In London, defaulting on a loan could result in imprisonment in a Counter. In the countryside, failure to repay on the appointed day could mean foreclosure. Indebted landowners, fearful of forfeiture, had good reason to detest their mortgage-holders. Then too, creditors often held mortgagors in no less contempt. While an improvident estate manager represented an easy mark, those who attempted to wriggle free of encumbrances, to convey property to third parties, or to appeal to Chancery, sharpened the animus of their mortgagees. The mortgage-holder had his (and it was generally his) own cause for, if not fear, then strain, since he himself was juggling borrowed money, trying to keep up with a rapid turnover of funds, defending himself in court, and enduring the opprobrium that inevitably was felt for a creditor. Nevertheless, merchants, moneylenders, and citizens succeeded or failed not in opposition to landowners but through them, just as landowners – powerful nobility in particular – were rarely the enemy of moneymen so much as they were their willing sponsors. Putative borders were regularly crossed when merchants' daughters and merchants themselves married into gentry families and gentry daughters into merchant families; when nobles depended upon citizens to manage their customs farms and citizens built their own vast landed estates; when established peers underwrote the advance into government office of new men and were in turn serviced by these clients; and when landowners colluded with citizens in order more successfully to counter other landowner–merchant combinations with which they were in competition.