Comment by giraffe_lady

You couldn't in practical terms. The vast majority of premodern people were peasant farmers who owned no capital other than (possibly!) the land & livestock they farmed and the tools used to farm them. All this having almost no liquid value in the market such as it existed at the time. It was essentially impossible to pick up and start over somewhere else. That's aside from if you even had the right to do that; depending on time and place peasants were sometimes legally bound to their landlord.