Intimately connected with the system of the companies was the status of the London apprentices. Both have been materially modified, and their representatives have ceased to exercise the tangible power they once possessed. But when the system was in full operation, every trade having its separate guild; and when, in order that any one might exercise a trade, it was necessary he should have the freedom of the guild, this freedom could only be obtained by serving an apprenticeship to a member of the company. In old times the apprentices were a superior class of men, and it was not permitted to every one to exercise the chief trades. Under Henry IV. an act was passed containing a clause to the effect that no one should put his son or daughter apprentice to a handicraft trade, “except he have land or rent to the value of 20s. by the year,” which in those days would be a fair competency. The regulations of the city of London forbade any to be admitted to be bound apprentice except such as were “gentlemen born,” by which was understood freeborn, and not in a state of villeinage――the son of a free-holder or a yeoman. In the days of the Tudors and Stuarts even the younger sons of gentlemen often served in the commercial establishments of rich citizens. The chronicler Stow attributes to this cause their “costly apparel, their wearing weapons, and frequenting schools of dancing, fencing, and music.” But this very pretension to “gentility” it was which Ben Jonson rebuked in his _Eastward Hoe_, a comedy, the counterpart of Hogarth’s subsequent caricatures in pencil. The old goldsmith boasts that he made his wealth by “hiring me a little shop; bought low; took small gain; kept no debt-book; garnished my shop, for want of plate, with good, wholesome, thrifty sentences, as, ‘Touchstone, keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee’; ‘Light gains make heavy purses,’ etc.” The apprentices were very clannish, and ready to defend each other to the death, and this spirit often led to riots and serious disturbances, but a curious poem published in 1647, called _The Honor of London Apprentices_, mentions that this bravery had led them to distinguish themselves in a nobler field than a city brawl――namely, in the Crusades and on the field of Crécy. Their duties, it seems to us, corresponded in their way to the service required from youths of good birth as pages and esquires in the house of a knight, before they themselves could aspire to the honor of knighthood. These waited at table, served the ladies, and performed many offices now termed menial; and, as a tract published in London in 1625 avers, so too did the apprentices: