 Aside from protecting trade knowledge, the Word wanted to ensure that those men who were engaged in the profession were efficiently trained, that the quality of their work was consistently good, and that the remunerations for that work were appropriate.It served as a trade union whose goal was to protect these horse trainers and ploughmen, along with their trade knowledge, from the threat of an encroaching economic system in which the resources for production were becoming privately owned and wages and prices for goods and services were being taken out of the control of skilled labourers and into the hands of large farm owners.As Fernee related, "The ploughmen did not own the land, the horses, the harness, the ploughs or their homes but they took control of the new technology, the horses, and ensured that only a brother of the Society of the Horseman's Word might work them."