some indeed the office seems to have become hereditary.  The “magnates,” or “barons,” of the merchant-gild advised alone on all matters of civic government or trade regulation, and distributed or assessed at their will the revenues or burthens of the town.  Such a position afforded an opening for corruption and oppression of the most galling kind; and it seems to have been a general impression of the unfair assessment of the dues levied on the poor and the undue burthens which were thrown on the unenfranchised classes which provoked the first serious discontent.  In the reign of Richard the First William of the Long Beard, though one of the governing body, placed himself at the head of a conspiracy which in the panic-stricken fancy of the burghers numbered fifty thousand of the craftsmen.  His eloquence, his bold defiance of the aldermen in the town-mote, gained him at any rate a wide popularity, and the crowds who surrounded him hailed him as “the saviour of the poor.”  One of his addresses is luckily preserved to us by a hearer of the time.  In mediaeval fashion he began with a text from the Vulgate, “Ye shall draw water with joy from the fountain of the Saviour.”  “I,” he began, “am the saviour of the poor.  Ye poor men who have felt the weight of rich men’s hands, draw from my fountain waters of wholesome instruction and that with joy, for the time of your visitation is at hand.  For I will divide the waters from the waters.  It is the people who are the waters, and I will divide the lowly and faithful folk from the proud and faithless folk; I will part the chosen from the reprobate as light from darkness.”  But it was in vain that he strove to win royal favour for the popular cause.  The support of the moneyed classes was essential to Richard in the costly wars with Philip of France; and the Justiciar, Archbishop Hubert, after a moment of hesitation issued orders for William Longbeard’s arrest.  William felled with an axe the first soldier who advanced to seize him, and taking refuge with a few adherents in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow summoned his adherents to rise.  Hubert however, who had already flooded the city with troops, with bold contempt of the right of sanctuary set fire to the tower.  William was forced to surrender, and a burgher’s son, whose father he had slain, stabbed him as he came forth.  With his death the quarrel slumbered for more than fifty years.  But the movement towards equality went steadily on.  Under pretext of preserving the peace the unenfranchised townsmen united in secret frith-gilds of their own, and mobs rose from time to time to sack the houses of foreigners and the wealthier burgesses.  Nor did London stand alone in this movement.  In all the larger towns the same discontent prevailed, the same social growth called for new institutions, and in their silent revolt against the oppression of the Merchant-gild the Craft-gilds were training themselves to stand forward as champions of a wider liberty in the Barons’ War.