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Usually, if a serf wanted to leave the manor, he could find a way to do so fairly easily.

We read of serfs buying their freedom. I have no doubt that this happened, but I would be surprised if it happened very often. This is not be cause serfs usually did not have enough money, but because serfs usually had less expensive ways to do things.

In some places, serfs were encouraged to leave manors by laws giving them refuge in communities a king wanted more heavily populated.

Other laws said that if a serf was missing from a manor for a year, he was regarded as free.

In some places, the lords of the manors did things to make the serfs leave of their own accord. This happened because the lords wanted to do such things as appropriate common land for their own use, and did not want to have to put up with the problems that would develop from the serfs.

The thing to remember was that the serf was tied to the land, not the lord. The manorial obligations were mutual, between the serf and his lord. The serf had a legal obligation not to move away, but the lord had a legal obligation to allow him to live on the manor. The serf lacked a level of freedom, but he had a guarantee of a job, a home, and a certain amount of protection in times of trouble or famine. When a serf moved away, it freed both the serf and the lord from those obligations.

There were times of trouble, when free men and women were glad to give up their freedom in order to gain the security of serfdom. And this was possibly the one thing the kept the serfs most firmly tied to their manors.

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14y ago

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