There was one point, however, on which all employers were agreed, and that was on the advisability of checking unions and combinations among their workmen for the purpose of obtaining better wages. The journeymen's, or, as they were called, "yeomen's" guilds, which seem to have been fairly universal at the close of the fourteenth and during the fifteenth century, appear in Coventry with great frequency and persistence. Three several times the corporation obtained patents against the formation of guilds other than those already existing in the city.[494] The patent for the suppression of the first of these combinations that comes before our notice, the fraternity of S. Anne, is addressed to the mayor and bailiffs, in 1406, and relates how it had come to the ears of the government that a certain number of youths, serving men of the tailors and other artificers working by the day called journeymen, gathered together in the priory, or the houses of the friars, and formed a fraternity called the fraternity of S. Anne, to the end that each might maintain the other in their quarrels. This action was likely, in the opinion of those in authority, to breed dissensions in the city, do great harm to the societies founded of old time, namely, the Trinity and Corpus Christi guilds, and hence bring final destruction upon the townsfolk. The meetings were declared unlawful, and all who persisted in assembling to hold them after the patent had been openly proclaimed were to be arrested, and their names certified to the King, who would have them punished according to their deserts.[495] But, in spite of this warning, the journeymen did not give up the conflict, for the fraternity had again to be crushed in the first year of Henry V.,[496] only to reappear in 1425 under the title of the guild of S. George.