[Illustration:  Fig. 203.—­Merchants or Tradesmen of the Fourteenth Century.—­Fac-simile of a Miniature in a Manuscript of the Library at Brussels.]

There were associations of the same kind in most of the commercial towns situated on the banks of rivers and on the sea-coast, as, for example, at Rouen, Arles, Marseilles, Narbonne, Toulouse, Ratisbon, Augsburg, and Utrecht.  Sometimes neighbouring towns, such as the great manufacturing cities of Flanders, agreed together and entered into a leagued bond, which gave them greater power, and constituted an offensive and defensive compact (Fig. 204).  A typical example of this last institution is that of the commercial association of the Hanseatic Towns of Germany, which were grouped together to the number of eighty around their four capitals, viz., Lubeck, Cologne, Dantzic, and Brunswick.

[Illustration:  Fig. 204.—­Seal of the United Trades of Ghent (End of the Fifteenth Century).]

Although, as we have already seen, previous to the thirteenth century many of the corporations of artisans had been authorised by several of the kings of France to make special laws whereby they might govern themselves, it was really only from the reign of St. Louis that the first general measures of administration and police relating to these communities can be dated.  The King appointed Etienne Boileau, a rich bourgeois, provost of the capital in 1261, to set to work to establish order, wise administration, and “good faith” in the commerce of Paris.  To this end he ascertained from the verbal testimony of the senior members of each corporation the customs and usages of the various crafts, which for the most part up to that time had not been committed to writing.  He arranged and probably amended them in many ways, and thus composed the famous “Book of Trades,” which, as M. Depping, the able editor of this valuable compilation, first published in 1837, says, “has the advantage of being to a great extent the genuine production of the corporations themselves, and not a list of rules established and framed by the municipal or judicial authorities.”  From that time corporations gradually introduced themselves into the order of society.  The royal decrees in their favour were multiplied, and the regulations with regard to mechanical trades daily improved, not only in Paris and in the provinces, and also abroad, both in the south and in the north of Europe, especially in Italy, Germany, England, and the Low Countries (Figs. 205 to 213).

Etienne Boileau’s “Book of Trades” contained the rules of one hundred different trade associations.  It must be observed, however, that several of the most important trades, such as the butchers, tanners, glaziers, &c., were omitted, either because they neglected to be registered at the Chatelet, where the inquiry superintended by Boileau was made, or because some private interest induced them to keep aloof from this registration, which probably imposed some sort of fine and a tax upon them.  In the following century the number of trade associations considerably increased, and wonderfully so during the reigns of the last of the Valois and the first of the Bourbons.