While true, it was next to impossible to keep track of people - there were no borders or division.
If a lord was offering a better deal (or their old Lord was too despotic), serfs could and would pack up and leave and there wasn’t much their old lord could do about it.
The other part of people moving to the towns was inventions of new tools such as better looms and improvements in metallurgy to make more precise tools.
You might be surprised! Records-keeping in the high medieval period, when feudalism is most ‘defined’, can be frighteningly rigorous, and runaway serfs were regularly retrieved even at some distance from their land.
All the same, in support of your argument, there’s a reason why the “year-and-a-day” was a common legal standard for shedding serfdom by residence in a city - after a certain amount of time lapses, it does become increasingly difficult for institutions with pre-modern communications and government institutions to keep trying to search for and punish folk for running off - and increasingly inconvenient to have some local lord’s thugs nosing around one’s employees!
While true, it was next to impossible to keep track of people - there were no borders or division.
If a lord was offering a better deal (or their old Lord was too despotic), serfs could and would pack up and leave and there wasn’t much their old lord could do about it.
The other part of people moving to the towns was inventions of new tools such as better looms and improvements in metallurgy to make more precise tools.
You might be surprised! Records-keeping in the high medieval period, when feudalism is most ‘defined’, can be frighteningly rigorous, and runaway serfs were regularly retrieved even at some distance from their land.
All the same, in support of your argument, there’s a reason why the “year-and-a-day” was a common legal standard for shedding serfdom by residence in a city - after a certain amount of time lapses, it does become increasingly difficult for institutions with pre-modern communications and government institutions to keep trying to search for and punish folk for running off - and increasingly inconvenient to have some local lord’s thugs nosing around one’s employees!
You’re right, as the medieval period progressed a lot changed. Those 1000 years were very different across space as well as time.
The conversation has also not been distinct with serf vs. peasant, which is an important distinction in conversations like this.
Thank you for the extra details and pointing out there Lords did still work to retrieve serfs.