lords and serfs; of knights who graced court and castle, jousted
at tournaments, or fought upon the field of battle; and of serfs
who toiled in the fields, served in the castle, or, as the
retainers of the knight, formed the crude soldiery of medieval
days. For their labor and allegiance they were clothed and housed
and fed. Yet though there were feast days gay with the color of
pageantry and procession, the worker was always in a servile
state, an underman dependent upon his master, and sometimes
looking upon his condition as little better than slavery.

With the break-up of this rigid system came in England the
emancipation of the serf, the rise of the artisan class, and the
beginnings of peasant agriculture. That personal gravitation
which always draws together men of similar ambitions and tasks
now began to work significant changes in the economic order. The
peasantry, more or less scattered in the country, found it
difficult to unite their powers for redressing their grievances,
although there were some peasant revolts of no mean proportions.
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