulent baker or brewer destroyed.  Of such a strife we have an instance in the fight which the burghers of Wallingford carried on with their neighbours.  They first sought to crush the rising prosperity of Abingdon by declaring that its fair was an illegal innovation, and that in old days nothing might be sold in the town save bread and ale.  Oxford, which had had a long quarrel with Abingdon over boat cargoes