278 THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
while—the married man was forced to hesitate, and often to
draw back. So that the possibilities of freedom limit themselves
as soon as the serf begins to think out their consequences. But
besides absolute freedom there were states of comparative free-
dom which also held their attractions, and some of these were
more easily within his reach. At the moment we may compre-
hensively group together all the various alleviations of his con-
dition that the serf might obtain—commutation of works and
personal services for money rents, freedom from the payments
of such servile dues as tallage and merchet, and so on—and say
that the serf moved a step towards a freer condition by getting
quit of these, although he still remained a serf. To become a free
man was more difficult: the safe and straightforward way was to
win a manumission from his servile state from his lord. Then
(more adventurous) was the temptation to run to the nearest
town, hoping to win shelter within its walls; and, if fortune were
kind, complete freedom would follow in due course. Lastly,
there was the bold, hazardous, adventure of flight without definite
objective, and with o nly a hope of better things to sustain him. In
all these various ways the serf was attempting to gain his free-
dom. It will be our object in the following pages to see how this
all worked out in practice; and, more difficult, to see how it
all appeared to the serf.
We have already seen that by the thirteenth century a great
many lords felt it necessary to have prepared elaborate extents or
surveys of their lands and of their tenants, and from then on-
wards such documents give us invaluable evidence of the rela-
tion between lord and tenant. And among other things they
allow us to watch the first efforts on the part of the unfree to
shake off their servile obligations—be they of recent creation or
of long standing—obligations which were now part of their daily
being. Naturally, among the earliest ways of alleviating matters,
men conceived the idea of flight. What this involved will be
considered later.
At the moment all that is necessary is to make clear the mani-
fold temptations which the serf saw attracting him in the haze of
distance. We are not now concerned with what actually awaited
him in the world, so much as with trying to ascertain how he was
lured away to it. To a proportion of the workers on the manor