BUSINESS LIFE 40

The merchant and trading class, apart from the
nobility and the Church, formed the bulk of the
people of the nation. They were the solid part of
the nation, that paid taxes, that supplied clerks,
monks, and priests, that liberally supported the
Church, that kept the nation progressive and solvent
by commercial undertakings.

The professions, as we use the term to-day,
had not as yet attained sufficient importance for
them to form a distinct class division. There were a
few capable physicians, but generally the practice
of medicine was shared by the Church and the
barber-surgeons. Priests and officers of the Church
had the privilege peculiar to the Church by which
even a poor but intellectually capable man could
rise to high office and become the social equal of
nobles. Architecture was practised by master-
masons under the patronage of leading ecclesiastics
and nobles. Teaching was nearly all the work of the
Church. The lawyers, however, were already to be
distinguished from those who gained profit by deal-
ing in goods, for they made profit from transactions
on paper, from managing the interests qf others,
from trading in their own acute mental powers.

The wool trade was by far the most extensive
and flourishing trade of England in the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries. This was the trade
that made England great commercially. Wool was
England's raw material and the source of most of
her wealth. The numerous monasteries had huge
sheep-farms. Edward III. had encouraged foreign
clothworkers to settle in England (in York, as in
other places). The first York craftsmen to be
incorporated were the weavers, who received a
charter from Henry II., in return for which they paid
a tax to the King for the customs and liberties he