[Sidenote:  Division of Labour]

At the time we have reached this struggle for emancipation was nearly over.  The larger towns had secured the privilege of self-government, the administration of justice, and the control of their own trade.  The reigns of Richard and John mark the date in our municipal history at which towns began to acquire the right of electing their own chief magistrate, the Portreeve or Mayor, who had till then been a nominee of the crown.  But with the close of this outer struggle opened an inner struggle between the various classes of the townsmen themselves.  The growth of wealth and industry was bringing with it a vast increase of population.  The mass of the new settlers, composed as they were of escaped serfs, of traders without landed holdings, of families who had lost their original lot in the borough, and generally of the artizans and the poor, had no part in the actual life of the town.  The right of trade and of the regulation of trade in common with all other forms of jurisdiction lay wholly in the hands of the landed burghers whom we have described.  By a natural process too their superiority in wealth produced a fresh division between the “burghers” of the merchant-gild and the unenfranchised mass around them.  The same change which severed at Florence the seven Greater Arts or trades from the fourteen Lesser Arts, and which raised the three occupations of banking, the manufacture and the dyeing of cloth, to a position of superiority even within the privileged circle of the seven, told though with less force on the English boroughs.  The burghers of the merchant-gild gradually concentrated themselves on the greater operations of commerce, on trades which required a larger capital, while the meaner employments of general traffic were abandoned to their poorer neighbours.  This advance in the division of labour is marked by such severances as we note in the thirteenth century of the cloth merchant from the tailor or the leather merchant from the butcher.

[Sidenote:  Trade-Gilds]

But the result of this severance was all-important in its influence on the constitution of our towns.  The members of the trades thus abandoned by the wealthier burghers formed themselves into Craft-gilds which soon rose into dangerous rivalry with the original Merchant-gild of the town.  A seven years’ apprenticeship formed the necessary prelude to full membership of these trade-gilds.  Their regulations were of the minutest character; the quality and value of work were rigidly prescribed, the hours of toil fixed “from day-break to curfew,” and strict provision made against competition in labour.  At each meeting of these gilds their members gathered round the Craft-box which contained the rules of their Society, and stood with bared heads as it was opened.  The warden and a quorum of gild-brothers formed a court which enforced the ordinances of the gild, inspected all work done by its members, confiscated unlawful tools