irst 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 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 thei