than one apprentice, and if he has a wife, can have only one if she does not know the trade, but if the man and the woman know the trade, they can have two apprentices, but they can have as many _valets_ as they wish.” Among the masons, a Juré could have two apprentices, the other masters could employ only one. Exceptions to rules of apprenticeship were made for the sons of masters, or of their wives, and in this beginning of family privileges, we see foreshadowed the tyranny of the close-corporation control of the gild in latter centuries. All the sons of the master and his wife, if she knows the trade, may rise to the ‘mastery’ usually with no fixed term of apprenticeship. If the children were illegitimate, no privileges were granted them. In the case of the goldsmith we see still wider family privileges, for we read “of his lineage and of the lineage of his wife, whether distant or close, he can have as many (apprentices) as he wishes.” The wool-weaver was allowed in his house two large looms and one small one for himself and for each of his married sons, and one loom each for a brother and a nephew, if they “knew how to work with their hands.” In the gild of the iron shield-makers and several others, appears the obligation of teaching the son of a poor master or his orphans free. The conditions of the contract of apprenticeship shed much light on the lives of these little workmen, and the statutes recognize the possibility of their being led astray by “leur folour et leur joliveté.” The apprentice, we are told, should obey all the orders of the master, and not complain without justice of the master’s oppression to the _prud’hommes_ of the gild. He had to clean the workshop, run errands for the family and for the business. That apprentices were not always docile, nor their circumstances congenial, the many rules dealing with their flight suggest. An apprentice who had taken flight from his master could not be received into the workshop of another member of the gild until the complete period of his apprenticeship contract had elapsed. The pâter-notriers had to wait a year and a day after the flight of an apprentice, and the tablet-makers 26 weeks, before taking in another. After three attempts to escape, all obligation between gild and apprentice ceased. “And this regulation the _prud’hommes_ of the gild make to restrain the folly and jollity of the apprentices, for they do great harm to their masters and themselves, when they run away; for when the apprentice is enrolled to learn, and runs away in a month or two, he forgets as much as he has learned, and thus he wastes his time and does harm to his master.” The wool-weavers and the locksmiths insisted that the escaping apprentice pay the master what his training had cost.