committed to the next gaol, there to remain under strait
keeping, till he find surety to serve in the form aforesaid."

All of the oppressive enactments regulating the wages of laborers
and fixing the maximum of the sum that they were at liberty to accept
affected women equally with men. An enactment of Richard II. provided
"that no artificer, labourer, servant, nor victualler, man or woman,
should travel out of the hundred, rape, or wapentake where he is
dwelling, without a letter-patent under the King's seal, stating why
he is wandering, and that the term for which he or she had been hired
has been completed." Otherwise the offender might be put in a pair of
stocks, which was to be provided in every town.

The guild system, despite its attitude toward women, was the beginning
of the narrowing of her industrial sphere. Prior to the importation
of skilled laborers in textile and other branches of industry, such
activities were identified with the homes of the people, not merely in
that the industry itself was conducted in them, but that the product
was limited to the needs of the household, the demands of charity, and
such surplus as was used in trade. The guild broadened the meaning of
industry to meet the demands of a rising commercial system whose trade
routes became clearly established and extended throughout Europe and
into the East. So that, while the industry of the women artificers
became limited in that many things which had largely occupied their
hands became the settled occupations of men, the products which still
depended mainly upon their industrial activity became much more widely
dispersed, and made them factors in the developing industries to
which England is so deeply indebted for her trade supremacy. With the
decline of guilds, there was a return on a very large scale to the
system of home industry, when every farmstead and rural cottage became
a manufacturing centre. The development of the factory system of the
eighteenth century, upon the introduction of improved machinery for
manufacture, completely removed industry from the home and created the
modern factory town.

It is not our purpose to do more than suggest the influence which the
guilds exerted in bringing woman into the larger stream of English
life by the definition of her legal status which her industrial
consequence and activities made necessary. It has been already
remarked that the statutes of the times made her personally
responsibl