e individual
wealth was severely limited, the collective wealth was very large--the
wealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, and especially of the monastic
estates. It is important to remember this fact in the subsequent
history of England.

The next fact to note is that the local government grew out of things
like the Guild system, and not the system from the government. In
sketching the sound principles of this lost society, I shall not, of
course, be supposed by any sane person to be describing a moral
paradise, or to be implying that it was free from the faults and fights
and sorrows that harass human life in all times, and certainly not least
in our own time. There was a fair amount of rioting and fighting in
connection with the Guilds; and there was especially for some time a
combative rivalry between the guilds of merchants who sold things and
those of craftsmen who made them, a conflict in which the craftsmen on
the whole prevailed. But whichever party may have been predominant, it
was the heads of the Guild who became the heads of the town, and not
vice versa. The stiff survivals of this once very spontaneous uprising
can again be seen in the now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayor
and the Livery of the City of London. We are told so monotonously that
the government of our fathers reposed upon arms, that it is valid to
insist that this, their most intimate and everyday sort of government,
was wholly based upon tools; a government in which the workman's tool
became the sceptre. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests
that in the Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from the hilt
of the sword and put upon the handle of the plough. But something very
like this did happen in the interlude of this mediaeval democracy,
fermenting under the crust of mediaeval monarchy and aristocracy; where
productive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds
often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic
uses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, or
even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy's corderoys or a coster's
pearl buttons.

Two more points must be briefly added; and the rough sketch of this now
foreign and even fantastic state will be as complete as it can be made
here. Both refer to the links between this popular life and the politics
which are conventially the whole of history. The first, and for that age
the most evident, is the Ch