By the seventeenth century, German rulers made laws intended to tie servants more firmly to their masters, and thus also to squelch those bogeys of the officialdom, vagrancy and itinerancy.35 Meanwhile, across the Channel, similar developments had been afoot for some time. Despite the guarantee of the English subject’s freedom to depart in the Magna Carta, a statute of 1381 forbade all but peers, notable merchants, and soldiers to leave the kingdom without a license.36 Early modern English rulers were especially concerned that uncontrolled departures would facilitate religious deviance.
