288 THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
majority of peasants, who were only aware in the vaguest way
that, afar off in London, or may be at some distant city, the
King's justices dealt with problems arising from the plaints of
men so insignificant as themselves.
No very explicit grounds for desiring freedom are generally
given in manumission charters, and none are necessary, for it is
obvious that all men knew what a difference there was between
the free and the servile state in innumerable ways. Most freed
men had no desire to leave their village: they remained peasants,
and continued to work on their fields, but no longer burdened
with rents and services as before. They longed to call their cots
their own, and to do what they would in their own way, and
especially no longer to hear the hated epithet "rustic" or "serf",
hurled at them from time to time. A few exceptions to this
general rule must be noted, however, in which an external
motive encouraged a man to seek his freedom. No medieval
family was so ignorant as not to realise the power and prestige
of the Church, and few did not know at first hand that the
Church offered a safe honourable career to those who were her
servants. Even the poorest village priest was high above his
peasant parishioners in status; and, in general, on level terms
with the best of them in worldly goods. Hence the Church and
its service were constantly absorbing recruits from the villages;
and, as the centuries wore on, the call became more and more
insistent. But both Canon Law and civil law demanded that all
who would take orders should be free of any defect of birth, and
hence it was necessary for serfs who wished their sons to be-
come clerics to gain their freedom.1 "The villain redeems his
son from the Lord, and on each side covetousness fights and
wins when freedom is confirmed on freedom's foe", writes
Walter Map bitterly as he observes this going on about him,*
and finds it matter for complaint that serfs were trying to educate
their "ignoble and degenerate offspring". But he was powerless
to stop this movement which continued to the end of the Middle
Ages. Langland, nearly two centuries later than Map, voices the
same grievance:
1 Gratian, Decretim, pars i, distinctio liv; Const, of Clarendon, § 16; and
see below.
1 De Nugis Curialtum (ed. M. R. James), 7.