In the first, the typical economic institutions are the manor and the gild; in the second, domestic manufacture and convertible husbandry are predominant; and in the third the factory system and capitalist farming take their places.[22] Trade, too, undergoes a similar evolution. In the first period it is intermunicipal rather than international. In the second period, within each nation trade is free and unfettered, and a considerable amount of territorial division of labour and regional specialisation results. But external trade is regulated by governments on the principles of the mercantile system. In the third period, with the increase and improvement of the means of communication, international trade becomes more and more important, markets are immensely widened, and the economic organisation of society reaches the complexity possessed by it to-day, which reacts in many half comprehended ways on the household and on family life. The main characteristics of these divisions of English industrial history are, on the whole, clear and well-marked. But the transition periods are more difficult to describe. It has often been pointed out that the two industrial revolutions, as they have been named by some writers, bear a certain resemblance to each other. Both involve a reorganisation of industry which results in increased productivity on the one hand, but in the demoralisation of certain classes of the workers on the other hand. Both therefore require a revision of the system of providing for the destitute. Both, too, produce the most far-reaching effects on home-life and the economy of the household, and influence profoundly the position of women. Both, too, are alike in that it is not easy to fix dates to the periods within which the revolution in industry takes place.[23] But roughly we may regard the late fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth as a time of stress and strain, due to the appearance of new methods both in agriculture and in industry, especially in the wool trade; and in the same way the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was a period of sudden and violent economic transition. In both cases alike the changes in agriculture preceded somewhat the changes in industry, and the revolution made itself felt in different ways and at different times in the various districts of the country. There are still backward areas in the south of England and in the west of Scotland where life has been very little affected, notwithstanding trains and steam-engines, by the alterations in industry which have produced the roaring mills and clattering shipyards of Lancashire and the Clyde. The task before us, then, is to sketch as clearly as possible from the scanty material available the main features of domestic life at each one of these epochs, and to show how the changes in industry reflected themselves in the life of the household. (_a_) THE HOUSEHOLD IN THE MEDIÆVAL PERIOD