available resources of revenue and credit, present and prospective, had been exhausted, and all the accessible material had been consumed, the princely fisc went into bankruptcy, followed by its creditors, the captains of industry, followed by the business community at large with whose funds they had operated and by the industrial community, whose stock of goods and appliances was exhausted, whose trade connections were broken and whose working population had been debauched, scattered and reduced to poverty and subjection by the wars, revenue collectors and forced contributions. Meantime, too, habituation to the sentiments, ideals, standards and manner of life suitable to a state of predation had swamped the handicraft spirit and put abnegation and dependence on arbitrary power in the place of that initiative and pertinacious self-reliance that had made the era of handicraft. It was from this eventuality that England in great measure escaped by favour of her insular position and the inability of her princes to draw a reluctant industrial community into the traffic of dynastic intrigue that filled the Continent. It will have been remarked that one of the essential moves in this sequence of events, from the beginnings of handicraft in impecunious and self-reliant workmanship to its eventual collapse in exhaustion, is the gradual accumulation of commercial and industrial wealth in relatively few hands. This accumulation of wealth, or rather its segregation in few hands, appears, as already indicated, to have entered as a potent factor in the course of things that lead the system of handicraft through maturity to collapse, as on the Continent, or to decay, as in England. It will accordingly be in place to go somewhat more narrowly into the circumstances of its beginnings and growth and the manner in which it plays its part in the organisation of the handicraft industry. It appears that this uneven distribution of wealth arises out of the technological exigencies of handicraft and of the petty trade which characteristically runs along with the handicraft industry in its early stages.[132] In its earliest, impecunious beginnings, handicraft as known in mediæval Europe was like its congener, the manual arts of the savage and lower barbarian peoples, in that the whole material equipment requisite to its pursuit consisted of a skilled workman and an extremely slender kit of tools. The tradition countenanced by historical students says that the beginnings of the handicraft system, with its specialised industry and trained workmanship, is due to such workmen, possessed of substantially nothing but their own persons, who escaped in one way and another from the bonds of the manorial system, or its equivalent, and found shelter on sufferance near some feudal protector or religious corporation that found some advantage in this novel arrangement.[133]