[Sidenote: The guilds.] [Sidenote: mayor, aldermen, and common council.] In such boroughs or cities all classes of society were brought into close contact,--barons and knights, priests and monks, merchants and craftsmen, free labourers and serfs. But trades and manufactures, which always had so much to do with the growth of the city, acquired the chief power and the control of the government. From an early period tradesmen and artisans found it worth while to form themselves into guilds or brotherhoods, in order to protect their persons and property against insult and robbery at the hands of great lords and their lawless military retainers. Thus there came to be guilds, or "worshipful companies," of grocers, fishmongers, butchers, weavers, tailors, ironmongers, carpenters, saddlers, armourers, needle-makers, etc. In large towns there was a tendency among such trade guilds to combine in a "united brotherhood," or "town guild," and this organization at length acquired full control of the city government. In London this process was completed in the course of the thirteenth century. To obtain the full privileges of citizenship one had to be enrolled in a guild. The guild hall became the city hall. The _aldermen_, or head men of sundry guilds, became the head men of the several wards. There was a representative board, or _common council_, elected by the citizens. The aldermen and common council held their meetings in the Guildhall, and over these meetings presided the chief magistrate, or port-reeve, who by this time, in accordance with the fashion then prevailing, had assumed the French title of _mayor_. As London had come to be a little world in itself, so this city government reproduced on a small scale the national government; the mayor answering to the king, the aristocratic board of aldermen to the House of Lords, and the democratic common council to the House of Commons. A still more suggestive comparison, perhaps, would be between the aldermen and our federal Senate, since the aldermen represented wards, while the common council represented the citizens.