art of them destroyed. The knighthood was now to all
intents and purposes politically helpless and economically at the door
of bankruptcy, owing to the suddenly changed conditions of which we
have spoken in the Introduction and elsewhere as supervening since the
beginning of the century: the unparalleled rise in prices,
concurrently with the growing extravagance, the decline of agriculture
in many places, and the increasing burdens put upon the knights by
their feudal superiors, and last, but not least, the increasing
obstacles in the way of the successful pursuit of the profession of
highway robbery. The majority of them, therefore, clung with
relentless severity to the feudal dues of the peasants, which now
constituted their main, and in many cases their only, source of
revenue; and hence, abandoning the hope of independence, they threw in
their lot with the authorities, the princes, lay and ecclesiastic, in
the common object of both, that of reducing the insurgent peasants to
complete subjection.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Italics the present author's.

[20] Italics the present author's.

[21] _Saemmtliche Werke_ vol. xxviii. pp. 142-201.

[22] _Corpus Reformatorum_, vol. i. pp. 598-9.

CHAPTER VII

GENERAL SIGNS OF RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL REVOLT

Peasant revolts of a sporadic character are to be met with throughout
the Middle Ages even in their halcyon days. Some of these, like the
Jacquerie in France and the revolt associated with the name of Wat
Tyler in England, were of a serious and more or less extended
character. But most of them were purely local and of no significance,
apart from temporary and passing circumstances. By the last quarter of
the fifteenth century, however, peasant risings had become
increasingly numerous and their avowed aims much more definite and
far-reaching than, as a rule, were those of an earlier date. In saying
this we are referring to those revolts which were directly initiated
by the peasantry, the serfs, and the villeins of the time, and which
had as their main object the direct amelioration of the peasant's lot.
Movements of a primarily religious character were, of course, of a
somewhat different nature, but the tendency was increasingly, as we
approach the period of the Reformation, for the two currents to merge
one in the other. The echoes of the Hussite movement in Bavaria at the
beginning of the century spread far and wide throughout Central
Europe, and had by no means spe