By the opening of the sixteenth century the craft gilds, though not so weakened as the merchant gilds, were suffering from various internal diseases which sapped their vitality. They tended to become exclusive and to direct their power and affluence in hereditary grooves. They steadily raised their entrance fees and qualifications. Struggles between gilds in allied trades, such as spinning, weaving, fulling, and dyeing, often resulted in the reduction of several gilds to a dependent position. The regulation of the processes of manufacture, once designed to keep up the standard of skill, came in time to be a powerful hindrance to technical improvements; and in the method as well as in the amount of his work, the enterprising master found himself handicapped. Even the old conscientiousness often gave way to greed, until in many places inferior workmanship received the approval of the gild. Many craft gilds exhibited in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a tendency to split somewhat along the present lines of capital and labor. On the one hand the old gild organization would be usurped and controlled by the wealthier master-workmen, called "livery men," because they wore rich uniforms, or a class of dealers would arise and organize a "merchants' company" to conduct a wholesale business in the products of a particular industry. Thus the rich drapers sold all the cloth, but did not help to make it. On the other hand it became increasingly difficult for journeymen and apprentices to rise to the station of masters; oftentimes they remained wage-earners for life. In order to better their condition they formed new associations, which in England were called journeymen's or yeomen's companies. These new organizations were symptomatic of injustice but otherwise unimportant. The craft gilds, with all their imperfections, were to continue in power awhile longer, slowly giving away as new trades arose outside of their control, gradually succumbing in competition with capitalists who refused to be bound by gild rules and who were to evolve a new "domestic system," [Footnote: See Vol. II, ch xviii.] and slowly suffering diminution of prestige through royal interference. [Sidenote: Life in the Towns] In the year 1500 the European towns displayed little uniformity in government or in the amount of liberty they possessed. Some were petty republics subject only in a very vague way to an extraneous potentate; some merely paid annual tribute to a lord; some were administered by officers of a king or feudal magnate; others were controlled by oligarchical commercial associations. But of the general appearance and life of sixteenth-century towns, it is possible to secure a more uniform notion.