[115] A master could not employ more than one or two paid workers, lest he build up too big a business and ruin his competitors. The guild system seems deliberately contrived to perpetuate the existence of a great number of _very small_ industries. [116] The extreme difficulty of collecting loans made to powerful seigneurs went far to explain these astonishing rates of interest. The chances of an unfriended Jew being unable to collect any part of his loan were extremely great. As a rule his hopes lay in becoming the indispensable man of business and financier of a king or other great lord who would support him in recovering principal and interest from lesser debtors, in return for great favors to himself. Thus Richard I of England is alleged to have made the Jews settled in his realm furnish nearly _one third_ of his entire revenues, as recompense for allowing them to use his courts to collect from their private debtors. [117] Mediæval coinages varied to such an extreme extent that it is almost impossible to make correct general statements about their modern values. In the time of Philip Augustus, probably the North French money table was something like this: 1 pound (livre)--2 marks--20 (earlier 24) sous--240 deniers--4760 obols. A sou, merely a money of account, was equal to about 20 modern francs ($3.86 gold), and the denier, a regular coin, to about one franc (19.3 cents, gold). The copper obols were thus worth about one cent. But money in the Feudal Age had a purchasing power equal to at least ten times what it is to-day, and attempts at close estimating are decidedly futile. [118] The courts of Champagne took particular pains to assure merchants of honest treatment and protection, and their fairs were unusually successful. Champagne, of course, by its central location between the Seine and the Rhine, the Midi and Flemish lands, was exceedingly well placed to attract merchants. [119] Frequently, however, the cattle markets might be held at special seasons entirely apart from the general fairs. Chapter XXIII: The Lord Bishop. The Canons. The Parish Clergy. After Conon and his baroness have soiled their gentle blood by discreet trafficking at the Pontdebois fair, the seigneur must needs pay a ceremonious call upon the lord bishop. He might indeed have accepted lodgings at the episcopal palace, but it is well not to be put under too many obligations even to so conciliatory a prelate as Bishop Nivelon. Between the lay and ecclesiastical lords there are compliments, but little affection. Both unite in despising the villein and distrusting the monks, but there the harmony often ends.