When, however, we pass from the annals of slavery or serfdom to those of the nominally free citizenship of the mediæval town, we are on more debatable ground. We make no pretence to a thorough knowledge of English town-life in the Middle Ages. But it is clear that there were at times, alongside of the independent master craftsmen, a number of hired journeymen and labourers, who are known to have occasionally combined against their rulers and governors. These combinations are stated sometimes to have lasted for months, and even for years. As early as 1383 we find the Corporation of the City of London prohibiting all “congregations, covins, and conspiracies of workmen.” In 1387 the serving-men of the London cordwainers, in rebellion against the “overseers of the trade,”[4] are reported to be aiming at making a permanent fraternity. Nine years later the serving-men of the saddlers, “called yeomen,” assert that they have had a fraternity of their own, “time out of mind,” with a livery and appointed governors. The masters declared, however, that the association was only thirteen years old, and that its object was to raise wages.[5] In 1417 the tailors’ “serving men and journeymen” in London have to be forbidden to dwell apart from their masters as they hold assemblies and have formed a kind of association.[6] Nor were these fraternities confined to London. In 1538 the Bishop of Ely reports to Cromwell that twenty-one journeymen shoemakers of Wisbech have assembled on a hill without the town, and sent three of their number to summon all the master shoemakers to meet them, in order to insist upon an advance in their wages, threatening that “there shall none come into the town to serve for that wages within a twelve month and a day, but we woll have an harme or a legge of hym, except they woll take an othe as we have doon.”[7]