FREE LABOUR AND CONTRACT. 5Q5 



internal government went semi-militant external obligations. 

 On gild-members or burgesses in fortified places, devolved 

 the building, maintaining, and defending of the walls ; and 

 different towers were manned by different crafts. -These 

 nominally free townsmen were subject to forced labour not 

 only for purposes of defence but for purposes of improve 

 ment a municipal corvee. And besides having occasional 

 ly to fight outer enemies foreign on the coast and native in 

 the interior they had to fight inner enemies, bearing arms 

 at their own expense. 



Thus in the days when serfs sought refuge in towns, 

 though the regime of contract had qualified the regime of 

 status more in them than in the country, yet the qualification 

 was really not great. 



813. Further progress towards free labour was after 

 wards achieved by a second escape from coercion. Men 

 from the country had sought liberty in the towns and now 

 men from the towns fled for liberty into the country. A 

 petition from Southampton in 1376, quoted by Mrs. Green, 

 complains that &quot; half the people had deserted their homes 

 to escape the intolerable burdens thrown on them, and the 

 rest were going. 7 Then beyond the exodus thus prompted, 

 there was another prompted by desire to avoid gild-control. 

 Many artisans were obliged to take oath that after appren 

 ticeship ended they would not set up for themselves without 

 license from the gild. To avoid restraint by residence with 

 masters, they sought to live apart, and in London caused a 

 &quot; scandal &quot; by doing so; just as serfs caused a scandal by 

 escaping from their lords. Thus journeymen were prompted 

 to begin business outside the range of gild-authority. They 

 &quot; set up shops in suburbs or villages/ and some carried their 

 trades to distant towns not under corporate control, such as 

 Birmingham and Manchester. Both processes added to the 

 ranks of the free workers workers not nominally free only 

 but actually free. 



