Elites understood very well the concepts of freedom and liberty, because they were busy denying it to all sorts of people in all sorts of gradations of depriving. And they had a lot of Greek and Roman texts, as well as all kinds of other literature, to help them understand it.
I think it’s probably true that the “many-headed hydra” of sailors and all the others they write about weer among the first in the west to begin to engage in some resistance to elites’ notions of the “proper place” for certain kinds of people.
