What part the poorer folk--menus gentz--smaller craftsfolk, and working-people played in the struggle for liberty is dark to us, but we may infer from the analogy of other towns,[134] and from the subsequent history of Coventry, that they had but little effective power under the new constitution. The growth of oligarchy[135] in towns is a matter of much debate. How early the few in Coventry engrossed the governing power of which the whole community was--in theory at least--the source, it is impossible in our present state of knowledge to determine. We have testimony as early as 1450 of the great influence of the leading crafts, mercers, and drapers. The evidence--though not always so clear as we could wish--points to a gradual absorption of the conduct of affairs during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a small official class. In the end this clique succeeded so effectually in freeing itself from every device framed to ensure some regard for the popular will, that the charter of 1621 vested all power--and incidentally considerable official emolument--in a close select body "entirely independent of the rest of the community."[136] How early the citizens became aware of the trend of affairs we know not, but it is, maybe, significant that that popular discontent began to manifest itself within a generation after the incorporation of the city. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the commonalty set order at defiance, reviled the mayor in the guild hall, and sought occasion to break out in riot and tumult, while under the veil of religious societies, industrial combinations--akin to the modern strike--formed again and again, and were with difficulty suppressed.