History of the Reformation - Thomas M. Lindsay

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But the secret leaked out before the date planned for the general rising; and the revolt was mercilessly stamped out (1512–1513). Its leader escaped with the Bundschuh banner wound round his body under his clothes. In four years he was back again at his work (1517). In a very short time his agents, the “gild” of beggars, wandering minstrels, poor priests, pilgrims to local shrines, pardon-sellers, begging friars, and even lepers, had leagued the peasantry and the poorer artisans in the towns in one vast conspiracy which permeated the entire district between the Vosges and the Black Forest, including the whole of Baden and Elsass. The plot was again betrayed before the plans of the leaders were matured, and the partial risings were easily put down; but when the authorities set themselves to make careful investigations, they were aghast at the extent of the movement. The peasants of the country districts and the populace of the towns had been bound together to avenge common wrongs. The means of secret communication had been furnished by country innkeepers, old landsknechts, pedlars, parish priests, as well as by the vagrants above mentioned; and the names of some of the subordinate leaders—“long” John, “crooked” Peter, “old” Kuntz—show the classes from which they were drawn. It was discovered that the populace of Weisenburg had come to an agreement with the people of Hagenau (both towns were in Elsass) to slay the civic councillors and judges and all the inhabitants of noble descent, to refuse payment of all imperial and ecclesiastical dues, and that the Swiss had promised to come to their assistance.

      One might almost say that between the years 1503 and 1517 the social revolution was permanently established in the southern districts of the Empire, from Elsass in the west to Carinthia and the Steiermarck in the east. It is needless to describe the risings in detail. They were not purely peasant rebellions, for the townspeople were almost always involved; but they all displayed that mingling of communist ideas and religious enthusiasm of which the Bundschuh banner had become the emblem, and which may be traced back to the movement under Hans Böhm as its German source, and perhaps to the earlier propaganda of the Hussite revolutionaries or Taborites. The later decades of the fifteenth and the earlier years of the sixteenth century were a time of permanent social unrest.

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      If we ask why it was that the peasants, whose lot, according to the information given in the Weisthümer, could not have been such a very hard one, were so ready to rise in rebellion during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the answer seems to be that there must have been a growing change in their circumstances. Some chroniclers have described the condition of the peasants in the end of the fifteenth and in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and they always dwell upon their misery. John Böhm, who wrote in the beginning of the sixteenth century, says that “their lot was hard and pitiable,” and calls them “slaves.”63 Sebastian Frank (1534), Sebastian Munster (1546), H. Pantaleone (1570), an Italian who wrote a description of Germany, all agree with Böhm. Frank adds that the peasants hate every kind of cleric, good or bad, and that their speech is full of gibes against priests and monks; while Pantaleone observes that many skilled workmen, artisans, artists, and men of learning have sprung from this despised peasant class. There must have been a great change for the worse in the condition of the poorer dwellers both in town and in country.

      So far as the townsmen are concerned, nothing need be added to what has already been said; but the causes of the growing depression of the peasantry were more complicated. The universal testimony of contemporaries is that the gradual introduction of Roman law brought the greatest change, by placing a means of universal oppression in the hands of the over-lords. There is no need to suppose that the lawyers who introduced the new jurisprudence meant to use it to degrade and oppress the peasant class. A slight study of the Weisthümer shows how complicated and varied was this consuetudinary law which regulated the relations between peasant and over-lord. It was natural, when great estates grew to be principalities, whether lay or clerical, that the over-lords should seek for some principle of codification or reduction to uniformity. It had been the custom for centuries to attempt to simplify the ruder and involved German codes by bringing them into harmony with the principles of Roman law, and this idea had received a powerful impetus from the Renaissance movement. But when the bewildering multiplicity of customary usages which had governed the relations of cultivators to over-lords was simplified according to the ideas of Roman law, the result was in the highest degree dangerous to the free peasantry of Germany. The conception of strict individual proprietorship tended to displace the indefinite conception of communal proprietorship, and the peasants could only appear in the guise of tenants on long leases, or serfs who might have some personal rights but no rights of property, or slaves who had no rights at all. The new jurisprudence began by attacking the common lands, pastures, and forests. The passion for the chase, which became the more engrossing as the right to wage private war grew more and more dangerous, led to the nobles insisting on the individual title to all forest lands, and to the publication of such forest laws as we find made in Würtemberg, where anyone found trespassing with gun or cross-bow was liable to lose one eye. The attempt to reduce a free peasantry in possession of communal property to tenants on long lease, then to serfs, and, lastly, to slaves, may be seen in the seventy years' struggle between the Abbots of Kempten and their peasants. These spiritual lords carried on the contest with every kind of force and chicanery they could command. They enlarged illegally the jurisdiction of their spiritual courts; they prevented the poor people who opposed them from coming to the Lord's Table; they actually falsified their title-deeds, inserting provisions which were not originally contained in them.

      The case of the Kempten lands was, no doubt, an extreme one, though it could be matched by others. But the point to be noticed is the immense opportunities for oppression which were placed in the hands of the over-lords by the new jurisprudence, and the temptation to make use of them when their interests seemed to require it, or when their peasantry began to grow refractory or became too prosperous. The economic changes which were at work throughout the fifteenth century gave occasion for the use of the powers which the new jurisdiction had placed at the disposal of landlords. The economic revolution from the first impoverished the nobles of Germany; while, in its beginnings and until after the great rise in prices, it rather helped the peasantry. They had a better market for their produce, and they so profited by it that the burghers spoke of denying them the right of free markets, on the ground that they had begun to usurp the place of the merchants and were trafficking in gold by lending money on interest. The competition in luxurious dress and living, which the impoverished nobles carried on with the rich burghers, made the former still poorer and more reckless. We read of a noble lady in Swabia who, rather than be outshone at a tournament, sold a village and all her rights over it in order to buy a blue velvet dress. The nobles, becoming poorer and poorer, saw their own peasants making money to such an extent that they were, comparatively speaking, much better off than themselves, so that in Westphalia it was said that a peasant could get credit more easily than five nobles.

      Moreover, the peasants did not appear to be as submissive to their lords as they once had been. Nor was it to be wondered at. The creation of the landsknechts had put new thoughts into their heads. The days of the old fighting chivalry were over, and the strength of armies was measured by the number and discipline of the infantry. The victories of the Swiss over Charles the Bold had made the peasant or artisan soldier a power. Kings and princes raised standing armies, recruited from the country districts or from among the wilder and more restless of the town population. The folk-songs are full of the doings of these plebeian soldiers. When the landsknecht visited his relations in village or in town, swaggered about in his gorgeous parti-coloured clothes, his broad hat adorned with huge feathers, his great gauntlets and his weapons; when he showed a gold chain or his ducats, or a jewel he had won as his share of the booty; when his old neighbours saw his dress and gait imitated by the young burghers—he became a centre of admiration, and his relations began to hold themselves high on his account. They acquired a new independence of character, a new impatience against all that prevented them from rising in the world. It has scarcely been sufficiently noted how most of the leaders in the plebeian risings were disbanded landsknechts.64

      The new jurisprudence was a very effectual instrument in the hands of an impoverished

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