Insensibly this view was modified. Charlemagne, whose extraordinary
personal power and common-sense moulded men at will, set an example no
monarch had ever set before. He ordered the sale of eggs from his hens
and the vegetables from his gardens; and, scorn it as they might, his
sneering nobles insensibly modified their own thought and action.
Commerce brought the people and products of new countries face to face.
The lines of caste, as sharply defined within the labor world as
without, were gradually dimmed or obliterated. The practice of credit
and exchange, largely the creation of the persecuted Jews, made easy the
interchange of commodities. Saint Louis himself organized industry, and
divided the trades into brotherhoods, put under the protection of the
saints from the tyranny of the barons and of the feudal system which had
weighted all industry.

Reform began in the year 1257, in the "Institutions" of Saint Louis,--a
set of clear and definite rules for the development of public wealth and
the general good of the people. In their first joy at this escape from
long-continued oppression, many of the towns of the Middle Ages had
admitted women to citizenship on an equal footing with men. In 1160
Louis le Jeune, of France, granted to Theci, wife of Yves, and to her
heirs, the grand-mastership of the five trades of cobblers, belt-makers,
sweaters, leather-dressers, and purse-makers. In Frankfort and the
Silesian towns there were female furriers; along the middle Rhine many
female bakers were at work. Cologne and Strasburg had female saddlers
and embroiderers of coats-of-arms. Frankfort had female tailors,
Nuremburg female tanners, and in Cologne were several skilled female
goldsmiths.

Twelve hundred years of struggle toward some sort of justice seemed
likely at this point to be lost, for with the opening of the thirteenth