The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 had made it a criminal offence for any worker to combine with another to get an increased wage. This did not prevent the carpenters’ societies from meeting to corner the best and biggest jobs on the market as well as provide for unemployment and tool insurance.  In 1810, organised London bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers went on strike and obtained an increase from 28s to 30s.  By 1812, the carpenters in London alone had five separate societies representing 2500 men, both journeymen and masters.  A visiting craftsman from Nottinghamshire was impressed by one such carpenters’ society that had a fund of £20,000 and whose members were astounded to learn of the lack of combination in the provinces.  In 1824, when the Combination Acts were repealed, the carpenters were among the first to strike for higher wages.  When work stopped at Buckingham Palace under Nash, the Coldstream Guards were called out.  In 1827, the woodworkers were the first building trade to form a national union, the Friendly Society of Operative House Carpenters and Joiners of Great Britain.  By the 1840s there was a clear demarcation between honourable and dishonourable parts of the trade.  The most dishonourable work was that associated with low quality contracting that included the construction of speculative housing, public buildings, army barracks and churches.  Society carpenters were employed mostly at the construction of urban residential and commercial properties of the aristocracy and the new entrepreneurial middle class.  By the 1860s, urban unionised building workers in general had increased their wages by up to 50 per cent over those rates at the turn of the century.  Many carpenter trade unionists played leading roles in the general ‘new model unions’ in the latter part of the century.  Even before most carpenters were given the franchise to vote in 1867, many organized in societies such as the A.S.C.J. had played important roles in earlier Reform and Chartist movements.