Caste and Race in India c10.108

c10.108

Though the crafts, the practice of which was from very early times hedged in by many restrictions, had become more or less hereditary, the learned professions and commerce had begun to offer fresh fields for the intelligent youths. "The church had always provided clever youths with an opportunity of rising in the world." Toward the end of the fourteenth and throughout the following century, it seems, the clergy were largely recruited from the middle classes and even from serfs, the economic changes rendering the profession less attractive to the members of the upper classes. In the fifteenth century the legal profession also opened up possibilities of a brilliant career.³