Scotticé syboes), parsley, and peas; poppies, garlic, and hemp; apples, plums, and, in South Germany, grapes; as well as other things whose mediæval German names are not translatable by me. Wooden beehives were placed in the garden, and a pigeon-house usually stood in the yard.
The scanty underclothing of the peasants was of wool and the outer dress of linen—the men's, girt with a belt from which hung a sword, for they always went armed. Their furniture consisted of a table, several three-legged stools, and one or two chests. Rude cooking utensils hung on the walls, and dried pork, fruits, and baskets of grain on the rafters. The drinking-cups were of coarse clay; and we find regulations that the table-cloth or covering ought to be washed at least once a year! Their ordinary food was “some poor bread, oatmeal porridge, and cooked vegetables; and their drink, water and whey.” The live-stock included horses, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and hens.55
The villagers elected from among themselves four men, the Bauernmeister, who were the Fathers of the community. They were the arbiters in disputes, settled quarrels, and arranged for an equitable distribution of the various feudal assessments and services. They had no judicial or administrative powers; these belonged to the over-lord, or a representative appointed by him. This official sat in the justice room, heard cases, issued sentences, and exercised all the mediæval powers of “pit and gallows.” The whole list of mediæval punishments, ludicrous and gruesome, were at his command. It was he who ordered the scolding wife to be carried round the church three times while her neighbours jeered; who set the unfortunate charcoal-burner, who had transgressed some forest law, into the stocks, with his bare feet exposed to a slow fire till his soles were thoroughly burnt; who beheaded men who cut down trees, and ordered murderers to be broken on the wheel. He saw that the rents, paid in kind, were duly gathered. He directed the forced services of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting the over-lord's fields, what wood was to be hewn for the castle, what ditches dug, and what roads repaired. He saw that the peasants drank no wine but what came from the proprietor's vineyards, and that they drank it in sufficient quantity; that they ground their grain at the proprietor's mill, and fired their bread at the estate bakehouse. He exacted the two most valuable of the moveable goods of a dead peasant—the hated “death-tax.” There was no end to his powers. Of course, according to the Weisthümer, these powers were to be exercised in customary ways; and in some parts of Germany the indefinite “forced services” had been commuted to twelve days' service in the year, and in others to the payment of a fixed rate in lieu of service.
This description of the peasant life has been taken entirely from the Weisthümer, and, for reasons to be seen immediately, it perhaps represents rather a “golden past” than the actual state of matters at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It shows the peasants living in a state of rude plenty, but for the endless exactions of their lords and the continual robberies to which they were exposed from bands of sturdy rogues which swarmed through the country, and from companies of soldiers, who thought nothing of carrying off the peasant's cows, slaying his swine, maltreating his womenkind, and even firing his house.
The peasants had their diversions, not always too seemly. On the days of Church festivals, and they were numerous, the peasantry went to church and heard Mass in the morning, talked over the village business under the lime-trees, or in some open space near the village, and spent the afternoon in such amusements as they liked best—eating and drinking at the public-house, and dancing on the village green. In one of his least known poems, Hans Sachs describes the scene—the girls and the pipers waiting at the dancing-place, and the men and lads in the public-house eating calf's head, tripe, liver, black puddings, and roast pork, and drinking whey and the sour country wine, until some sank under the benches; and there was such a jostling, scratching, shoving, bawling, and singing, that not a word could be heard. Then three young men came to the dancing-place, his sweetheart had a garland ready for one of them, and the dancing began; other couples joined, and at last sixteen pairs of feet were in motion. Rough jests, gestures, and caresses went round.
“Nach dem der Messner von Hirschau,
Der tanzet mit des Pfarrhaus Frau
Von Budenheim, die hat er lieb,
Viel Scherzens am Tanz mit ihr trieb.”
The men whirled their partners off their feet and spun them round and round, or seized them by the waist and tossed them as high as they could; while they themselves leaped and threw out their feet in such reckless ways that Hans Sachs thought they would all fall down.
The winter amusements gathered round the spinning house. For it was the custom in most German villages for the young women to resort to a large room in the mill, or to the village tavern, or to a neighbour's house, with their wool and flax, their distaffs and spindles, some of them old heirlooms and richly ornamented, to spin all evening. The lads came also to pick the fluff off the lasses' dresses, they said; to hold the small beaker of water into which they dipped their fingers as they span; and to cheer the spinsters with songs and recitations. After work came the dancing. On festival evenings, and especially at carnival times, the lads treated their sweethearts to a late supper and a dance; and escorted them home, carrying their distaffs and spindles.56 All the old German love folk-songs are full of allusions to this peasant courtship, and it is not too much to say that from the singing in the spinning house have come most of the oldest folk-songs.
These descriptions apply to the German peasants of Central and South Germany. In the north and north-east, the agricultural population, which was for the most part of Slavonic descent, had been reduced by their conquerors to a serfdom which had no parallel in the more favoured districts.
§ 5. Earlier Social Revolts.
It was among the peasants of German descent that there had been risings, successful and unsuccessful, for more than a century. The train for revolution had been laid not where serfdom was at its worst, but where there was ease enough in life to allow men to think, and where freedom was nearest in sight. It may be well to refer to the earlier peasant revolts, before attempting to investigate the causes of that permanent unrest which was abundantly evident at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
The first great successful peasant rebellion was the fight for freedom made by the people of the four forest cantons in Switzerland. The weapons with which they overthrew the chivalry of Europe, rude pikes made by tying their scythes to their alpenstocks, may still be seen in the historical museums of Basel and Constance. They proved that man for man the peasant was as good as the noble. The free peasant soldier had come into being. These free peasants did not really secede from the Empire till 1499, and were formally connected with it till 1648. The Emperor was still their over-lord. But they were his free peasants, able to form leagues for their mutual defence and for the protection of their rights. Other cantons and some neighbouring cities joined them, and the Swiss Confederacy, with its flag, a white cross on a red ground, and its motto, “Each for all and all for each,” became a new nation in Europe. During the next century (1424–1471) the peasants of the Rhætian Alps also won their freedom, and formed a confederacy similar to the Swiss, though separate from it. It was called the Graubund.
The example of these peasant republics, strong in the protection which their mountains gave them, fired the imagination of the German peasantry of the south and the south-west of the Empire, and the leaders of lost popular causes found a refuge in the Alpine valleys while they meditated on fresh schemes to emancipate their followers. We have evidence of the popularity of the Swiss in the towns and country districts of Germany all through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century.57
But while the social tumults and popular uprisings against authority, which are a feature of the close of the Middle Ages, are usually and rightly enough called peasant insurrections, the name tends to obscure their real character. They were rather the revolts of the poor against the rich, of debtors against creditors, of men who had scanty legal rights or none at all against those who had the protection of the existing laws, and they were joined by the poor of the towns as well as by the peasantry of the country districts. The peasants generally began the revolt and the townsmen