or unworthy goods; and disobedience to their orders was punished by fines or in the last resort by expulsion, which involved the loss of a right to trade.  A common fund was raised by contributions among the members, which not only provided for the trade objects of the gild but sufficed to found chantries and masses and set up painted windows in the church of their patron saint.  Even at the present day the arms of a craft-gild may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals side by side with those of prelates and of kings.  But it was only by slow degrees that they rose to such a height as this.  The first steps in their existence were the most difficult, for to enable a trade-gild to carry out its objects with any success it was first necessary that the whole body of craftsmen belonging to the trade should be compelled to join the gild, and secondly that a legal control over the trade itself should be secured to it.  A royal charter was indispensable for these purposes, and over the grant of these charters took place the first struggle with the merchant-gilds which had till then solely exercised jurisdiction over trade within the boroughs.  The weavers, who were the first trade-gild to secure royal sanction in the reign of Henry the First, were still engaged in a contest for existence as late as the reign of John when the citizens of London bought for a time the suppression of their gild.  Even under the House of Lancaster Exeter was engaged in resisting the establishment of a tailors’ gild.  From the eleventh century however the spread of these societies went steadily on, and the control of trade passed more and more from the merchant-gilds to the craft-gilds.

[Sidenote:  Greater and Lesser Folk]

It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of the time, of the “greater folk” against the “lesser folk,” or of the “commune,” the general mass of the inhabitants, against the “prudhommes,” or “wiser” few, which brought about, as it passed from the regulation of trade to the general government of the town, the great civic revolution of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  On the Continent, and especially along the Rhine, the struggle was as fierce as the supremacy of the older burghers had been complete.  In Koeln the craftsmen had been reduced to all but serfage, and the merchant of Brussels might box at his will the ears of “the man without heart or honour who lives by his toil.”  Such social tyranny of class over class brought a century of bloodshed to the cities of Germany; but in England the tyranny of class over class was restrained by the general tenor of the law, and the revolution took for the most part a milder form.  The longest and bitterest strife of all was naturally at London.  Nowhere had the territorial constitution struck root so deeply, and nowhere had the landed oligarchy risen to such a height of wealth and influence.  The city was divided into wards, each of which was governed by an alderman drawn from the ruling class.  In