Some of the most interesting evidence in regard to the grievances of the journeymen comes from the story of a dispute in the weaving trade in the early part of the fifteenth century. "The said parties--both masters and journeymen--on the mediation of their friends, and by the mandate and wish of the worshipful Mayor, entered into a final agreement." The rules to which they agreed throw indirect light on the nature of the points in dispute. It was evidently a time when the trade was developing rapidly, and when an employing class of capitalists and clothiers was springing up among the weavers. It was agreed that any who could use the art freely might have as many looms, both linen and woollen, in his cottage, and also have as many apprentices as he liked. Every cottager or journeyman who wished to become a master might do so in paying twenty shillings. Besides this, the journeymen were allowed to have their own fraternity, but they were to pay a shilling a year to the weavers, and a shilling for every member they admitted.[7] On the whole it appears that the journeymen in this trade obtained a very considerable measure of independence, but this was somewhat exceptional, and on the whole it appears that the grievances and disabilities under which journeymen laboured had a very injurious effect on the trade of many towns, and apparently on that of Coventry, during the sixteenth century. There was a very strong incentive for journeymen to go and set up in villages or outside the areas where craft gilds had jurisdiction, and there is abundant evidence[8] that this sort of migration took place on a very large scale. I should be inclined to lay very great stress on this factor as a principal reason for the decay of craft gilds under Henry VIII., so that Edward VI.'s Act gave them a death-blow. They no longer exerted an effective supervision, because in so many cases the trade had migrated to new districts, where there was no authority to regulate it. This is, at any rate, the best solution I can offer of the remarkable manner in which craft gilds disappeared, as effective institutions, about the middle of the sixteenth century. Their religious side was sufficiently pronounced to bring them within the scope of the great Act of Confiscation, by which Edward VI. despoiled the gilds; but there was an effort made to spare them then, and I cannot but believe that if they had had any real vitality a large number would have survived, as some, like the Bakers and Fullers at Coventry, actually did. At the same time, it appears to be true that these cases are somewhat exceptional and that the craft gilds, as effective institutions for regulating industry, disappeared. Part of the evidence for this opinion comes from Coventry itself, for we find that a deliberate and conscious effort was made to resuscitate the gilds in 1584. It is of this resuscitation, involving as it does a previous period of decay, that I now wish to speak. [7] Leet Book, f. 27.