In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the peasants were the villeins of the owners of the land and held their small farms in return for the work done, the work of children was contracted for, “the lord very frequently demanding the labour of the whole family, with the exception of the housewife.”[440] Nearly all the trades and manufactures in the Middle Ages were under the control of the guilds, so that almost all of the children working, excepting those on farms or in domestic service, came under their supervision. The attitude of the guilds toward child labour is shown in the regulations of the apprenticeships, but this interest was mainly industrial, for in regulating the work of the children they protected their members from cheap labour and at the same time, by their supervision over the work of the rising generation, saw that the guild’s reputation for the proper kind of labour was kept up and prices therefore held to a desirable level.[441] At the same time there was a religious side to the guilds, a strong religious side, and while everything they did, such as the prohibition of night work (not out of consideration of the health of the workers but because it might lead to bad work),[442] had a purely industrial aspect, there is no doubt that this social and religious side developed in the guilds and their members an outlook on the broader and more humane aspects of their own place in society. The custom of not permitting a man to employ other than his own wedded wife and his own daughter was not humanitarian in its intention but its effect could not be other than beneficial. “No one of the said trade,” said the ordinances of the Braelers (makers of braces) in 1355, “shall be so daring as to work at his trade at night ... also, that no one of the said trade shall be so daring as to set any woman to work in his trade, other than his wedded wife, or his daughter.”[443] In 1562 the Statute of Artificers was passed, regulating the system of apprenticeship which had hitherto been a matter of regulation only among the guilds themselves. The national sanction thereby given to the apprentice system meant much and had a great influence in the years to come. The chief features of the Act, binding by indenture, registration of the agreement, and a minimum term of seven years on the indoor system, led to the master’s entire control of the boy and up to 1814 affected the relationships of the child employed or otherwise under the control of an employer. Coincident with the development of the interest in the child as an industrial factor arose the interest in the child as a charge on the State, a phase of the child question that in the ancient civilizations had found its answer mainly in the toleration of infanticide. The Common Council of London on September 27, 1556, passed an Act, the following extract from which will go to show that there was then an attempt to go back of the child problem and an endeavour to regulate marriage.