Parallel with the decline of the feudal system is the rapid growth of towns. Women did not take a conspicuous part in the work carried on in the towns, but that they were not excluded from the industries is apparent when we find them in the trade guilds as early as the fifteenth century. “Labor disputes arose over the questions of wages and piece-work, of holidays, of the employment of women and cheap workers.”[27] Before the great pestilence of 1348, women were employed as agricultural laborers. Their wages were invariably lower than the wages of men. This difference in wages can be partially accounted for on the ground that there existed a marked difference in the nature of their work. Women as farm hands were employed in “dibbling beans, in weeding corn, in making hay, in assisting the sheep-shearers and washing the sheep, in filling the muck carts with manure, and in spreading it upon the lands, in shearing corn, but especially in reaping stubble after the ears of corn had been cut off by the shearers, in binding and stacking sheaves, in thatching ricks and houses, in watching in the fields to prevent cattle straying into the corn, or armed with a sling, in scaring birds from the seed of ripening corn, and in similar occupations. When these failed, there were the winding and spinning of wool ‘to stop a gap.’ These were the employments not only of the laborers’ wives; the wife and daughters of the farmer took their part in all farm works with other women, and worked side by side with their husbands and fathers. After the ‘black death’, women shared for a time in the general rise of wages, and were seldom paid less than two-pence for a day’s work, a sum not unfrequently paid a woman for her daily work in the fields before the time of the great pestilence. This amount of wages, however, was diminished by one of the statutes of labourers, which required that every woman not having a craft, nor possessing property of her own, should work on a farm equally with a man, and be subjected to the same regulations as to wages as her husband and brothers, and like them should not leave the manor or district in which she usually lived to seek work elsewhere.”[28] In the early stages of industry “wool and silk were woven and spun in scattered villages by families who eked out their subsistence by agriculture.”[29]