17, prohibiting any one who did not possess twenty shillings a year in land from binding his sons apprentices to any trade.

They found already that the cities began to drain the country of the laborers and husbandmen: and did not foresee how much the increase of commerce would increase the value of their estates.

See further, Cotton, p.179.

The kings, to encourage the boroughs, granted them this privilege, that any villein who had lived a twelvemonth in any corporation, and had been of the guild, should be thenceforth regarded as free.
The relaxation of the feudal tenures, and an execution somewhat stricter of the public law, bestowed an independence on vassals which was unknown to their forefathers.

And even the peasants themselves, though later than other orders of the state, made their escape from those bonds of villenage or slavery in which they had formerly been retained.
It may appear strange that the progress of the arts, which seems, among the Greeks and Romans, to have daily increased the number of slaves, should, in later times, have proved so general a source of liberty; but this difference in the events proceeded from a great difference in the circumstances which attended those institutions.