lations which had not been
actually conquered, became his vassals, villeins, or serfs, as the
case might be. The process by means of which this was accomplished was
more or less gradual; indeed, the entire extinction of communal
rights, whereby the notion of private ownership is fully realized, was
not universally effected even in the West of Europe till within a
measurable distance of our own time.[3]

From the foregoing it will be understood that the oppression of the
peasant, under the feudalism of the Middle Ages, and especially of the
later Middle Ages, was viewed by him as an infringement of his rights.
During the period of time constituting mediaeval history, the peasant,
though he often slumbered, yet often started up to a sudden
consciousness of his position. The memory of primitive communism was
never quite extinguished, and the continual peasant-revolts of the
Middle Ages, though immediately occasioned, probably, by some fresh
invasion, by which it was sought to tear from the "common man" yet
another shred of his surviving rights, always had in the background
the ideal, vague though it may have been, of his ancient freedom.
Such, undoubtedly, was the meaning of the Jacquerie in France, with
its wild and apparently senseless vengeance; of the Wat Tyler revolt
in England, with its systematic attempt to envisage the vague
tradition of the primitive village community in the legends of the
current ecclesiastical creed; of the numerous revolts in Flanders and
North Germany; to a large extent of the Hussite movement in Bohemia,
under Ziska; of the rebellion led by George Doza in Hungary; and, as
we shall see in the body of the present work, of the social movements
of Reformation Germany, in which, with the partial exception of Ket's
rebellion in England a few years later, we may consider them as
virtually coming to an end.

For the movements in question were distinctly the last of their kind.
The civil wars of religion in France, and the great rebellion in
England against Charles I, which also assumed a religious colouring,
open a new era in popular revolts. In the latter, particularly, we
have clearly before us the attempt of the new middle class of town and
country, the independent citizen, and the now independent yeoman, to
assert supremacy over the old feudal estates or orders. The new
conditions had swept away the special revolutionary tradition of the
mediaeval period, whose golden age lay in the past with i