[Footnote 7: Keutgen, _Der Grosshandel im Mittelalter_ in _Hansische Geschichtsblätter_, 1901, p. 67.] [Footnote 8: Unwin, _Industrial Organisation_, pp. 32-36.] In 1345 a dispute at Ghent between the fullers and their employers, the weavers and clothmakers about a piece-work rate led to a pitched battle in which hundreds were slain.[9] For a few months during the Ciompi rising of 1378 the nine thousand textile wage-earners of Florence maintained themselves by a temporary transformation of the gild constitution on an equal footing with the wealthier classes of the city, but were then obliged to fall back on that Friendly Society form of organisation out of which the Lancashire weavers in the eighteenth century constructed their later trade unions.[10] Elsewhere in many places the struggle of the town wage-earners for recognition was carried on with varying success during the fifteenth century. In 1453 the journeymen fullers of Brussels formed part of an international federation comprising forty-two towns and cities whose objects were to limit the supply of labour and to exclude all workers from towns in their black list.[11] The journeymen weavers followed the example of the fullers and their black list included the whole of England as well as the cities of Malines and Ypres. The records of the last successful strike of the fullers of Leyden in 1478 show that their fraternity, though it included small masters, was mainly representative of the journeyman class.[12] [Footnote 9: W. J. Ashley, _James and Philip van Artevelde_, pp. 162-163.] [Footnote 10: A. Doren, _Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie_, pp. 124-242.] [Footnote 11: G. des Marez, _Organisation du Travail à Bruxelles_, pp. 118-119, and _Le Compagnannage des Chapelier Bruxellois_, pp. 17-19.] [Footnote 12: _Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van de Leidsche textielnijverheid_, I. xxi. Ed. N. W. Posthumus.] From that time till the end of the seventeenth century we hear little of the activities of the journeymen. In all cases where they expanded, the textile industries outgrew the limits of the town economy and drew supplies both of capital and labour from sources outside the corporate boroughs and the gilds. The textile workers became in every country a much larger and more important section of the community than before, but their centre of gravity shifted from the journeyman wage-earner to the working master who was essentially a small capitalist and receiver of credit, and whose economic well-being depended primarily upon a free flow of capital and credit.[13] It remains to consider briefly how this was affected by the mercantilist policy of the state. [Footnote 13: Unwin, _Industrial Organisation in the 16th and 17th Centuries_, pp. 52-61, 126. _Commerce and Coinage in Shakespeare’s England_, i., p. 330.] III