o use them, when the fighting instinct was imbibed with
the mother's milk, when every week saw some street brawl, often
attended by loss of life, and that by no means always among the most
worthless and dissolute of the inhabitants, every dissatisfaction
immediately turned itself into an armed revolt, whether it were of the
apprentices or the journeymen against the guild-masters, the body of
the townsmen against the patriciate, the town itself against its
feudal superior, where it had one, or of the knighthood against the
princes. The extremity to which disputes can at present be carried
without resulting in a breach of the peace, as evinced in modern
political and trade conflicts, exacerbated though some of them are,
was a thing unknown in the Middle Ages, and indeed to any considerable
extent until comparatively recent times. The sacred right of
insurrection was then a recognized fact of life, and but very little
straining of a dispute led to a resort to arms. In the subsequent
chapters we have to deal with the more important of those outbursts to
which the ferment due to the dissolution of the mediaeval system of
things, then beginning throughout Central Europe, gave rise, of which
the religious side is represented by what is known as the Reformation.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Sebastian Franck, _Chronica_, ccxvii.

[14] Cf. Trittheim's letter to Wirdung of Hasfurt regarding Faust. _J.
Tritthemii Epistolarum Familiarum_, 1536, bk. ii. ep. 47; also the works
of Paracelsus.

CHAPTER V

COUNTRY AND TOWN AT THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES

For the complete understanding of the events which follow it must be
borne in mind that the early sixteenth century represents the end of a
distinct historical period; and, as we have pointed out in the
Introduction, the expiring effort, half-conscious and half-unconscious,
of the people to revert to the conditions of an earlier age. Nor can the
significance be properly gauged unless a clear conception is obtained of
the differences between country and town life at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. From the earliest periods of the Middle Ages of which
we have any historical record, the _Markgenossenschaft_, or primitive
village community of the Germanic race, was overlaid by a territorial
domination, imposed upon it either directly by conquest or voluntarily
accepted for the sake of the protection indispensable in that rude
period. The conflict of these two elements, the mark or