I made the mistake of watching "King Arthur" this weekend, for a laugh. OK- it's a decent action movie, and I'm as fond as the next man of watching Keira Knightly with bits of string over her threepenny bits, but (ye Gods) what a historical travesty it was.

Leaving aside the monstrous liberties it took with Dark Ages Britain, all the pro-British characters kept endlessly banging on about "freedom" and "free will" as their reason for living and fighting. My arse! I call this "Social History according to Doctors Bruckheimer and Gibson".

I would be amazed if there was much concept of "freedom" at all at that time. OK- there were social divisions between slaves and "free men", but ultimately everybody was somebody's ***** until you reached the big beardy bloke with the big sword at the top. They fought the Saxons because they'd be killed/robbed/bummed if they didn't. It was a philosophy strangely beautiful in its simple purity.

So did these Hollywood notions of "freedom" actually exist anywhere before the Age of Reason? Or even after it?

Yes and no. The ancient Greeks invented the concept IIRC and spread it around. But after Rome the concept was largely lost as freedom was no guarantee for safety. Of course some people like the Basques and Frisians managed to gain some considerable level of freedom before the Enlightenment, but such instances were largely isolated. The Feudal System clearly put people into their place, and in the Middle Ages any guarantee for safety or peace was more important than freedom or education.

That's the way I see it anyway.

I gather it was more of a concept than a reality even in Greece and Rome.

It depends what you mean by "freedom", doesn't it? From a philosophical point of view these issues were indeed debated in late antiquity, typically between the Platonists (who believed in free will) and the Stoics (who did not). It was interesting that the makers of this film tried to put the issue in the context of Pelagianism, since Pelagius did defend human freedom and responsibility against Augustine, who in his eyes denied these things. Laying aside the fact that Pelagius actually died some decades before the time when the film was set, however, they severely misrepresented his views: Pelagius was not some cheery liberal concerned with human freedom, but a rather morbid ascetic who was concerned with the responsibility to lead a perfect life, and who thought that anyone who failed to do that was going *down*. As an army officer who was responsible for ordering death, Arturius would certainly have failed, in Pelagius' eyes.

In England, I don't think the populace was really given any kind of "freedom" or power or anything until the Magna Carta, and that wasn't exactly a revolution to democracy.

Looking at ancient Greek politics it should perhaps be thought of as 'freedom for some and sod the rest'.
The really tricky bit is that the ancients had absolutely no time for ideas about general human 'equality'. Freedom as something reminiscent to what we think today they might get. Our ideas about equality? Never! Nietzsche analysed this rather well, siding with the ancients against the 'slave morality' of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Freedom was reserved for free male citizens of the polis — and mostly it meant that they were free to engage in competition between equals to decide who was on top of everyone else.
The system worked in a similar way between city-state as well. You compete in order to show you're an equal since failure to enter into competiton means admitting your subserviant status. There's no point in competing with women, slaves etc. since they are by definition un-equal and men have legal rights to dominate them. by force if need be.

I think it can be assumed that the ancient Celtic and Germanic nobility worked in the same way. Freedom applies to equals. It makes no sense talking about freedom for women, slaves, pesants etc. And without much of a government, freedom depends on the ability of clan/family/lineage to uphold it against all comers, at the tip of your swords if need be. The individual is always secondary to the collective.

It was the church that started the 'democratisation' of ideas about individual worth and freedom — individuals have souls worth saving and sex or social status doesn't matter, the church stopped slavery in the Germanic societies, the church assumed women to be rational creatures capable of making individual decisions (marriage according to canonical law is a 'consortium', i.e. a gamble, a throw of the dice ('con sors'=with dice) by two rational individuals).
There was an almighty conflict between Germanic, Roman and Canonical law all over Western Europe, and it led to the rise of the legal specialist, the lawyer (the 13th c. is sometimes called 'the century of the lawyer'), to reconcile these competing systems.

The Germanic system was a mixture of democracy and feudalism. For once a free man, and since the numbers of slaves were relative low most men were free, could elect and be elected. The chieftain was a kind of elected dictator, however in certain situations, like big decisions, he had to obey the orders of the parliament, the so called Thing (speak: Ting). So the Germanic tribes had a kind of democracy and freedom which perhaps meet modern standards better than the Greek ones in which for instance liberated slaves had (IIRC) not the rights to elect or be elected. That was in contrast to the Germanic tribes.
The need for freedom was very strong within the Germanic tribes. That was one basic reason for the fights the Germans had with the Romans for centuries. However slavery was still existing and the rights of women were also not very high.
The first true democracy however in a big power was Germany in 1918. Before that women were not allowed to elect. Even the US (1920) and Britain (1928) were behind. France, Italy and Belgium introduced this right finally in 1946! (The first states with that right were New Zealand 1893, Australia 1902 and Finnland 1906).

Adler

So the Germanic tribes had a kind of democracy and freedom which perhaps meet modern standards better than the Greek ones in which for instance liberated slaves had (IIRC) not the rights to elect or be elected. I don't know about Greek freed slaves, besides, there were so many city-states that the details probably differed widely depending on the city. However, I do know something about Roman freedmen.

It was the exceptional feature of Rome that almost all slaves freed by Roman owners automatically received not only freedom but also Roman citizenship. As citizens, needing a Roman name for the first time, freedmen customarily took the nomen of their former owner, who now became their patronus. A precedent was set under the Claudian Civil Service where freedmen were used as civil servants in the Roman bureaucracy. In addition, Claudius a passed law that if any slave owner abandoned their sick slave and he recovered he became a freedman.

Slaves were able to gain their freedom various ways. Some were freed in the wills (and therefore at the death) of their owners, some owners bought their slaves' freedom themselves, and other slaves bought themselves from their owners. A slave was able to buy his own freedom through his peculium, or personal posessions.

But what do you mean by "freedom" in the first place? Surely it means more than simply whether you are a slave or not. I notice some people contrasting "freedom" with "feudalism". But I suspect that people in the Middle Ages would have seen feudalism as protecting their freedoms, because it kept society stable and provided for the raising of armies to protect their lives. I think that people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages would have thought of "freedom" in an Augustinian way as "freedom from", that is, not suffering hunger, deprivation, war and sin. The idea that "freedom" means "freedom to", that is, the freedom to do what you want, go where you like, etc, is a modern sort of idea. Being "put in your place" was, to the medieval mind, precisely how one became free. Think of Pseudo-Dionysius' divine and ecclesiastical hierarchies, in which it is through accepting your place on the hierarchy and being good at it that you draw close to God (not by trying to work your way up the hierarchy). At least, that's how I see it. No doubt others will know more on the matter...