The education obtained by the framing of their own ordinances was also no slight gain to the townsmen. They provided for their peculiar needs in their own peculiar way, not always we may say in the best way, but in that which they, who knew the special requirements of the case, considered the best. Each who took part in drawing up those regulations would feel that a certain share of responsibility rested with him to see that they were kept. The constitutional importance also of this training, in imparting an appreciation of the responsibilities and duties which devolve on those who frame regulations was not unimportant.
The services which the Gilds rendered to the cause of liberty by the feeling of strong cohesion which they produced among the townsmen would be less difficult to estimate if the burgesses had played a more distinctive part in the work of Parliament[90]. It is easier to point out how, if they may have interfered to some extent with family life on the one hand, they on the other increased the tendency to narrowness and localism which was otherwise sufficiently strong throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed through considerably later times. Everything was antagonistic to the widening of the townsman's sympathies. He found his trade, his ambition, almost his whole life, satisfied within the walls of the borough in which he dwelt; and the Craft Gilds crystallised, as it were, this tendency towards insularity.
[Sidenote: _Special interest of their history at present time._]
It may be noticed how a special interest attaches at the present time to the history of the Gilds and to the study of their influence and development.
The condition of the working classes must always be a point of vital importance to the welfare of the state. It is peculiarly so to-day. Anything therefore which can assist us to understand how the present degradation of the craftsman has been brought about, and which may help towards his amelioration, will be valuable and of practical usefulness.
Five hundred years ago the working man differed very widely from his modern representative; how widely may be gathered from a single illustration. The architects of the Churches and other buildings which the Middle Ages have bequeathed to us in such large numbers and of such exquisite beauty are, in the vast majority of cases, unknown to-day even by name. They were not less unknown to contemporaries. For they were men of like nature with their fellows: _ancestors of our modern artisans_. How great a change has grown up in the generations which have intervened.