But the artisans of the towns were soon grouped into powerful
organizations, called guilds, so carefully managed and so well
disciplined that they dominated every craft and controlled every
detail in every trade. The relation of master to journeyman and
apprentice, the wages, hours, quantity, and quality of the
output, were all minutely regulated. Merchant guilds, similarly
constituted, also prospered. The magnificent guild halls that
remain in our day are monuments of the power and splendor of
these organizations that made the towns of the later Middle Ages
flourishing centers of trade, of handicrafts, and of art. As
towns developed, they dealt the final blow to an agricultural
system based on feudalism; they became cities of refuge for the
runaway serfs, and their charters, insuring political and
economic freedom, gave them superior advantages for trading.
The guild system of manufacture was gradually replaced by the
domestic system. The workman's cottage, standing in its garden,
housed the loom and the spinning wheel, and the entire family was
engaged in labor at home. But the workman, thus apparently
independent, was not the owner of either the raw material or the
finished product. A middleman or agent brought him the wool,
carried away the cloth, and paid him his hire. Daniel Defoe, who
made a tour of Britain in 1794-6, left a picture of rural
England in this period, often called the golden age of labor. The
land, he says, "was divided into small inclosures from two acres
to six or seven each, seldom more; every three or four pieces of
land had an house belonging to them, .
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