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The railway, and the constant application of new machinery have completed this work of destruction, and have likewise abolished a number of small handicrafts, such as hand-stitched boots, and lace, which flourished in western and midland districts, Nor is this all.

With trading came a greater development of handicrafts, so that the population of later Anglo-Saxon England had somewhat varied occupations and means of support, instead of being exclusively agricultural, as in earlier centuries. During these later centuries of the Saxon period, from 800 to 1066, the most conspicuous and most influential ruler was King Alfred.

These vast tracts belonged to Romans, who kept slaves to attend to the flocks; while all the corn that was used in Rome came from Sicily or Africa, and the poorer Romans lived in the city itself idle men, chiefly trusting to distributions of corn, and unable to work for themselves because they had no ground to till; and as to trades and handicrafts, the rich men had everything they wanted made in their own houses by their slaves.

The various handicrafts or small industries, such as blacksmithing, cabinet-making, pottery, brick-making, were regulated quite as strictly in Canada as in France. The artisans of the towns were organized into jurés or guilds, and elected a master for each trade.

Dead silence reigned in the house in Thurloe Square: the street outside was ankle-deep in straw: doctors and nurses took possession of Nan's pretty rooms, where all her graceful devices and gentle handicrafts were set aside, and their places filled with a grim array of medicaments.

Thus in the earliest Rome, as everywhere, the arts of forging and of wielding the ploughshare and the sword went hand in hand, and there was nothing of that arrogant contempt for handicrafts which we afterwards meet with there.

He cast his eyes on the nobility and rich gentry of his acquaintance at Strasburg and Mainz. He probably met with rebuffs from all quarters, on account of the prejudice then prevailing that handicrafts were derogatory to a gentleman.

There was, indeed, a temporary variation of activities between the new communities, where the superabundance of soil kept handicrafts in abeyance, and the old country, where agriculture was already failing to produce food sufficient for the population, and men were being forced into manufactures and their export as a means of livelihood.

But now let us forget any conventional ways of looking at the labour which produces the matters of our daily life, which ways come partly from the wretched state of the arts in modern times, and partly I suppose from that repulsion to handicraft which seems to have beset some minds in all ages: let us forget this, and try to think how it really fares with the divers ways of work in handicrafts.

Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-hand, practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material.