Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/206

 the nobles were constantly demanding more and more from the peasant; and the process of extortion did not slacken in the succeeding years. The noble himself was feeling the weight of the economic revolution, of the increase in prices, and depression in agriculture; and he naturally sought to shift it from his own shoulders to those of his villeins and serfs, that lowest substratum of society on which all burdens ultimately rest. He endeavoured to redress the relative depreciation in the value of land by increasing the amount of rent and services which he received from its tillers.

Nor was this the only trouble in which the peasants were involved. The evil of enclosures, although it was felt in Germany, was not so prominent among their complaints as it was in England; but their general distress produced two other symptoms, one of which seems to have been peculiar to those districts of Germany in which the revolt raged with the greatest fury. In the south-west, in the valleys of the Tauber and the Neckar, in the Moselle and middle Rhine districts, the practice of subdividing land had proceeded so far that the ordinary holding of the peasant had shrunk to the quarter of a ploughland; and the effort to check this ruinous development only resulted in the creation of a landless agrarian proletariat. The other process, which was not confined to Germany, was the conversion of land into a speculative market for money. The financial embarrassments of the peasant rendered him an easy prey to the burgher-capitalist who lent him money on the security of his holding, the interest on which was often not forthcoming if the harvest failed, or the plague attacked his cattle; and the traffic in rents, which inevitably bore hardly on the tenant, was one of the somewhat numerous evils which Luther at one time or another declared to be the ruin of the German nation.

Besides these economic causes, the growing influence of Roman law affected the peasant even more than it had done the barons. By it, said the Emperor Maximilian, the poor man either got no justice at all against the rich, or it was so sharp and fine-pointed that it availed him nothing. Ignoring the fine distinctions of feudal law with respect to service it regarded the rendering of service as proof of servitude, and everyone who was not entirely free sank in its eyes to a serf. The policy of reducing tenants to this position was systematically pursued in many districts; the Abbots of Kempten resorted not merely to the falsification of charters but to such abuse of their clerical powers as refusing the Sacrament to those who denied their servitude; and one of them defended his conduct on the ground that he was only doing as other lords. It was in fact the lords and not the peasants who were the revolutionists; the revolt was essentially reactionary. The peasants demanded the restoration of their old Haingerichte and other Courts, the abolition of novel jurisdictions and new exactions of rent and service. The movement was an attempt to revive the worn-out communal system