290 THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
to this permission. On the Halesowen manor two men are dis-
trained because their sons have gone ad scholas clericales without
first getting leave,1 and year by year the Court at Ingoldmells
ordered a certain Peter, son of Reginald Saffron, to be attached
because he was ordained without license of the lord.2 In 1330
the Archbishop of Canterbury directs his bailiff to take security
for the payment of a fine from two bondmen who had caused
their sons to receive Holy Orders; and a fewyears later he warns
his Chancellor that it is Unlawful to ordain men of servile con-
dition without the consent of their lords.3 These instances from
a crowd of similar records will serve sufficiently to show the im-
portance attached to this method of gaining freedom. The lawyers,
however, insisted that, in order to retain this freedom the reci-
pient must continue to live as a cleric: if he relapsed into secular
life his serfdom revived.4 But this was little more than an ex-
pression of legal opinion, and must have happened extremely
rarely.
So too with knighthood. There was nothing to prevent a serf
becoming a knight according to the lawyer's theory, however rare
it was in practice; but, should he be degraded, he at once re-
verted to his servile state. When we remember, however, the
disdain with which the chivalric romances look down upon the
peasant, it is hard to believe that many rose from the ranks of the
serfs to become knights. It is a pleasing fancy: The Squire of
Low Degree and the romance of Guy of Warwick remind us of its
attractiveness as legend; but, even here, are we dealing with any-
thing more degraded than impoverished gentlemen, or at very
least with free men? No doubt a generation or two made all the
difference; Sir William Paston, one of the King's justices in the
early fifteenth century, was accused by the "unfriendly hand"
1 Hales Rolls, 193, 305. "Scholas clericales", i.e. a grammar School, at
lowest, with its tonsure. No doubt, if there were a parish school, it was not
prohibited.
2 Ingoldmdls Rolls, 34, 35, 40.
8 Lit. Cant. (R.S.), in, 389; i, 307. Similarly we have records of arrange-
ments being entered into by religious houses not to receive recruits without
the lord's leave; and, if this should be done unwittingly, they agree to expel
the postulant so long as his period of probation is not yet ended. See Bed.
Hist. Rec. Soc. xin, No. 340.
* Bracton,ff. 5,1906; Britton, I, 200,208; Fleta, in; Pollock and Maitland,
1,429-