CHAPTER XI
THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
IT is a commonplace of historians that the greater half of the
people of England were unfree during the three centuries
before the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Yet any picture of
medieval England would be false which failed to take account of
the constant efforts to obtain freedom which were being made
throughout this period. Everywhere men were at work seeking
to break the bonds which tied them to the land, although unfortu-
nately the evidence of their efforts is curiously thin and sporadic.
Even in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it is difficult to
produce a catena of unimpeachable documents to support what
we know to have happened: that the year 1350 saw England with
more than half its population serfs, while the year 1600 saw
England without a single serf left in the realm. We can see
several large-scale causes for this—the scarcity of labour after
1349; the new system of stock and land leases: the compelling
attraction of the towns: the growing belief that money rents were
more advantageous to the lord than the ancient feudal services—
but the documentary evidence surviving and available so far is
comparatively small. And in the earlier centuries it is even
smaller, but it is sufficient to encourage us to examine this weak
spot in the great structure of the manorial system. What were
the possibilities before a determined man of the thirteenth or
fourteenth century who wished to free himself of the ties holding
him to the soil where he was born? Before we discuss this we
must emphasise the one tremendous fact which must ever have
been in tie mind of the would-be runaway, and must have kept
thousands on the manors. To leave "the villein nest" meant
adventuring into the unknown without more than he could carry
on his back.
For the majority of them livelihood and training were in-
extricably linked up with their fields, their flocks, and the little
cot and close about it which they called home. None of these
could they take with them: asinglemanmightthinkthe riskworth