Perhaps not 100 years ago, but during the post-Roman Empire times in Europe, there was a lot of decentralization and many people were left to live their lives without large and funded authorities to bother them, to a large degree 'authority' was just a local ethnic chief or a general or noble/land-owner. Evaluating our freedom from the perspective of how many and how powerful of authorities exist to force your compliance. How much choice do you have in compliance? In purely technical terms, there were many fewer authorities enforcing anything upon people's of the past just because governments had fewer resources in the past because the GDP of the people was smaller and less effective.