There were also women who, though unapprenticed, had the right of working on their own account, and this, though never very common, was not so unusual as to arouse comment or surprise. These were mostly widows who carried on the work of their deceased husbands; others were the daughters of freemen who claimed as such to be admitted to the gild or company, basing their claims on rights of patrimony. This taking up of independent work by no means implied that the women had themselves served apprenticeship in youth; it seems merely to have meant the inheritance of the goodwill and privileges along with the craftsman's shop. In the Carpenters' Company Mary Wiltshire and Ann Callcutt took up their freedom by right of patrimony, and there are other instances. _The Development of Capitalistic Industry._--The growth and development of a capitalistic system of industry can be traced from the fifteenth century, and forms one of the most interesting and dramatic episodes in economic history. It is, however, not very easy to determine in what way the change influenced women's employment. The more prosperous among the weavers gradually developed into clothiers, employing many hands, but the majority tended to become mere wage-earners. A petition of weavers in 1539 stated that the clothiers had their own looms and weavers and fullers in their own houses, so that the master weavers were rendered destitute. "For the rich men the clothiers be concluded and agreed among themselves to hold and pay one price for weaving, which price is too little to sustain households upon, working night and day, holy-day and work-day, and many weavers are therefore reduced to the position of servants." The Petition of Suffolk Clothiers, 1575, says that the custom of their country is "to carry our wool out ... and put it to sundry spinners who have in their houses divers and sundry children and servants that do card and spin the same wool." In the north of England also large clothiers employing many hands were to be found as early as 1520. The subsequent development of the industry, Professor Unwin tells us, took place in a very marked degree in those districts which were exempt from the operation of the statutes forbidding clothiers to set up outside market-towns. In other parts of the country the struggle was acute. "The protection of industry from all competition was the first and last word of the crafts. To employers and dealers the monopoly of trade chiefly meant their own monopoly of production and sale, while the wage-earner's predominant anxiety was to keep surplus labour out of the craft, lest the regular worker might be deprived of his comfortable certainty of subsistence."