s which was not chargeable to
the member's own misdoing. Finally it was very customary for such
gilds to provide for the support of a certain number of dependents,
aged men or women, cripples, or lepers, for charity's sake; and
occasionally educational facilities were also provided by them from
their regular income or from bequests made for the purpose. The
social-religious gilds were extremely numerous, and seem frequently to
have existed within the limits of a craft, including some of its
members and not others, or within a certain parish, including some of
the parishioners, but not all.

Thus if there were men in the mediaeval town who were not members of
some trading or craft body, they would in all probability be members
of some society based merely on religious or social feeling. The whole
tendency of mediaeval society was toward organization, combination,
close union with one's fellows. It might be said that all town life
involved membership in some organization, and usually in that one into
which a man was drawn by the occupation in which he made his living.
These gilds or the town government itself controlled even the affairs
of private economic life in the city, just as the customary
agriculture of the country prevented much freedom of action there.
Methods of trading, or manufacture, the kind and amount of material to
be used, hours of labor, conditions of employment, even prices of
work, were regulated by the gild ordinances. The individual gildsman
had as little opportunity to emancipate himself from the controlling
force of the association as the individual tenant on the rural manor
had to free himself from the customary agriculture and the customary
services. Whether we study rural or urban society, whether we look at
the purely economic or at the broader social side of existence, life
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was corporate rather than
individual.

*18. BIBLIOGRAPHY*

Gross, Charles: _The Gild Merchant_, two volumes. The first volume
consists of a full account and discussion of the character and
functions of the gild merchant, with a number of appendices on cognate
subjects. The second volume contains the documents on which the first
is based.

Seligman, E. R. A.: _Two Chapters on Mediaeval Gilds_.

Brentano, L.: _The History and Development of English Gilds_. An essay
prefixed to a volume of ordinances of English Gilds, edited by T.
Smith. Brentano's essay is only referred to b