DIFFERENTIATION OF AN EMPLOYING CLASS IN TRADES 513 
was likely to arise so soon as the master-tailor owned and AD, 1553 
traded in materials on which he worked. There had been 
a considerable amount of trouble in the trade, as early as 
the fifteenth century, when the management of the London 
tailors’ gild appears to have passed into the hands of men 
who were more concerned in the cloth trade than in making 
clothes. The journeymen tailors, who worked for wages, had 
become a well-defined class; and early in the eighteenth 
century, they were definitely organised in a Trade Union. 
Their society appears to have been a new thing; in 17213 it 
was composed of wage-earners, who were primarily concerned 
in trying to secure better terms for themselves from their 
masters; it was not a gild, or company, consisting of inde- 
pendent masters who were anxious to maintain due super- 
vision over the manner in which work was done. It had no 
direct concern with the public, but only with the relations 
between masters and men. 
The most serious grievances on the part of the workmen, Capitalism 
during the eighteenth century, arose in connection with an dy 
industry where the capitalist’s position was due not so much 
bo his skill as an organiser or supervisor or his possession of 
the materials, as to the fact that he owned the machinery 
which was necessary for the prosecution of the trade. The 
framework knitting trade had been organised on capitalist 
lines from the first, and the efforts to control the action of 
the employers in the interest of the hands, proved ineffective. 
The stocking frame had been invented in the time of Queen 
Elizabeth; and a considerable industry had sprung up in 
Nottinghamshire, as well as in London, where a Company 
was formed which assumed power to regulate the trade of 
the Framework Knitters®. One very important point in the 
rules they laid down was that they were careful about limiting 
the number of apprentices. They had been chartered by 
Cromwell, and again by Charles II.; and the trade appears to 
was fol- 
Towed by 
rganisa- 
Wom among 
the wage- 
earners. 
| See Vol. 1. 444. 2 F. W. Galton, Select Documents on Tailoring Trade, XVI. 
8 One man who objected to their regulations tried to migrate with his frame to 
Amsterdam, but he had no success. Felkin, A History of the Machine-wrought 
Hosiery, 61. Pains were taken to prevent the trade from being planted in foreign 
parts, as the exportation of the machinery was forbidden, by Proclamation (16 Jan. 
1666), [Brit. Mus. 1851. d. 23 (8)], and by Statute (7 and 8 W. ILL. ¢. 20, § 8). 
39