hour off for breakfast and an hour and a half off for midday dinner. In winter the outside limits were fixed by the length of daylight. Cloth manufacture Throughout the fifteenth century the rapidly increasing manufacture of cloth was subject to a regulation which aimed at maintaining the standard of production and prevention of bad workmanship, and the noteworthy statute 4 Edward IV. c. 1, while giving power to royal officers to supervise size of cloths, modes of sealing, etc., also repressed payment to workers in "pins, girdles and unprofitable wares," and ordained payment in true and lawful money. This statute (the first against "truck") gives an interesting picture of the way in which clothiers—or, as we should call them, wholesale merchants and manufacturers—delivered wool to spinners, carders, etc., by weight, and paid for the work when brought back finished. It appears that the work was carried on in rural as well as town districts. While this industry was growing and thriving other trades remained backward, and agriculture was in a depressed condition. Craft guilds had primarily the same purpose as the Edwardian statutes, that is, of securing that the public should be well served with good wares, and that the trade and manufacture itself should be on a sound basis as to quality of products and should flourish. Incidentally there was considerable regulation by the guilds of the conditions of labour, but not primarily in the interests of the labourer. Thus night work was prohibited because it tended to secrecy and so to bad execution of work; working on holidays was prohibited to secure fair play between craftsmen and so on. The position of apprentices was made clear through indentures, but the position of journeymen was less certain. Signs are not wanting of a struggle between journeymen and masters, and towards the end of the fifteenth century masters themselves, in at least the great wool trade, tended to develop from craftsmen into something more like the modern capitalist employer; from an act of 1555 touching weavers it is quite clear that this development had greatly advanced and that cloth-making was carried on largely by employers with large capitals. Before this, however, while a struggle went on between the town authorities and the craft guilds, journeymen began to form companies of their own, and the result of the various conflicts may be seen in an act of Henry VI, providing