As indicated in an earlier chapter, in speaking of the decay of the predatory (feudalistic) régime and its servile agricultural organisation of industry, when peace and order supervene the instinct of workmanship by insensible degrees and in an uncertain measure supplants the invidious self-regarding sentiments that actuate the life of prowess and servility characteristic of that culture; so that workmanship comes again into the foreground among the instinctive propensities that shape the community’s habitual interest and so bend the course of its institutional growth and determine the bias of its common sense. The habitual outlook and the bias given by the handicraft system are of a twofold character--technological and pecuniary. The craftsman was an artificer engaged in mechanical operations, working with tools of which he had the mastery, and employing mechanical processes the mysteries of which were familiar to his everyday habits of thought; but from the beginning of the era of handicraft and throughout his industrial life he was also more or less of a trader. He stood in close relation with some form of market, and his proficiency as a craftsman was brought to a daily practical test in the sale of his wares or services, no less than in the workmanlike fashioning of them. Also, the price as well as the workmanlike quality of the goods presently became subject of regulation under the rules of the crafts; and the petty trade which grew up as an occupation accessory to the handicraft industry was itself organised on lines analogous to the crafts proper and was regulated by similar principles; the trader’s work being accounted serviceable, or productive, in the same general sense as that of any other craftsman and being recognised as equitably entitling those who pursued it to a fair livelihood.