NUANCE, please! Blanket statements will get us nowhere.
Historically, people's freedom of movement has been very often restricted, for starters because human societies very often featured some sort of bondage (slavery, serfdom, forced labour etc).
And historically, civilisation exists as we know it because people had enough freedom of movement to travel back and forth and relocate from one place to another. And this option wasn't exclusively available to wealthy tourists and actual armies.
Fishermen, sailors, merchants ranging from filthy rich to simple tradesmen to peddlers, refugees, diasporas, people moving from the country to the city, or from city to city, or within an empire or across empires, people traveling miles and miles to relocate with their kin and kith who lived far away, seasonal workers who went where the harvest or other agricultural temp work was, sometimes hopping from country to country, craftsmen and artisans who went where the jobs were, journeymen on their Wanderjahre, nomadic or transhumant pastoralists herding their flocks over vast distances in steppes and mountains and savannahs, itinerant workers always on the road, ships and caravans and processions crossing seas, valleys, and deserts, roads stretching across continents, do you think all that was for the privileged few?
Sometimes there were restrictions in place (at borders, or more often as internal control of the population), and they often targeted the marginalised even when they were legally free persons and not bound to land or masters. And sometimes states would decide as a matter of policy against the relocation of this or that group (though more often they would force people to relocate, which was another thing altogether). I'm not denying any of that, and in fact I'll always be mad at all of that, because freedom of movement is SO IMPORTANT.
But let's not get crazy here. My beloved criminal and criminalised underworld got the short end of the stick as usual, but on the whole, people who were not bound to land or masters WERE free to move, and didn't get summarily blocked or killed at borders. At worst they got summarily taxed.
Oh, and whatever you do, don't extrapolate anything from the exceptionally weird Britain. (It's always bloody Britain scrambling people's preconceptions, "oooh, the Middle Ages were like this", no they weren't, that's just Essex, "oooh, chivalry was like that", no it wasn't, that's just one guy from Wiltshire who excelled in a bloodsport and married above his station, "oooh, Europe was like this", absolutely not, "oooh, the whole world was like this", ABSOLUTELY THE FUCK NOT.)
"we had these great studies showing that pre-modern Europeans moved very little, that travel was dangerous, and that most people married someone born less than a mile from their birthplace. But those early studies were mainly of the British Isles, and later, when we looked at other places, we realized people in the British Isles were super way more stationary than most Europeans. Continental DNA mixed all over the place throughout the Middle Ages, so it’s only in Britain that you can dig up a 3,000-year-old bog body and compare its DNA to the person who lives nearest to the bog and it’ll tag them as first or second cousins."
– Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (2025)
Exception: you can extrapolate from English anti-vagrancy laws to some extent – there it is, my beloved criminal and criminalised underworld. These laws emerged from very specific historical conditions (the Black Death and its aftermath), but they are equivalent with developments both in Europe (Fernard Braudel called it "The Great Imprisonment"), and much earlier in Iran, the Arab world, China etc, i.e. places where urban growth wasn't as delayed as in Western Europe.
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