ganization and
the territorial lordship, constitutes the marrow of the social history
of the Middle Ages.

In the earliest times the pressure of the overlord, whoever he might
be, seems to have been comparatively slight, but its inevitable
tendency was for the territorial power to extend itself at the expense
of the rural community. It was thus that in the tenth and eleventh
centuries the feudal oppression had become thoroughly settled, and had
reached its greatest intensity all over Europe. It continued thus with
little intermission until the thirteenth century, when from various
causes, economic and otherwise, matters began to improve in the
interests of the common man, till in the fifteenth century the
condition of the peasant was better than it has ever been, either
before or since within historical times, in Northern and Western
Europe. But with all this, the oppressive power of the lord of the
soil was by no means dead. It was merely dormant, and was destined to
spring into renewed activity the moment the lord's necessities
supplied a sufficient incentive. From this time forward the element of
territorial power, supported in its claims by the Roman law, with its
basis of private property, continued to eat into it until it had
finally devoured the old rights and possessions of the village
community. The executive power always tended to be transferred from
its legitimate holder, the village in its corporate capacity, to the
lord; and this was alone sufficient to place the villager at his
mercy.

At the time of the Reformation, owing to the new conditions which had
arisen and had brought about in a few decades the hitherto
unparalleled rise in prices, combined with the unprecedented
ostentation and extravagance more than once referred to in these
pages, the lord was supplied with the requisite incentive to the
exercise of the power which his feudal system gave him. Consequently,
the position of the peasant rapidly changed for the worse; and
although at the outbreak of the movement not absolutely _in extremis_,
according to our notions, yet it was so bad comparatively to his
previous condition and that less than half a century before, and
tended as evidently to become more intolerable, that discontent became
everywhere rife, and only awaited the torch of the new doctrines to
set it ablaze. The whole course of the movement shows a peasantry, not
downtrodden and starved but proud and robust, driven to take up arms
n