On the other hand, combinations of journeymen to regulate for themselves their wages and conditions of employment stood, from the first, on a different footing. The common law doctrine of the illegality of proceedings “in restraint of trade,” as subsequently interpreted by the judges, of itself made illegal all combinations whatsoever of journeymen to regulate the conditions of their work. Moreover, with the regulation by law of wages and the conditions of employment, any combination to resist the order of the justices on these matters was obviously of the nature of rebellion, and was, in fact, put down like any individual disobedience of the law. Nor was express statute law against combinations wanting. The statute of 1305, entitled, “Who be Conspirators and who be Champertors” (33 Edw. I. st. 2), was in 1818 held to apply to a combination to raise wages among cotton-spinners, whose leaders were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment under this Act. The “Bill of Conspiracies of Victuallers and Craftsmen” of 1549 (2 and 3 Edw. VI. c. 15), though aimed primarily at combinations to keep up the prices charged to consumers, clearly includes within its prohibitions any combinations of journeymen craftsmen to keep up wages or reduce hours. It is some proof of the novelty of the workmen’s combinations in the early part of the eighteenth century, that neither the employers nor the authorities thought at first of resorting to the very sufficient powers of the existing law against them. When, in 1720, the master tailors of London found themselves confronted with an organised body of journeymen claiming to make a collective bargain, seriously “in restraint of trade,” they turned, not to the law courts, but to Parliament for protection, and obtained, as we have seen, the Act “for regulating the Journeymen Tailors within the bills of mortality” (7 Geo. I. st. 1, c. 13, amended by 8 Geo. III. c. 17).[114] Similarly, when the clothiers of the West of England began between 1717 and 1725 to be inconvenienced by the “riotous and tumultuous clubs and societies” of woolcombers and weavers, who made bye-laws and maintained a Standard Rate,[115] they did not put in force the existing law, but successfully petitioned Parliament for the Act “to prevent unlawful combinations of workmen employed in the Woollen Manufactures” (12 Geo. I. c. 34). Indeed, prior to the general Acts of 1799 and 1800 against all combinations of journeymen, Parliament was, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, perpetually enacting statutes forbidding combinations in particular trades.[116]