The trading fraternities assumed generally the character of corporations in the reign of Edward III. Many of them had been chartered before, but their privileges, hitherto exercised only on sufferance and by payment of their terms, were now confirmed by letters patent. Edward III. himself became a member of the fraternity of Linen Armourers, or Merchant Taylors, and other distinguished persons followed his example. From this time they are called livery companies, "from now generally assuming a distinctive dress or livery." The origin of the Grocers' Company is thus described: "Twenty-two persons, carrying on the business of pepperers in Soper's Lane, Cheapside, agree to meet together, to a dinner, at the Abbot of Bury's, St Mary Axe, and commit the particulars of their formation into a trading society to writing. They elect after dinner two persons of the company so assembled--Roger Osekyn and Lawrence de Haliwell--as their first governors or wardens, appointing, at the same time, in conformity with the pious custom of the age, a priest or chaplain to celebrate divine offices for their souls" (Heath's "Account of the Grocers' Company," quoted in Herbert's _Twelve Great Livery Companies_, 1836, i. 43). The religious observances and the common feasts were characteristic features of those institutions. They were therefore not merely trade unions in the current meaning of that phrase, but may rather be described as forms of industrial self-government, the basis of union being the membership of a common trade, and the authority of the society extending to the general welfare, spiritual and temporal, of its members. It must be remembered that they flourished at a time when the separate interests of master and servant had not yet been created; and, indeed, when that fundamental division of interests arose, the companies gradually lost their functions in the regulation of industry. The fact that the craftsmen were a homogeneous order will account for the wide authority claimed by their societies, and the important public powers which were conceded to them. In the regulation of trade they possessed extensive powers. They required every one carrying on the trade to join the company. In 1363, in answer to a remonstrance against the mischief caused by "the merchants called grocers who engrossed all manner of merchandize vendable, and who suddenly raised the prices of such merchandize within the realm," it was enacted "that all artificers and people of mysteries shall each choose his own mystery[1] before next Candlemas, and that, having so chosen it, he shall henceforth use no other." L. Brentano (_On Gilds_) holds that it is wrong to represent such regulations as monopolistic, inasmuch as there was no question whatever of a monopoly in that time nor until the degeneration of the craftgilds into limited corporations of capitalists. In the regulation of trade the right of search was an important instrument. The wardens of the grocers are to