That the Trinity society of Coventry was not the last of these astute fraternities of traders we know;[426] that it was not the first we may safely believe. Indeed, it might well have been modelled on the fraternity of the Trinity at Lynn[427]—an older company by a hundred and fifty years, whose members would at no time have found any trouble in discussing the secrets of their policy with the merchants of Coventry. It may be that the texture of society was never so simple or so uniform as historians have believed, that the humble mediæval merchant loomed big in the eyes of his yet humbler fellow-citizens, and that in many a trading town the Guild Merchant was the monument of the successful capitalists of the village, and of a triumph so complete that the petty details of its progress fell out of memory. How many typical forms the early guild may have taken from town to town, as it squeezed its way with or without a welcome into communities of every shape and consistence, we have not yet materials to say; nor do we yet know by what varieties of compact it may have become the indispensable minister or the master of the municipal authority; or what was its common relation to the lesser forms of trade. It is indeed conceivable that later research may show us that in many cases the subjection of the crafts to the town—a subjection so astonishing in the silence, the calm, the rapidity with which it is affected—was carried out by the indissoluble union of guild and corporation. Organized in days when the way to wealth lay in the buying and selling of raw material, and in consequence by its constitution destitute of powers to follow the artizan into his workroom and meddle with his tools and the stuff of his trade, the Guild Merchant must very early have seen its officers falling behind the officers of the town before whom all bars and doors were thrown open; but if, suiting their policy to the necessities of the situation, seneschals and scavins of the Guild preserved their power by becoming bailiffs and councillors of the borough, not by laying down their authority before the wardens of the cobblers or the tailors, or even by taking them into its councils; such a guild might make its end neither by resigning to the crafts its cherished prerogatives nor by a spontaneous death, but by a consecrated alliance, in which it only seemed to merge its identity in the borough corporation, while in reality it secured the preservation of its ancient name and guaranteed the traditions and authority of its order. As in Coventry, the force which had first served to overthrow the mastery of the lord of the soil might be employed later to enforce its own despotism over a subject people; and the question whether it used an old or a new name was a matter of little consequence to the inferior and dependent class. In either case the control of the town rested in the hands of an oligarchy of the richer sort of traders, who by combination were able to exact from the mass of the working people an unlimited submission, and practically held at their mercy the fortunes of the free commons of the city.