One can see in these and other symptoms signs of the coming storm. The workmen protested against the importation of foreign workers as lowering the price of labour, and made them submit to an entrance fee. They attempted to secure a monopoly of work, just as the masters attempted to secure the monopoly of this or that manufacture. Thus amongst the nail-makers of Paris[24] it was forbidden to hire a _compagnon_ from elsewhere, as long as one belonging to the district was left in the market. Even in the religious brotherhoods, which usually united master and workman at the same altar, a division occurred, and in certain crafts the journeymen formed separate brotherhoods: the working bakers of Toulouse, the working shoemakers of Paris, set up their brotherhoods in opposition to the corresponding societies of masters, and this shows that the dim consciousness of the possession of distinct interests and rights was waking within them.[25] 6. Finally we should take into account the condition of the masters in the lesser guilds where the workshop remained small, intimate, and homely, but these we shall constantly meet with again when we come to study the life and purpose of the guilds, since it was they who made the statutes and administered them. For the present it is enough to mention that women were not excluded from guild life. It would be a mistake to imagine that the woman of the Middle Ages was confined to her home, and was ignorant of the difficulties of a worker's life. In those days she had an economic independence, such as is hardly to be met with in our own times. In many countries she possessed, for instance, the power to dispose of her property without her husband's permission. It is therefore natural that there should be women's guilds organized and administered like those of the men. They existed in exclusively feminine crafts: fifteen of them were to be found in Paris alone towards the end of the thirteenth century, in the dressmaking industry and among the silk-workers and gold-thread workers especially. There were also the mixed crafts--that is, crafts followed both by men and women--which in Paris numbered about eighty. In them a master's widow had the right to carry on her husband's workshop after his death. This right was often disputed. Thus in 1263 the bakers of Pontoise attempted to take it from the women, under the pretext that they were not strong enough to knead the bread with their own hands; their claims, however, were dismissed by an ordinance of the _Parlement_. Another decree preserved to the widows this right even when they were remarried to a man not of the craft.