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The weavers were the largest and wealthiest body of traders. Guilds had developed from societies of masters and men engaged in the same trade, to the trade-guilds, which in the fourteenth century were trade corporations, the lower ranks of members being the workers, the higher ranks, including the office-holders, the richer merchants, the capitalist employers.
This must have convinced every reader capable of rising above "the holy laws of prejudice," how bad faith, idleness, disorder, and all the other evils of monopoly were fomented by a system of jealous trade-guilds, carrying compulsory subdivision and restriction of all kinds of skilled labour down to a degree that would have been laughable enough, if it had only been less destructive.
Around the church lay the trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to the castle.
Can it be that there was a schism among the primitive scavengers and that these, at first addicted to the same industry, afterwards divided the hygienic task, some burying the ordure of the intestines, the others the ordure of death? Can the comparative frequency of this or the other provender have brought about the formation of two trade-guilds? That is not admissible.
But it was noticed that on account of the abridgment of the power of the trade-guilds, and the consequent rise of competition, French goods were losing in excellence, while they gained in cheapness; so that it was said that workmanship was becoming less thorough in Paris than in London. The police of Paris was already remarkable for its efficiency.
Along with the corvées were suppressed the jurandes, or exclusive industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose monopolies and restrictions were so mischievous an impediment to the wellbeing of the country.
To secure more respect and decency there were many burial clubs, whether connected with the trade-guilds or not, and these procured a joint tomb of the kind known as a "dovecote," or columbarium, from the resemblance of its niches to so many pigeon-holes.
Women had only the monastic life to enter as a profession. They could become full members of a number of the York trade-guilds. The social position of women in the retrograde fifteenth century fully agrees with the absence of women from among those who achieved notability in the city during the century.
The only way whereby such powerful corporations as the trade-guilds or the East India Company could be kept from acts of oppression was through the appellate jurisdiction, by which means their enactments could be brought before the courts, and those annulled which in the opinion of the judges transcended the charters.
The system of serfdom, by which serfs were bound to a particular domain and owned by their overlord, had not yet ceased. Nearly all the workmen of York, however, were freemen, i.e. they had full and complete citizenship. The members of the councils of aldermen and councillors, the mayors and city officials, the members of the trade-guilds, were all freemen.
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