It will also be a record rich in illustrations of contemporary social life[9]. The closeness of relationship between religion and the ordinary business pursuits of the mediaeval burgess; the wide public influence exercised by the Gilds in their earlier years, and the remarkable family feeling they maintained within the boundaries of the old towns even down to the time when the companies had become utterly demoralised, will be exemplified not less remarkably than the continuity of the Gild sentiment through the shocks of the Reformation period, through the economic changes of Elizabeth, and even (in some sort) through the Reforms of 1835. It is a history too which will help us to understand a problem of considerable difficulty. We shall not only see the degenerated societies of capitalists in full vigour down to the date of their enforced termination as trading companies, but we shall also be enabled to perceive how it was that they managed to retain their prejudicial and antiquated privileges to the very end of their existence. It is indeed in the light which their history throws on the conditions of provincial trade and the social customs of an ordinary provincial town during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that its special importance lies. The rapid progress which marked the commencement of that period, not less than the torpor and decay which characterised the corporate towns at its close will be found to be eminently exemplified in the history of the Shrewsbury Gilds. CHAPTER II. THE MERCHANT GILD. [Sidenote: _Universality of Gild feeling._] Dr Brentano[10] is particularly desirous to make it clear that he considers England "the birthplace of Gilds." But it is scarcely necessary to point out that the conception of the Gild belongs to no particular age and to no particular country. Not to insist unduly on the universality of an institution from which some writers have derived the Gilds, and to which they certainly bear considerable resemblance, the family--common to humanity itself--we note that the Greeks had their [Greek: eranoi][11] and their [Greek: xunomosiai][12], and the Romans their _collegia opificum_[13], each exhibiting not a few of the features of the mediaeval Gilds. _Corps des metiers_ existed in France in very early times, perhaps in direct continuation of the Roman institutions, and played a great part in the beginnings of many towns[14]. So early as to be anterior to the earliest known Frith Gilds, that is to say in the latter half of the seventh century, a regularly organised system of confederation existed among the Anglo-Saxon monasteries throughout England, according to the rules of which the united Abbeys and Religious Houses undertook to pray for the members, living and departed, of one another[15]: [Sidenote: _English and Continental Gilds._]