ot so much by misery and despair as by the deliberate will to
maintain the advantages which were rapidly slipping away from them.

Serfdom was not by any means universal. Many free peasant villages
were to be found scattered amongst the manors of the territorial
lords, though it was but too evidently the settled policy of the
latter at this time to sweep everything into their net, and to compel
such peasant communes to accept a feudal overlordship. Nor were they
at all scrupulous in the means adopted for attaining their ends. The
ecclesiastical foundations, as before said, were especially expert in
forging documents for the purpose of proving that these free villages
were lapsed feudatories of their own. Old rights of pasture were being
curtailed, and others, notably those of hunting and fishing, had in
most manors been completely filched away.

It is noticeable, however, that although the immediate causes of the
peasant rising were the new burdens which had been laid upon the
common people during the last few years, once the spirit of discontent
was aroused it extended also in many cases to the traditional feudal
dues to which, until then, the peasant had submitted with little
murmuring, and an attempt was made by the country-side to reconquer
the ancient complete freedom of which a dim remembrance had been
handed down to them.

The condition of the peasant up to the beginning of the sixteenth
century--that is to say, up to the time when it began to so rapidly
change for the worse--may be gathered from what we are told by
contemporary writers, such as Wimpfeling, Sebastian Brandt,
Wittenweiler, the satires in the _Nuernberger Fastnachtspielen_, and
numberless other sources, as also from the sumptuary laws of the end
of the fifteenth century. All these indicate an ease and profuseness
of living which little accord with our notions of the word "peasant".
Wimpfeling writes: "The peasants in our district and in many parts of
Germany have become, through their riches, stiff-necked and
ease-loving. I know peasants who at the weddings of their sons or
daughters, or the baptism of their children, make so much display that
a house and field might be bought therewith, and a small vineyard to
boot. Through their riches, they are oftentimes spendthrift in food
and in vestments, and they drink wines of price."

A chronicler relates of the Austrian peasants, under the date of 1478,
that "they wore better garments and drank bette