By the sixteenth century, Europe was experiencing hitherto unheard of levels of mobility by the newly landless and all those associated with trade. The city was the one place where an increased level of mobility was acceptable. The rise of mercantile capitalism necessitated the mobility associated with trade. This commercial mobility gradually loosened the rootedness of feudal society as guilds emerged to protect commercial interests. For the first time there were associations made between freedom, mobility, and city life. “The city air makes men free” the saying went, and hand in hand with this freedom went mobility. A “new freedom of movement” Mumford wrote, “that sprang up with corporate liberties claimed by the medieval town itself.”34 Alongside this, by the late sixteenth century, English feudal order was being rapidly undone as the population grew and agriculture became more efficient, needing less bodily labor and creating new kinds of relationships to the land. Man people became disconnected from the kind of order that held life together for centuries. People were homeless and economically marginal. They were without place. These new “masterless men” were considered extremely threatening because they did not appear to be part of any recognizable form of order. Their mobility made them illegible. These were the new vagabonds—“people too listless and too numerous to be tamed and domesticated by the customary method of familiarization or incorporation.”35 Whereas medieval society had operated on the basis that every member of a community was responsible for every other (a system known as frankpledge) these new mobile strangers made such a system inoperable.