294 THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
The possession of these advantages by the towns must con-
stantly be borne in mind when we are considering the various
agencies which slowly brought about the emancipation of the
English countryside. Every one of these towns, with its charters
and privileges, was a constant challenge: to the serf, they
reminded him of the difference between his manorial tenure and
that of his more fortunate brother of the borough; to the lord,
they were an ever-present threat to his autocracy. Therefore, in
order to retain his peasants on the manor, he was often obliged to
allow their conditions to approximate to those of the nearby
borough.
But when we have discussed the long struggle waged by most
boroughs for their freedom, and their attraction to the serfs, as
places of refuge, once they had gained this freedom, we are only
at the outset of our task. It is obvious that this slow winning of
self-government represents, in effect, the gradual acquisition of
personal freedom for the burgesses. Men who owe merchet, and
are forced to render agricultural services, or to give heriots, are
clearly sprung from the unfree population of the villages. But
we may go further than this, and say that in many cases these
burgesses of the thirteenth century were the villeins of the
twelfth. Maidand has taught us that the medieval burgher was a
"rustic", and that the investigators of the early history of towns
"will have fields and pastures on their hands". And so con-
versely. If we have any doubt of this we may see the serf trans-
formed into a freeholding burgess by a stroke of the pen. On
St Gregory's Day, in 1251, the Earl of Derby founded his borough
of Higham Ferrers. No less than 92 men, whose names are all
recited in the charter, therefore rose in the morning as serfs, and
by evening were free men," so that from them and their families
(sequela), with all their lands and tenements and chattels, the
Earl and his heirs could not from henceforth have or exact any
servitude from them or from their issue ".1 Many of the boroughs
founded in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries (especially
1 Ballard, op. tit. n, 47, 142; cf. Latin text in E.H.R. vn, 290, and in-
spescmus of charter in Col. Charter Rolls, I, 372. The Rev. W. J. H. Kerr, who
has an intimate knowledge of the H.F. documents, tells me that there were 92
names in the original and that "it is obvious from the small aggregate of land
held by them that they were the very lowest type of bondmen". By 1314
there were 101 burgages and they held in all only 30 J acres.