Your only realistic choice was to live in a city, which meant more often than not that you had to become a tenant of a landholder and pay whatever rent they charged on top of your taxes. And most landholders in cities? They tended to be the few freemen who did well for themselves, usually through becoming ruthless merchants and gathering enough capital to buy the land, or some of the more notorious fellows who exploited their fellow griffons to get to the positions of power they achieved.