Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/207

 of the Middle Ages, and a socialistic protest against the individualistic tendencies of the time.

The peasant's condition was fruitful soil for the seeds of a gospel of discontent. The aristocratic humanist revival awoke no echoes in his breast, but he found balm of Gilead in Luther's denunciations of merchants as usurers, of lawyers as robbers, and in his assertion of the worthlessness of all things compared with the Word of God, which peasants could understand better than priests. More radical preachers supplied whatever was lacking in Luther's doctrine to complete their exaltation. Carlstadt improved on Luther's declaration that peasants knew more of the Scriptures than learned doctors by affirming that they certainly knew more than Luther. Peasants adopted with fervour the doctrine of universal priesthood, and began themselves to preach and baptise. Schappeler announced at Memmingen that heaven was open to peasants, but closed to nobles and clergy. But while this was heresy, it was hardly sedition; most of the preachers believed as Luther did, in the efficacy of the Word, and repudiated Miinzer's appeal to the sword; and the promise of heaven hereafter might be expected to reconcile rather than to exasperate the peasant with his lot on earth. Yet it exerted an indirect stimulus, for men do not rebel in despair, but in hope; and the spiritual hopes held out by the Gospel produced that quickening of his mind, without which the peasant would never have risen to end his temporal ills.

The outbreak in 1524« can only have caused surprise by its extent, for that the peasants would rise was a common expectation. Almanacks and astrologers predicted the storm with remarkable accuracy; indeed its mutterings had been heard for years, and in 1522 friends of the exiled Ulrich of Württemberg had discussed a plan for his restoration to the duchy by means of a peasant revolt. But the first step in the great movement was not due to Ulrich or to any other extraneous impulse. It was taken in June, 1524, on the estates of Count Siegmund von Lupfen at Stühlingen, some miles to the north-west of Schaffhausen. There had already been a number of local disturbances elsewhere, and the peasantry round Nürnberg had burnt their tithes on the field; but they had all been suppressed without difficulty. The rising at Stühlingen is traditionally reported to have been provoked by a whim of the Countess von Lupfen, who insisted upon the Count's tenants spending a holiday in collecting snail-shells on which she might wind her wool; and this trivial reason has been remembered, to the oblivion of the more weighty causes alleged by the peasants in their list of grievances. They complained of the enclosure of woods, the alienation of common lands, and the denial of their right to fish in streams; they were compelled, they said, to do all kinds of field-work for their lord and his steward, to assist at hunts, to draw ponds and streams without any regard to the necessities of their own avocations; the lord's streams were diverted across their