Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/242

 230 HISTORY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE The peasant of the fifteenth century in most parts of Germany was not an oppressed boor condemned to a life of sordid vulgarity, as after the social revolution of the sixteenth century, but a sturdy, independent being, full of courage and spirit. Having the right to bear arms, he was as well equipped for self-protection as any city guild associate. He took part in public life and sat in district courts ; indeed, the literature of that period, still extant, gives us more concise descriptions of his life, habits, and manners than of those of the higher classes. In Franconia, Bavaria, Breisgau, and Alsatia, just where the peasant war raged the most fiercely, the peasants lived in such ease that they aspired to equality with their superiors, imitating their manners and style of living and dressing in silk and velvet. In one of the Nuremberg carnival plays — the satire of which is directed against the stuck-up peasants — there are some rhymes to the effect that peasants cannot bear that the nobles and their children should be dressed better than them- selves. Formerly the peasants wore grey mantles, grey caps and battered hats, hemp smocks, and linen jackets. Their shoes were tied with bast, and their hair cut in Wendish fashion above their ears. Their saddles and bridles were equally plain. Nun aber sich die Paurheit Den Rittern gleich hat geklait Mit Gewand und mit Geparden, Nun mag es nimmer guot werden. Sebastian Brant expresses the same sentiment in his ' NarrenschifT — Die bauern tragen seiden kleid Und goldene Ketten an deni Leib.