This talk will explore the unstable opposition between franc and serf, focusing on the conceptual affordances of the latter. I seek to trace the contours of a cultural imaginary in which the serf looms large, exercising a frightening or uncanny power over its counterpart, the franc, whose status is never firmly or definitively acquired. Reading works by, for instance, Philippe de Vitry, Eustache Deschamps, and Pierre d’Ailly I will propose that the serf is one who engages in and benefits from unalienated labor and who experiences satisfaction (souffisance) with his material conditions. The notion of the serf has implications for thinking about both sovereignty and tyranny, and functions moreover to foreground the awareness of precarity which, I suggest, haunts the elite readership of the late 14th century.