German Culture Past and Present Part 4

It is noticeable, however, that although the immediate causes of the peasant rising were the new burdens which had been laid upon the common people during the last few years, once the spirit of discontent was aroused it extended also in many cases to the traditional feudal dues to which, until then, the peasant had submitted with little murmuring, and an attempt was made by the country-side to reconquer the ancient complete freedom of which a dim remembrance had been handed down to them.

The condition of the peasant up to the beginning of the sixteenth century--that is to say, up to the time when it began to so rapidly change for the worse--may be gathered from what we are told by contemporary writers, such as Wimpfeling, Sebastian Brandt, Wittenweiler, the satires in the _Nurnberger Fastnachtspielen_, and numberless other sources, as also from the sumptuary laws of the end of the fifteenth century. All these indicate an ease and profuseness of living which little accord with our notions of the word "peasant".

Wimpfeling writes: "The peasants in our district and in many parts of Germany have become, through their riches, stiff-necked and ease-loving. I know peasants who at the weddings of their sons or daughters, or the baptism of their children, make so much display that a house and field might be bought therewith, and a small vineyard to boot. Through their riches, they are oftentimes spendthrift in food and in vestments, and they drink wines of price."

A chronicler relates of the Austrian peasants, under the date of 1478, that "they wore better garments and drank better wine than their lords"; and a sumptuary law pa.s.sed at the Reichstag held at Lindau, in 1497, provides that the common peasant man and the labourer in the towns or in the field "shall neither make nor wear cloth that costs more than half a gulden the ell, neither shall they wear gold, pearls, velvet, silk, nor embroidered clothes, nor shall they permit their wives or their children to wear such."

Respecting the food of the peasant, it is stated that he ate his full in flesh of every kind, in fish, in bread, in fruit, drinking wine often to excess. The Swabian, Heinrich Muller, writes in the year 1550, nearly two generations after the change had begun to take place: "In the memory of my father, who was a peasant man, the peasant did eat much better than now. Meat and food in plenty was there every day, and at fairs and other junketings the tables did wellnigh break with what they bore. Then drank they wine as it were water, then did a man fill his belly and carry away withal as much as he could; then was wealth and plenty. Otherwise is it now. A costly and a bad time hath arisen since many a year, and the food and drink of the best peasant is much worse than of yore that of the day labourer and the serving man."

We may well imagine the vivid recollections which a peasant in the year 1525 had of the golden days of a few years before. The day labourers and serving men were equally tantalized by the remembrance of high wages and cheap living at the beginning of the century. A day labourer could then earn, with his keep, nine, and without keep, sixteen groschen[15] a week. What this would buy may be judged from the following prices current in Saxony during the second half of the fifteenth century. A pair of good working-shoes cost three groschen; a whole sheep, four groschen; a good fat hen, half a groschen; twenty-five cod-fish, four groschen; a wagon-load of firewood, together with carriage, five groschen; an ell of the best homespun cloth, five groschen; a scheffel (about a bushel) of rye, six or seven groschen. The Duke of Saxony wore grey hats which cost him four groschen. In Northern Rhineland about the same time a day labourer could, in addition to his keep, earn in a week a quarter of rye, ten pounds of pork, six large cans of milk, and two bundles of firewood, and in the course of five weeks be able to buy six ells of linen, a pair of shoes, and a bag for his tools. In Augsburg the daily wages of an ordinary labourer represented the value of six pounds of the best meat, or one pound of meat, seven eggs, a peck of peas, about a quart of wine, in addition to such bread as he required, with enough over for lodging, clothing, and minor expenses. In Bavaria he could earn daily eighteen pfennige, or one and a half groschen, whilst a pound of sausage cost one pfennig, and a pound of the best beef two pfennige, and similarly throughout the whole of the States of Central Europe.

A doc.u.ment of the year 1483, from Ehrbach in the Swabian Odenwald, describes for us the treatment of servants by their masters. "All journeymen," it declares, "that are hired, and likewise bondsmen (serfs), also the serving men and maids, shall each day be given twice meat and what thereto longith, with half a small measure of wine, save on fast days, when they shall have fish or other food that nourisheth.

Whoso in the week hath toiled shall also on Sundays and feast days make merry after ma.s.s and preaching. They shall have bread and meat enough, and half a great measure of wine. On feast days also roasted meat enough. Moreover, they shall be given, to take home with them, a great loaf of bread and so much of flesh as two at one meal may eat."

Again, in a bill of fare of the household of Count Joachim von Oettingen in Bavaria, the journeymen and villeins are accorded in the morning, soup and vegetables; at midday, soup and meat, with vegetables, and a bowl of broth or a plate of salted or pickled meat; at night, soup and meat, carrots, and preserved meat. Even the women who brought fowls or eggs from the neighbouring villages to the castle were given for their trouble--if from the immediate vicinity, a plate of soup with two pieces of bread; if from a greater distance, a complete meal and a cruse of wine. In Saxony, similarly, the agricultural journeymen received two meals a day, of four courses each, besides frequently cheese and bread at other times should they require it. Not to have eaten meat for a week was the sign of the direst famine in any district. Warnings are not wanting against the evils accruing to the common man from his excessive indulgence in eating and drinking.

Such was the condition of the proletariat in its first inception, that is, when the mediaeval system of villeinage had begun to loosen and to allow a proportion of free labourers to insinuate themselves into its working. How grievous, then, were the complaints when, while wages had risen either not at all or at most from half a groschen to a groschen, the price of rye rose from six or seven groschen a bushel to about five-and-twenty groschen, that of a sheep from four to eighteen groschen, and all other articles of necessary consumption in a like proportion![16]

In the Middle Ages, necessaries and such ordinary comforts as were to be had at all were dirt cheap; while non-necessaries and luxuries, that is, such articles as had to be imported from afar, were for the most part at prohibitive prices. With the opening up of the world-market during the first half of the sixteenth century, this state of things rapidly changed. Most luxuries in a short time fell heavily in price, while necessaries rose in a still greater proportion.

This latter change in the economic conditions of the world exercised its most powerful effect, however, on the character of the mediaeval town, which had remained substantially unchanged since the first great expansion at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. With the extension of commerce and the opening up of communications, there began that evolution of the town whose ultimate outcome was to entirely change the central idea on which the urban organization was based.

The first requisite for a town, according to modern notions, is facility of communication with the rest of the world by means of railways, telegraphs, postal system, and the like. So far has this gone now that in a new country, for instance, America, the railway, telegraph lines, etc., are made first, and the towns are then strung upon them, like beads upon a cord. In the mediaeval town, on the contrary, communication was quite a secondary matter, and more of a luxury than a necessity. Each town was really a self-sufficing ent.i.ty, both materially and intellectually. The modern idea of a town is that of a mere local aggregate of individuals, each pursuing a trade or calling with a view to the world-market at large. Their own locality or town is no more to them economically than any other part of the world-market, and very little more in any other respect. The mediaeval idea of a town, on the contrary, was that of an organization of groups into one organic whole. Just as the village community was a somewhat extended family organization, so was, _mutatis mutandis_, the larger unit, the towns.h.i.+p or city. Each member of the town organization owed allegiance and distinct duties primarily to his guild, or immediate social group, and through this to the larger social group which const.i.tuted the civic society. Consequently, every townsman felt a kind of _esprit de corps_ with his fellow-citizens, akin to that, say, which is alleged of the soldiers of the old French "foreign legion"

who, being brothers-in-arms, were brothers also in all other relations. But if every citizen owed duty and allegiance to the town in its corporate capacity, the town no less owed protection and a.s.sistance, in every department of life, to its individual members.

As in ancient Rome in its earlier history, and as in all other early urban communities, agriculture necessarily played a considerable part in the life of most mediaeval towns. Like the villages, they possessed each its own mark, with its common fields, pastures, and woods. These were demarcated by various landmarks, crosses, holy images, etc.; and "the bounds" were beaten every year. The wealthier citizens usually possessed gardens and orchards within the town walls, while each inhabitant had his share in the communal holding without. The use of this latter was regulated by the Rath or Council. In fact, the town life of the Middle Ages was not by any means so sharply differentiated from rural life as is implied in our modern idea of a town. Even in the larger commercial towns, such as Frankfurt, Nurnberg, or Augsburg, it was common to keep cows, pigs, and sheep, and, as a matter of course, fowls and geese, in large numbers within the precincts of the town itself. In Frankfurt in 1481 the pigsties in the town had become such a nuisance that the Rath had to forbid them _in the front_ of the houses by a formal decree. In Ulm there was a regulation of the bakers' guild to the effect that no single member should keep more than twenty-four pigs, and that cows should be confined to their stalls at night. In Nurnberg in 1475 again, the Rath had to interfere with the intolerable nuisance of pigs and other farm-yard stock running about loose in the streets. Even in a town like Munchen we are informed that agriculture formed one of the staple occupations of the inhabitants, while in almost every city the gardeners' or the wine-growers' guild appears as one of the largest and most influential.

It is evident that such conditions of life would be impossible with town-populations even approaching only distantly those of to-day; and, in fact, when we come to inquire into the size and populousness of mediaeval German cities, as into those of the cla.s.sical world of antiquity, we are at first sight staggered by the smallness of their proportions. The largest and most populous free Imperial cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Nurnberg and Stra.s.sburg, numbered little more than 20,000 resident inhabitants within the walls, a population rather less than that of (say) many an English country town at the present time. Such an important place as Frankfurt-am-Main is stated at the middle of the fifteenth century to have had less than 9,000 inhabitants. At the end of the fifteenth century Dresden could only boast of about 5,000. Rothenburg on the Tauber is to-day a dead city to all intents and purposes, affording us a magnificent example of what a mediaeval town was like, as the bulk of its architecture, including the circuit of its walls, which remain intact, dates approximately from the sixteenth century. At present a single line of railway branching off from the main line with about two trains a day is amply sufficient to convey the few antiquaries and artists who are now its sole visitors, and who have to content themselves with country-inn accommodation. Yet this old free city has actually a larger population at the present day than it had at the time of which we are writing, when it was at the height of its prosperity as an important centre of activity. The figures of its population are now between 8,000 and 9,000. At the beginning of the sixteenth century they were between 6,000 and 7,000. A work written and circulated in ma.n.u.script during the first decade of the sixteenth century, "A Christian Exhortation" (_Ein Christliche Mahnung_), after referring to the frightful pestilences recently raging as a punishment from G.o.d, observes, in the spirit of true Malthusianism, and as a justification of the ways of Providence, that "an there were not so many that died there were too much folk in the land, and it were not good that such should be lest there were not food enough for all."

Great population as const.i.tuting importance in a city is comparatively a modern notion. In other ages towns became famous on account of their superior civic organization, their more advantageous situation, or the greater activity, intellectual, political, or commercial, of their citizens.

What this civic organization of mediaeval towns was, demands a few words of explanation, since the conflict between the two main elements in their composition plays an important part in the events which follow. Something has already been said on this head in the Introduction. We have there pointed out that the Rath or Town Council, that is, the supreme governing body of the munic.i.p.ality, was in all cases mainly, and often entirely, composed of the heads of the town aristocracy, the patrician cla.s.s or "honorability" (_Ehrbarkeit_), as they were termed, who on the ground of their antiquity and wealth laid claim to every post of power and privilege. On the other hand were the body of the citizens enrolled in the various guilds, seeking, as their position and wealth improved, to wrest the control of the town's resources from the patricians. It must be remembered that the towns stood in the position of feudal over-lords to the peasants who held land on the city territory, which often extended for many square miles outside the walls. A small town like Rothenburg, for instance, which we have described above, had on its lands as many as 15,000 peasants.

The feudal dues and contributions of these tenants const.i.tuted the staple revenue of the town, and the management of them was one of the chief bones of contention.

Nowhere was the guild system brought to a greater perfection than in the free Imperial towns of Germany. Indeed, it was carried further in them, in one respect, than in any other part of Europe, for the guilds of journeymen (_Cesellenverbande_), which in other places never attained any strength or importance, were in Germany developed to the fullest extent, and of course supported the craft-guilds in their conflict with the patriciate. Although there were naturally numerous frictions between the two cla.s.ses of guilds respecting wages, working days, hours, and the like, it must not be supposed that there was that irreconcilable hostility between them which would exist at the present time between a trade-union and a syndicate of employers. Each recognized the right to existence of the other. In one case, that of the strike of bakers towards the close of the fifteenth century, at Colmar in Elsa.s.s, the craft-guilds supported the journeymen in their protest against a certain action of the patrician Rath, which they considered to be a derogation from their dignity.

Like the masters, the journeymen had their own guild-house, and their own solemn functions and social gatherings. There were, indeed, two kinds of journeymen-guilds: one whose chief purpose was a religious one, and the other concerning itself in the first instance with the secular concerns of the body. However, both cla.s.ses of journeymen-guilds worked into one another's hand. On coming into a strange town a travelling member of such a guild was certain of a friendly reception, of maintenance until he procured work, and of a.s.sistance in finding it as soon as possible.

Interesting details concerning the wages paid to journeymen and their contributions to the guilds are to be found in the original doc.u.ments relating exclusively to the journeymen-guilds, collected by Georg Schanz.[17] From these and other sources it is clear that the position of the artisan in the towns was in proportion much better than even that of the peasants at that time, and therefore immeasurably superior to anything he has enjoyed since. In South Germany at this period the average price of beef was about two denarii[18] a pound, while the daily wages of the masons and carpenters, in addition to their keep and lodging, amounted in the summer to about twenty, and in the winter to about sixteen of these denarii. In Saxony the same journeymen-craftsmen earned on the average, besides their maintenance, two groschen four pfennige a day, or about one-third the value of a bushel of corn. In addition to this, in some cases the workmen had weekly gratuities under the name of "bathing money"; and in this connection it may be noticed that a holiday for the purpose of bathing once a fortnight, once a week, or even oftener, as the case might be, was stipulated for by the guilds, and generally recognized as a legitimate demand. The common notion of the uniform uncleanliness of the mediaeval man requires to be considerably modified when one closely investigates the condition of town life, and finds everywhere facilities for bathing in winter and summer alike. Untidiness and uncleanliness, according to our notions, there may have been in the streets and in the dwellings in many cases, owing to inadequate provisions for the disposal of refuse and the like; but we must not therefore extend this idea to the person, and imagine that the mediaeval craftsman or even peasant was as unwholesome as, say, the East European peasant of to-day.

When the wages received by the journeymen artisans are compared with the prices of commodities previously given, it will be seen how relatively easy were their circ.u.mstances; and the extent of their well-being may be further judged from the wealth of their guilds, which, although varying in different places, at all times formed a considerable proportion of the wealth of the town. The guild system was based upon the notion that the individual master and workman was working as much in the interest of the guild as for his own advantage.

Each member of the guild was alike under the obligation to labour, and to labour in accordance with the rules laid down by his guild, and at the same time had the right of equal enjoyment with his fellow-guildsmen of all advantages pertaining to the particular branch of industry covered by the guild. Every guildsman had to work himself _in propria persona_; no contractor was tolerated who himself "in ease and sloth doth live on the sweat of others, and puffeth himself up in l.u.s.tful pride." Were a guild-master ill and unable to manage the affairs of his workshop, it was the council of the guild, and not himself or his relatives, who installed a representative for him and generally looked after his affairs. It was the guild again which procured the raw material, and distributed it in relatively equal proportions amongst its members; or where this was not the case, the time and place were indicated at which the guildsman might buy at a fixed maximum price. Every master had equal right to the use of the common property and inst.i.tutions of the guild, which in some industries included the essentials of production, as, for example, in the case of the woollen manufacturers, where wool-kitchens, carding-rooms, bleaching-houses and the like were common to the whole guild.

Needless to say, the relations between master and apprentices and master and journeymen were rigidly fixed down to the minutest detail. The system was thoroughly patriarchal in its character. In the hey-day of the guilds, every apprentice and most of the journeymen regarded their actual condition as a period of preparation which would end in the glories of masters.h.i.+p. For this dear hope they were ready on occasion to undergo cheerfully the most arduous duties. The education in handicraft, and, we may add, the supervision of the morals of the blossoming members of the guild, was a department which greatly exercised its administration. On the other hand, the guild in its corporate capacity was bound to maintain sick or incapacitated apprentices and journeymen, though after the journeymen had developed into a distinct cla.s.s, and the consequent rise of the journeymen-guilds, the latter function was probably in most cases taken over by the latter. The guild laws against adulteration, scamped work, and the like, were sometimes ferocious in their severity. For example, in some towns the baker who misconducted himself in the matter of the composition of his bread was condemned to be shut up in a basket which was fixed at the end of a long pole, and let down so many times to the bottom of a pool of dirty water. In the year 1456 two grocers, together with a female a.s.sistant, were burnt alive at Nurnberg for adulterating saffron and spices, and a similar instance happened at Augsburg in 1492. From what we have said it will be seen that guild life, like the life of the town as a whole, was essentially a social life. It was a larger family, into which various blood families were merged. The interest of each was felt to be the interest of all, and the interest of all no less the interest of each.

But in many towns, outside the town population properly speaking, outside the patrician families who generally governed the Rath, outside the guilds, outside the city organization altogether, there were other bodies dwelling within the walls and forming _imperia in imperiis_. These were the religious corporations, whose possessions were often extensive, and who, dwelling within their own walls, shut out from the rest of the town, were subject only to their own ordinances. The quasi-religious, quasi-military Order of the Teutonic Knights (_Deutscher Orden_), founded at the time of the Crusades, was the wealthiest and largest of these corporations. In addition to the extensive territories which it held in various parts of the empire, it had establishments in a large number of cities. Besides this there were, of course, the Orders of the Augustinians and Carthusians, and a number of less important foundations, who had their cloisters in various towns. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the pomp, pride, and licentiousness of the Teutonic Order drew upon it the especial hatred of the townsfolk; and amid the general wreck of religious houses none were more ferociously despoiled than those belonging to this Order. There were, moreover, in some towns, the establishments of princely families, which were regarded by the citizens with little less hostility than that accorded to the religious Orders.

Such were the explosive elements of town life when changing conditions were tending to dislocate the whole structure of mediaeval existence.

The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 had struck a heavy blow at the commerce of the Bavarian cities which had come by way of Constantinople and Venice. This latter city lost one by one its trading centres in the East, and all Oriental traffic by way of the Black Sea was practically stopped. It was the Dutch cities which inherited the wealth and influence of the German towns when Vasco da Gama's discovery of the Cape route to the East began to have its influence on the trade of the world. This diversion of Oriental traffic from the old overland route was the starting-point of the modern merchant navy, and it must be placed amongst the most potent causes of the break-up of mediaeval civilization. The above change, although immediately felt by the German towns, was not realized by them in its full importance either as to its causes or its consequences for more than a century; but the decline of their prosperity was nevertheless sensible, even now, and contributed directly to the coming upheaval.

The impatience of the prince, the prelate, the n.o.ble, and the wealthy burgher at the restraints which the system of the Middle Ages placed upon his activity as an individual in the acquisition for his own behoof, and the disposal at his own pleasure, of wealth, regardless of the consequences to his neighbour, found expression, and a powerful lever, in the introduction from Italy of the Roman law in place of the old canon and customary law of Europe. The latter never regarded the individual as an independent and autonomous ent.i.ty, but invariably treated him with reference to a group or social body, of which he might be the head or merely a subordinate member; but in any case the filaments of custom and religious duty attached him to a certain humanity outside himself, whether it were a village community, a guild, a towns.h.i.+p, a province, or the empire. The idea of a right to individual autonomy in his dealings with men never entered into the mediaeval man's conception. Hence the mere possession of property was not recognized by mediaeval law as conferring any absolute rights in its holder to its unregulated use, and the basis of the mediaeval notions of property was the a.s.sociation of responsibility and duty with owners.h.i.+p. In other words, the notion of _trust_ was never completely divorced from that of _possession_.

The Roman law rested on a totally different basis. It represented the legal ethics of a society on most of its sides brutally and cra.s.sly individualistic. That that society had come to an end instead of evolving to its natural conclusion--a developed capitalistic individualism such as exists to-day--was due to the weakness of its economic basis, owing to the limitation at that time of man's power over Nature, which deprived it of recuperative and defensive force, thereby leaving it a prey not only to internal influences of decay but also to violent destructive forces from without. Nevertheless, it left a legacy of a ready-made legal system to serve as an implement for the first occasion when economic conditions should be once more ready for progress to resume the course of individualistic development, abruptly brought to an end by the fall of ancient civilization as crystallized in the Roman Empire.

The popular courts of the village, of the mark, and of the town, which had existed up to the beginning of the sixteenth century with all their ancient functions, were extremely democratic in character. Cases were decided on their merits, in accordance with local custom, by a body of jurymen chosen from among the freemen of the district, to whom the presiding functionaries, most of whom were also of popular selection, were little more than a.s.sessors. The technicalities of a cut-and-dried system were unknown. The Catholic-Germanic theory of the Middle Ages proper, as regards the civil power in all its functions, from the highest downward, was that of the mere administrator of justice as such; whereas the Roman law regarded the magistrate as the vicegerent of the _princeps_ or _imperator_, in whose person was absolutely vested as its supreme embodiment the whole power of the State. The Divinity of the Emperors was a recognition of this fact; and the influence of the Roman law revived the theory as far as possible under the changed conditions, in the form of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings--a doctrine which was totally alien to the Catholic feudal conception of the Middle Ages. This doctrine, moreover, received added force from the Oriental conception of the position of the ruler found in the Old Testament, from which Protestantism drew so much of its inspiration.

But apart from this aspect of the question, the new juridical conception involved that of a system of rules as the crystallized embodiment of the abstract "State," given through its representatives, which could under no circ.u.mstances be departed from, and which could only be modified in their operation by legal quibbles that left to them their nominal integrity. The new law could therefore only be administered by a cla.s.s of men trained specially for the purpose, of which the plastic customary law borne down the stream of history from primitive times, and insensibly adapting itself to new conditions but understood in its broader aspects by all those who might be called to administer it, had little need. The Roman law, the study of which was started at Bologna in the twelfth century, as might naturally be expected, early attracted the attention of the German Emperors as a suitable instrument for use on emergencies. But it made little real headway in Germany itself as against the early inst.i.tutions until the fifteenth century, when the provincial power of the princes of the empire was beginning to overshadow the central authority of the t.i.tular chief of the Holy Roman Empire. The former, while strenuously resisting the results of its application from above, found in it a powerful auxiliary in their Courts in riveting their power over the estates subject to them. As opposed to the delicately adjusted hierarchical notions of Feudalism, which did not recognize any absoluteness of dominion either over persons or things, in short for which neither the head of the State had any inviolate authority as such, nor private property any inviolable rights or sanct.i.ty as such, the new jurisprudence made corner-stones of both these conceptions.

Even the canon law, consisting in a ma.s.s of Papal decretals dating from the early Middle Ages, and which, while undoubtedly containing considerable traces of the influence of Roman law, was nevertheless largely customary in its character, with an infusion of Christian ethics, had to yield to the new jurisprudence, and that too in countries where the Reformation had been unable to replace the old ecclesiastical dogma and organization. The principles and practice of the Roman law were sedulously inculcated by the tribe of civilian lawyers who by the beginning of the sixteenth century infested every Court throughout Europe. Every potentate, great and small, little as he might like its application by his feudal overlord to himself, was yet only too ready and willing to invoke its aid for the oppression of his own va.s.sals or peasants. Thus the civil law everywhere triumphed.

It became the juridical expression of the political, economical, and religious change which marks the close of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of the modern commercial world.

It must not be supposed, however, that no resistance was made to it.

Everywhere in contemporary literature, side by side with denunciations of the new mercenary troops, the _Landsknechte_, we find uncomplimentary allusions to the race of advocates, notaries, and procurators who, as one writer has it, "are increasing like gra.s.shoppers in town and in country year by year." Whenever they appeared, we are told, countless litigious disputes sprang up. He who had but the money in hand might readily defraud his poorer neighbour in the name of law and right. "Woe is me!" exclaims one author, "in my home there is but one procurator, and yet is the whole country round about brought into confusion by his wiles. What a misery will this horde bring upon us!" Everywhere was complaint and in many places resistance.

As early as 1460 we find the Bavarian estates vigorously complaining that all the courts were in the hands of doctors. They demanded that the rights of the land and the ancient custom should not be cast aside; but that the courts as of old should be served by reasonable and honest judges, who should be men of the same feudal livery and of the same country as those whom they tried. Again in 1514, when the evil had become still more crying, we find the estates of Wurtemberg pet.i.tioning Duke Ulrich that the Supreme Court "shall be composed of honourable, worthy, and understanding men of the n.o.bles and of the towns, who shall not be doctors, to the intent that the ancient usages and customs should abide, and that it should be judged according to them in such wise that the poor man might no longer be brought to confusion." In many covenants of the end of the fifteenth century, express stipulation is made that they should not be interpreted by a doctor or licentiate, and also in some cases that no such doctor or licentiate should be permitted to reside or to exercise his profession within certain districts. Great as was the economical influence of the new jurists in the tribunals, their political influence in the various courts of the empire, from the _Reichskammergericht_ downwards, was, if anything, greater. Says Wimpfeling, the first writer on the art of education in the modern world: "According to the loathsome doctrines of the new jurisconsults, the prince shall be everything in the land and the people naught. The people shall only obey, pay tax, and do service. Moreover, they shall not alone obey the prince but also them that he has placed in authority, who begin to puff themselves up as the proper lords of the land, and to order matters so that the princes themselves do as little as may be reign." From this pa.s.sage it will be seen that the modern bureaucratic State, in which government is as nearly as possible reduced to mechanism and the personal relation abolished, was ushered in under the auspices of the civil law. How easy it was for the civilian to effect the abolition of feudal inst.i.tutions may be readily imagined by those cognizant of the principles of Roman law. For example, the Roman law, of course, making no mention of the right of the mediaeval "estates" to be consulted in the levying of taxes or in other questions, the jurist would explain this right to his too willing master, the prince, as an abuse which had no legal justification, and which, the sooner it were abolished in the interest of good government the better it would be. All feudal rights as against the power of an overlord were explained away by the civil jurist, either as pernicious abuses, or, at best, as favours granted in the past by the predecessors of the reigning monarch, which it was within his right to truncate or to abrogate at his will.

From the preceding survey will be clearly perceived the important role which the new jurisprudence played on the Continent of Europe in the gestation of the new phase which history was entering upon in the sixteenth century. Even the short sketch given will be sufficient to show that it was not in one department only that it operated; but that, in addition to its own domain of law proper, its influence was felt in modifying economical, political, and indirectly even ethical and religious conditions. From this time forth Feudalism slowly but surely gave place to the newer order, all that remained being certain of its features, which, crystallized into bureaucratic forms, were doubly veneered with a last trace of mediaeval ideas and a denser coating of civilian conceptions. This transitional Europe, and not mediaeval Europe, was the Europe which lasted on until the eighteenth century, and which practically came to an end with the French Revolution.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] One silver groschen = 1-1/5d.

[16] The authorities for the above data may be found in Janssen, i., vol. i., bk. iii., especially pp. 330-46.

[17] _Zur Geschichte der deutschen Gesellenverbande._ Leipzig, 1876.

[18] C. 1/5d. The denarius was the South German equivalent of the North German pfennig, of which twelve went to the groschen.

CHAPTER VI

THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD

We have already pointed out in more than one place the position to which the smaller n.o.bility, or the knighthood, had been reduced by the concatenation of causes which was bringing about the dissolution of the old mediaeval order of things, and, as a consequence, ruining the knights both economically and politically--economically by the rise of capitalism as represented by the commercial syndicates of the cities; by the unprecedented power and wealth of the city confederations, especially of the Hanseatic League; by the rising importance of the newly developed world-market; by the growing luxury and the enormous rise in the prices of commodities concurrently with the reduction in value of the feudal land-tenures; and by the limitation of the possibilities of acquiring wealth by highway robbery, owing to Imperial const.i.tutions, on the one hand, and increased powers of defence on the part of the trading community, on the other--politically, by the new modes of warfare in which artillery and infantry, composed of comparatively well-drilled mercenaries (_Landsknechte_), were rapidly making inroads into the omnipotence of the ancient feudal chivalry, and reducing the importance of individual skill or prowess in the handling of weapons, and by the development of the power of the princes or higher n.o.bility, partly due to the influence which the Roman civil law now began to exercise over the older customary Const.i.tution of the empire, and partly to the budding centralism of authority--which in France and England became a national centralization, but in Germany, in spite of the temporary ascendancy of Charles V, finally issued in a provincial centralization in which the princes were _de facto_ independent monarchs. The Imperial Const.i.tution of 1495, forbidding private war, applied, it must be remembered, only to the lesser n.o.bility and not to the higher, thereby placing the former in a decidedly ignominious position as regards their feudal superiors. And though this particular enactment had little immediate result, yet it was none the less resented as a blow struck at the old knightly privilege.

The mental att.i.tude of the knighthood in the face of this progressing change in their position was naturally an ambiguous one, composed partly of a desire to hark back to the haughty independence of feudalism, and partly of sympathy with the growing discontent among other cla.s.ses and with the new spirit generally. In order that the knights might succeed in recovering their old or even in maintaining their actual position against the higher n.o.bility, the princes, backed as these now largely were by the Imperial power, the co-operation of the cities was absolutely essential to them, but the obstacles in the way of such a co-operation proved insurmountable. The towns hated the knights for their lawless practices, which rendered trade unsafe and not infrequently cost the lives of the citizens. The knights for the most part, with true feudal hauteur, scorned and despised the artisans and traders who had no territorial family name and were unexercised in the higher chivalric arts. The grievances of the two parties were, moreover, not identical, although they had their origin in the same causes.

The cities were in the main solely concerned to maintain their old independent position, and especially to curb the growing disposition at this time of the other estates to use them as milch cows from which to draw the taxation necessary to the maintenance of the empire. For example, at the Reichstag opened at Nurnberg on November 17, 1522--to discuss the questions of the establishment of perpetual peace within the empire, of organizing an energetic resistance to the inroads of the Turks, and of placing on a firm foundation the Imperial Privy Council (_Kammergericht_) and the Supreme Council (_Reichsregiment_)--at which were represented twenty-six Imperial towns, thirty-eight high prelates, eighteen princes, and twenty-nine counts and barons--the representatives of the cities complained grievously that their attendance was reduced to a farce, since they were always out-voted, and hence obliged to accept the decisions of the other estates. They stated that their position was no longer bearable, and for the first time drew up an Act of Protest, which further complained of the delay in the decisions of the Imperial courts; of their sufferings from the right of private war, which was still allowed to subsist in defiance of the Const.i.tution; of the increase of customs-stations on the part of the princes and prince-prelates; and, finally, of the debas.e.m.e.nt of the coinage due to the unscrupulous practices of these notables and of the Jews. The only sympathy the other estates vouchsafed to the plaints of the cities was with regard to the right of private war, which the higher n.o.bles were also anxious to suppress amongst the lower, though without prejudice, of course, to their own privileges in this line.

All the other articles of the Act of Protest were coolly waived aside. From all this it will be seen that not much co-operation was to be expected between such heterogeneous bodies as the knighthood and the free towns, in spite of their common interest in checking the threateningly advancing power of the princes and the central Imperial authority in so far as it was manned and manipulated by the princes.

Amid the decaying knighthood there was, as we have already intimated, one figure which stood out head and shoulders above every other n.o.ble of the time, whether prince or knight, and that was Franz von Sickingen. He has been termed, not without truth, "the last flower of German chivalry," since in him the old knightly qualities flashed up in conjunction with the old knightly power and splendour with a brightness hardly known even in the palmiest days of mediaeval life. It was, however, the last flicker of the light of German chivalry. With the death of Sickingen and the collapse of his revolt the knighthood of Central Europe ceased any longer to play an independent part in history.

Sickingen, although technically only one of the lower n.o.bility, was deemed about the time of Luther's appearance to hold the immediate destinies of the empire in his hand. Wealthy, inspiring confidence and enthusiasm as a leader, possessed of more than one powerful and strategically situated stronghold, he held court at his favourite residence, the Castle of the Landstuhl, in the Rhenish Palatinate, in a style which many a prince of the empire might have envied. As honoured guests were to be found attending on him humanists, poets, minstrels, partisans of the new theology, astrologers, alchemists, and men of letters generally--in short, the whole intelligence and culture of the period. Foremost amongst these, and chief confidant of Sickingen, was the knight, courtier, poet, essayist, and pamphleteer, Ulrich von Hutten, whose pen was ever ready to champion with unstinted enthusiasm the cause of the progressive ideas of his age. He first took up the cudgels against the obscurantists on behalf of Humanism as represented by Erasmus and Reuchlin, the latter of whom he bravely defended in his dispute with the Inquisition and the monks of Cologne, and in his contributions to the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_ we see the youthful ardour of the Renaissance in full blast in its onslaught on the forces of mediaeval obstruction. Unlike most of those with whom he was first a.s.sociated, Hutten pa.s.sed from being the upholder of the New Learning to the role of champion of the Reformation; and it was largely through his influence that Sickingen took up the cause of Luther and his movement.

Sickingen had been induced by Charles V to a.s.sist him in an abortive attempt to invade France in 1521, from which campaign he had returned without much benefit either material or moral, save that Charles was left heavily in his debt. The acc.u.mulated hatred of generations for the priesthood had made Sickingen a willing instrument in the hands of the reforming party, and believing that Charles now lay to some extent in his power, he considered the moment opportune for putting his long-cherished scheme into operation for reforming the Const.i.tution of the empire. This reformation consisted, as was to be expected, in placing his own order on a firm footing, and of effectually curbing the power of the other estates, especially that of the prelates.

Sickingen wished to make the Emperor and the lower n.o.bility the decisive factors in his new scheme of things political. The Emperor, it so happened, was for the moment away in Spain, and Sickingen's colleagues of the knightly order were becoming clamorous at the unworthy position into which they found themselves rapidly being driven. The feudal exactions of their princely lieges had reached a point which pa.s.sed all endurance, and since they were practically powerless in the Reichstags, no outlet was left for their discontent save by open revolt. Impelled not less by his own inclinations than by the pressure of his companions, foremost among whom was Hutten, Sickingen decided at once to open the campaign.