304 THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
escape from one evil to others that they knew not of? Instead of
the certain dues and services to be rendered to the manorial lord
they had to face the uncertainties of the changing economic
conditions, and the whims and fancies of their new master in the
town. Their work was sporadic, seasonal, at the will of their
employer—it is difficult to see how many of the peasants found
the exchange worth while. And we must remember that the
peculiar organisation of town life did not help them. Around
them they saw the great ones of the town: the merchant gild,
which in many places had assumed control of the town-govern-
ment, and the craft gilds, which controlled almost every worth-
while trade in the borough. "If ordinary inhabitants were'
allowed to buy and sell food or the bare necessities of life, all
profitable business was reserved as the monopoly of the full
citizen." And, beside the full citizen, various privileged classes
may be discerned in the towns: the tenants and dependents of
bishop, or abbot, or of a lord, who lived within the liberties of the
borough and had limited trading rights; the "foreigners" who
lived without the walls, but who were allowed within it for trade
"according to the town's discretion and convenience". And so
on down by subtle gradations till we reach our men from the
countryside—the non-burgesses—without rights, without cham-
pions, without traditions. Yet, though many of them must often
have longed for their fields and the comfort which comes from
"use and wont", and often, at the end of a long arduous day spent
at wretched and unremunerative toil, must have wondered what
the end of it all was to be: even so, it was a necessary phase in the
history of emancipation. Though John-atte-Grene himself was
little better off as a free man in the town of Leicester than his
father had been as a serf of the Earl, yet a generation or two
hence saw John Green an alderman of the city and one of the
controllers of his craft. His father, like a multitude of other
fugitives in the towns, may indeed have "bought his blood" at a
heavy price, but future generations were to bless him for it.
Little wonder then that when all other methods failed him
the peasant's thoughts turned to the possibilities of flight. Indeed,
in some ways, the prospects in a nearby town or at a distance
often must have seemed so rosy that we must ask ourselves:
"What, then, kept the majority of the peasant population fixed to