These words explain the whole position. In the twelfth century the government of London was entirely in the hands of certain families who held the land. As we have seen, the wards were their own property, named after them: the heads of these families were hereditary Aldermen of the wards. The members of this corporation or association were themselves, for the most part, engaged in trade. They were the wholesale traders—mercers, drapers, merchant adventurers. They would not admit within their body the craftsmen, who began, however, to form guilds for themselves. And the efforts of the governing body were directed against the formation of the craft guilds which, they plainly saw, would lead to the destruction of their own power. In the reign of Henry the Third this struggle of the _Prud hommes_ or the “wise men”—the men of the ruling class—against the craftsmen was at its fiercest. In the reign of John, they had secured the suppression of the comprehensive weavers’ guild. Slow and difficult is the process and many are the lessons which must be learned, great are the oppressions which must be endured, before men so far overcome their suspicion of each other as to unite for the common good. The Londoner—the man of the commonalty—of Henry the Third could unite for fighting purposes; he could trust his brother to stand by him shoulder to shoulder; what he could not do was to trust his brother-craftsman not to overreach him, or to undersell him. Do we not see the same thing to-day? We think we are better educated and wiser; and we are even now exhorting men to do exactly what these popular leaders of the thirteenth century exhorted them to do, namely—to combine. The commonalty, at first, were galled, not so much by having no share in the administration, for they had never looked for any, but by the suspicion that the real burden of taxation fell upon themselves instead of on the wealthy. The names of the Mayors of this reign sufficiently indicate the side on which the power lay from time to time. Thus Basing, Blunt, Bukerel, Frowyk, FitzWalter are names of the old families: Le Fullour and Grapefig are the names of craftsmen.