'Popular errors are very difficult to deal with effectually. One of the most persistent is that which confounds the city guilds with the city companies. Here two widely different things are inextricably confused, and that, too, not in mere catchpenny popular books, but in books pretending to more or less authority. In the common run of London histories, guild means company, and company means guild.... To begin with, there are now no guilds in London. By an Act passed in 1557 all religious guilds were abolished and all guildable property was confiscated. But as there were no guilds not religious, and as the property of guilds was held in trust to provide burials, masses, and sometimes chantries for deceased members, the guilds and their land, and their money and their priestly vestments, and their illuminated manuscripts, all ceased to exist absolutely; and not only so, but it became penal to revive them. A city company which calls itself a guild renders itself liable to forfeiture--a penalty which would, of course, be rather difficult to enforce.'[320] There are two statements here which may be challenged--one that all gilds were religious, and the other that all gilds were abolished by Act of Parliament. Certainly the gilds which were not instituted for purposes of trade protection have often been styled religious, but Mr. Toulmin Smith preferred to class them as social gilds, and I think wisely. As already stated, their objects were entirely practical and social. Mr. Toulmin Smith writes: 'The gilds were lay bodies, and existed for lay purposes, and the better to enable those who belonged to them rightly and understandingly to fulfil their neighbourly duties as freemen in a free state.' Religious duties were performed, but these were only incidental to the life of the time, and consisted mostly of services connected with the serious occasions in the life of laymen, which were general in the periods that have been styled 'ages of faith.' As to the second point, a reference to the Statute 1 Edw. VI. cap. 14, will show us that the craft gilds are exempted from its operation. In the _Statutes of the Realm_ one of the side-notes to the 'Act whereby certain chantries, colleges, free chapells, and the possessions of the same, be given to the King's Majesty,' runs as follows: 'All brotherhoods or guilds and their possessions, except companies of trade vested in the King.' The text is 'other then suche corporations, guyldes, fraternities, companyes and felowshippes of misteryes or craftes.' I think we must allow that the terms of this Act strongly corroborate the general belief that the old craft gilds and the later companies were so closely connected as to be practically the same. Having dealt with the general question of gilds, we can now pass on to consider the influence of the different trades upon London life.