retr0kitty

Once upon a time you had Barons. They ran baronies. Most people were serfs. To be an ordinary person was to be a serf. There were "Freemen",but they were a special privileged class*. It was more or less slavery, as serfs Belonged to the local Baron. Serfs were given the right to farm a particular bit of land to feed themselves and earn enough money to live, but they could only tend that land after they had completed their work for the Baron. If you were a serf you were not allowed to leave your Baron's Land You were his. Emigration to the next Barony was Illegal because you were property Punishments for "Vagrancy" were harsh. Generally outside of big towns where you would find a higher concentration of freemen outsiders even from the next town over were treated with suspicion. The Barons liked this because it meant they could treat their workers as badly as they liked and nobody could do anything about it. Abuse of all kinds including sexual was common.

Eventually there was a plague. The Number of serfs was more than decimated. There was a major labour shortage and serfs were worked even harder by the worse barons and so vast numbers of them broke the law and ran off to less bad Barons who also needed the labour, but offered better conditions. Punishing the vagrants became impractical because they the Barons of the lands they had run to were happy to have them and in no mood to take people out of the workforce for punishment so the laws on vagrancy collapsed and Vagrancy was made legal.

Later in the 16th century the first in an attempt to get ordinary working people to support the protestant throne against those who would have us dragged back under catholic control Queen Elizabeth I Banded serfdom and slavery across England and declared all English people to be free.

Over the centuries that followed Democracy and freedom of movement flourished not just across the UK but across Europe and with that the power of the elites to abuse their workers with impunity diminished.

This carried on until this carried on in the UK until it reached it's peek in the early 21st century. Now things are going backwards. Peoples freedom of movement is being wound back, the fear of strangers is returning and the power of a new kind of oligarchic baron is rising threatening both democracy and the rights of ordinary people to not be abused for fun and profit.

*That's why to this day people get awarded the freedom of this or that place