The illuminators at first made common cause with the copyists. Before long, however, they discovered that the copyists were making a hopeless fight and that their own occupation had a chance of surviving. They, therefore, for the most part went over to the printers and found occupation in the new industry, either directly in their old occupations as illuminators or in slightly modified form as illustrators. Many of the early books show hand-illuminated capitals and some show illuminated margins and hand-painted illustrations equal to those of the finest manuscripts. It was, however, only the more expensive books which were separately hand-illustrated. The field of book illustration, substantially as we know it through the medium of pictures mechanically reproduced, was soon developed and offered a large field for the exercise of artistic ability and taste. The kings and rulers generally favored printing as a means of spreading intelligence. The fifteenth century kings, unlike some of a little later period, were believers in education and patrons of learning and the arts. They had not yet come to see that their thrones, or at least their prerogatives, might be threatened by learning, and therefore they did their best to encourage it. Among all these royal patrons of printing, Francis I of France is the most conspicuous. When he first came to the throne he was under the influence of those who were hostile to the new art and attempted to stifle it by stringent legislation. An edict of his issued in 1534 prohibits printing on pain of hanging for the offender. Exactly why King Francis took so positive a position is not clear, but fortunately he very soon changed his mind and repealed the edict. From this time forward he did everything in his power to encourage printing and printers, as we have already seen in recounting the history of the Estienne family. In 1536 he made an arrangement, the first of the kind, to have a copy of every book that was printed filed in the Royal Library. In 1538 he favored the printers by granting them an edict of exemption from service in the City Guard, a service to which residents generally were liable. During King Francis’s reign labor troubles arose in the industry. Enough references have already been made to show that the strike is by no means a modern institution and that strikes in printing offices are pretty nearly as old as the industry. There were strikes, some of them of a rather serious nature, among the Parisian printers in the reign of King Francis. As soon, however, as it appeared that they were liable to injure the industry or interfere seriously with the work of the master printers the king suppressed them by a heavy-handed use of the royal authority, insisting that trade disputes must not be allowed to interfere with the successful prosecution of the industry and that the journeymen must not be permitted by strikes to put a stop to the operations of their employers.