from thirty and forty shillings a Year, their Wages are increased of late to six, seven and eight pounds _per Annum_, and upwards ... an ordinary Tradesman cannot well keep one; but his Wife, who might be useful in his Shop, or Business, must do the Drudgery of Household Affairs; And all this, because our Servant Wenches are so puff’d up with Pride now-a-Days that they never think they go fine enough.”[300] Footnote 300: Defoe, _Everybody’s Business is No-Body’s Business_, p. 6, 1725. The position of a married woman in the tradesman class was far removed from that of her husband’s domestic servant. She was in very truth mistress of the household in that which related to trade as well as in domestic matters, and the more menial domestic duties were performed by young unmarried persons of either sex. To quote Defoe again, “it is but few Years ago, and in the Memory of many now living, that all the Apprentices of the Shopkeepers and Warehouse-keepers ... submitted to the most servile Employments of the Families in which they serv’d; such as the _young Gentry_, their Successors in the same Station, scorn so much as the Name of now; such as _cleaning_ their Masters’ Shoes, bringing _Water_ into the Houses from _the Conduits_ in the Street, which they carried on their Shoulders in long Vessels call’d Tankards; also waiting at Table, ... but their Masters are oblig’d to keep Porters or Footmen to wait upon the apprentices.”[301] Footnote 301: Defoe, _Behaviour of Servants_, p. 12, 1724. The rules of the early Gilds furnish abundant evidence that women then took an active part in their husbands’s trades; thus in 1297 the Craft of Fullers at Lincoln ordered that “none [of the craft] shall work at the wooden bar with a woman, unless with the wife of a master or her handmaid,”[302] and in 1372, when articles were drawn up for the Leather-sellers and Pouch-makers of London, and for Dyers serving those trades, the wives of the dyers of leather were sworn together with their husbands “to do their calling, and, to the best of their power, faithfully to observe the things in the said petition contained; namely John Blakthorne, and Agnes, his wife; John Whitynge, and Lucy, his wife; and Richard Westone, dier, and Katherine, his wife.”[303] Footnote 302: Smith (Toulmin), _English Gilds_, p. 180. Footnote 303: Riley (H. T.), _Memorials of London_, p. 365.