The masters, anxious to secure a life of ease for their posterity, and filled with a sort of dynastic ambition, made the acquisition of mastership more and more difficult for those who had not the good luck to be their sons, nephews, or sons-in-law. Even in the Middle Ages they had given way to the influence of domestic affection, but, as modern times draw nearer, the circle of the privileged narrows. Those who were connected with the family by any tie received all the favours; periods of apprenticeship, rights and expenses of admissions, were reduced or done away with; technical proofs of ability degenerated into a simple formality which could be passed through at home. For every one else, old obligations were not only maintained but added to; expenses increased to such an extent that in France the Crown intervened more than once to prevent their rise;[128] crying injustices served as a pretext for the great ordinance of 1581; candidates were taken advantage of and made to give banquets, even when they had been refused admission; the tests became more and more complicated, cost more and more, and were often conducted with revolting partiality. As if this were not enough, the guilds arbitrarily reduced the number of masterships, some of them refusing to admit new masters for ten years, while others definitely decided only to admit the sons of masters. From the sixteenth century, the butchers in Paris, Poitiers, and other places quite frankly decreed that mastership was to be hereditary among them. The same narrowing down applied to the attainment of magistracies. The duties of wardens and officers tended to be perpetuated in certain families: the electoral lists were weeded out in such a way as only to include the oldest masters. Sometimes even the officers nominated their successors, and this gave them the opportunity of forming a permanent oligarchy which divided the honours among its members. One step more in the same direction would have been enough to make them in turn hereditary. The influence of money was combined with this family favouritism, counteracting it at times, but usually backing it up. None could be master unless he were rich, for the cost of admission, in the eighteenth century in France, rose to 1500 and 1800 francs. At the end of the seventeenth century, in the same country, the guilds which were in debt themselves sold letters of mastership to the highest bidder or contracted debts with their richest members, and even put up the wardenships for sale. (_b_) These measures, which, through the fault of the guilds themselves, falsified the normal action of their statutes, were accompanied by an increasingly strict subjection of inferiors to superiors.