In the great days of the Guild system the industrial market was almost entirely local. Long-distance or overseas trade existed only in a few commodities, and, in this country, these were almost entirely raw materials or easily portable luxuries. England was, as we have seen, an agricultural country, and the nascent industry of the towns existed only to supply a limited range of commodities within a restricted local market. While these conditions remained in being, organization developed in each town separately, and industry came hardly at all into touch with the national State. Then, gradually, the market widened and the demand for manufactured commodities increased. As this happened, industry began to overflow the boundaries set to it by the purely local Guild organization. Foreign trade, and to a less extent internal exchange, increased in variety and amount; and a distinct class of traders, separated from the craftsmen-producers, grew steadily in power and prominence. New industries, moreover, and rival methods of industrial organization began to grow up outside the towns and to challenge the supremacy of the Guilds; while, in the Guilds themselves, the system of regulation began to break down, and inequality of wealth and social consideration among the Guildsmen destroyed the democratic basis of the earlier Guild organization. These developments coincided in time with a big growth in the power and organization of the national State, a growth based largely on the imposition of a common justice and the establishment of a common security. This made possible, while the parallel economic developments made necessary, a national economic policy; and the State, beginning with the woollen industry, then after agriculture of by far the greatest national and international importance, began to develop a policy of economic intervention. The State had intervened in agriculture after the Black Death; even earlier it had begun its long series of interventions in connection with the woollen industry; in 1381 the first Navigation Act was passed; and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries complicated codes of industrial regulation by the State became the rule and practice of English statecraft. We have then to distinguish already two periods in which the State assumed differing relations to mediaeval industrial organization. In the earlier days of the Guild system industry was local in character, and the Guilds came into relations primarily with the municipal authority, and only occasionally with the State, even when the Guild charter was obtained directly from the Crown. In the second period, when the Guild system was already at the beginning of its long period of disintegration, the State was developing a comprehensive economic policy which covered every aspect of industrial organization.