The most important duty of the gild had been the regulation of the home market. Burdensome restrictions were laid upon the stranger who attempted to utilize the advantages of the market without sharing the expense of maintenance. No goods were allowed to be carried away from the city if the townsmen wished to buy; and a tax, called in France the _octroi_, was levied on goods brought into the town. [Footnote: The _octroi_ is still collected in Paris.] Moreover, a conviction prevailed that the gild was morally bound to enforce honest straightforward methods of business; and the "wardens" appointed by the gild to supervise the market endeavored to prevent, as dishonest practices, "forestalling" (buying outside of the regular market), "engrossing" (cornering the market), [Footnote: The idea that "combinations in restraint of trade" are wrong quite possibly goes back to this abhorrence of engrossing.] and "regrating" (retailing at higher than market price). The dishonest green grocer was not allowed to use a peck-measure with false bottom, for weighing and measuring were done by officials. Cheats were fined heavily and, if they persisted in their evil ways, they might be expelled from the gild. These merchant gilds, with their social, protective, and regulative functions, had first begun to be important in the eleventh century. In England, where their growth was most rapid, 82 out of the total of 102 towns had merchant gilds by the end of the thirteenth century. [Footnote: Several important places, such as London, Colchester, and Norwich, belonged to the small minority without merchant gilds.] On the Continent many towns, especially in Germany, had quite different arrangements, and where merchant gilds existed, they were often exclusive and selfish groups of merchants in a single branch of business. [Sidenote: Decline of Merchant Guilds] With the expansion of trade and industry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the rule of the old merchant gilds, instead of keeping pace with the times, became oppressive, limited, or merely nominal. Where the merchant gilds became oppressive oligarchical associations, as they did in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent, they lost their power by the revolt of the more democratic "craft gilds." In England specialized control of industry and trade by craft gilds, journeymen's gilds, and dealers' associations gradually took the place of the general supervision of the older merchant gild. After suffering the loss of its vital functions, the merchant gild by the sixteenth century either quietly succumbed or lived on with power in a limited branch of trade, or continued as an honorary organization with occasional feasts, or, and this was especially true in England, it became practically identical with the town corporation, from which originally it had been distinct. [Sidenote: Industry: the Craft Guilds]