It was for this reason that while the demand for manufactures was increasing beyond all experience, the number of men who sought through apprenticeship to enter the trade was most strictly limited by law;[216] and when a man had finished his apprenticeship cunning devices were found for casting him back among the rank and file of hired labourers;[217] so that the skilled workman who had passed through his time of service but had not been admitted to the freedom of his trade[218]—whether because he failed to secure the recommendation of the heads of the guild, or because he was unable to pay the double fees demanded for the franchise of the city and the franchise of the craft[219]—was condemned henceforth to remain a mere journeyman without apparently much hope of promotion. For the enrolled journeyman there was some protection, though of a very limited kind, in the guild; but a lower and more helpless class of serving-men was recruited from the apprentices who had not worked out their full time—poor children whose service had begun at seven or twelve, and who while yet mere lads were induced to cut short the seven or ten years fixed in their trade for apprenticeship, and entering hastily on work for a daily wage found themselves from that time forward counted as unskilled labourers;[220] apparently deprived of the protection of the law in the matter of wages, without any standing in the guild, and lying in the power of the craft-masters for their hire, they were for the rest of their lives admitted to work on sufferance as bringing cheap labour into the market. Finally even the statutes which forbade poor country people to apprentice their children in the towns,[221] far from proving any intention of withdrawing the villagers from the service of the manufacturer, may have been the result of an alliance between landowner and employer to serve their several ends, and have been designed by the town magnate merely to prevent the dependent country workers from flocking into the boroughs in search of apprenticeship and subsequent freedom of the trade.[222] For it seems probable that the town dealers had very early been accustomed to contract with the country folk for the lower and rougher kinds of work. In Norwich, for example, all the tanners’ business was at first done in the country, and the skins sent into Norwich to be worked and finished by the parmenters; and it was perhaps but a generation before the passing of the Act of Henry the Fourth that the tanners came into Norwich and settled down by its river side. And in like manner all cloth brought to the Norwich market was country-made, and originally no wool was sold in the Norwich streets and no cloth manufactured in its workshops.[223] The same system of contracting for work in surrounding villages[224] was known far beyond Norwich, but its local history varied greatly with local circumstances. In that city, where trade was manifestly too vigorous to be shut up into a few square miles, and where the surrounding population had turned into a people of journeymen and artizans, the municipality seems to have inaugurated the policy of governing an industry it had no desire to suppress, by seizing the organization of the country districts into the same hands as that of the town, and bringing the workers under the same municipal control[225]—a policy, it would seem, of merchants and employers mainly occupied with the expansion of commerce, and blind to the danger which their experiment implied of the breaking up of municipal life. But in other towns we seem to detect a vain attempt of the working population to clutch at a trade which had grown into a free maturity, and force it back into the old municipal nursery under the tutors and governors of its infancy; as in Worcester, where the ordinances contain many proofs of having been drawn up under strong popular influences, and where the masters were forbidden to give out wool to weavers so long as there were people enough in the city to do the work, “in the hindering of the poor commonalty of the same.”[226] It is evident that the manufacturer might, from his own point of view, feel the strongest objection to flooding the towns with an unmanageable number of workers attached to the guild who could, by virtue of their numbers and their covenanted position, call on the municipal government to interfere for their special benefit in the management of the trade.[227]