First Published in 1963. This book has grown up out of a piece of research planned by the author when a student in Berlin in 1898, and commenced to carry out as a student of the London School of Economics in the following year. An article published in the Economic Journal for September 1900, under the title, ‘ A Seventeenth¬ Century Trade Union’, which was the first outcome of this investigation. This work seeks to bridge over the gap which appeared to exist in industrial history between medieval England and the England of the eighteenth century.