d the vintage in peace. But even
this modest demand was found to be impracticable. The knights had to
live in the style required by their status, as they declared, and
where other means were more and more failing them, their ancient right
or privilege of plunder was indispensable to their order. Still,
Hutten was right so far in declaring the knight the most harmless kind
of robber, inasmuch as, direct as were his methods, his sun was
obviously setting, while as much could not be said of the other
classes named; the merchant and the lawyer were on the rise, and the
priest, although about to receive a check, was not destined speedily
to disappear, or to change fundamentally the character of his
activity.

The feudal orders saw their own position seriously threatened by the
new development of things economic in the cities. The guilds were
becoming crystallized into close corporations of wealthy families,
constituting a kind of second _Ehrbarkeit_ or town patriciate; the
numbers of the landless and unprivileged, with at most a bare footing
in the town constitution, were increasing in an alarming proportion;
the journeyman workman was no longer a stage between apprentice and
master craftsman, but a permanent condition embodied in a large and
growing class. All these symptoms indicated an extraordinary economic
revolution, which was making itself at first directly felt only in the
larger cities, but the results of which were dislocating the social
relations of the Middle Ages throughout the whole empire.

Perhaps the most striking feature in this dislocation was the transition
from direct barter to exchange through the medium of money, and the
consequent suddenly increased importance of the role played by usury in
the social life of the time. The scarcity of money is a perennial theme
of complaint for which the new large capitalist-monopolists are made
responsible. But the class in question was itself only a symptom of the
general economic change. The seeming scarcity of money, though but the
consequence of the increased demand for a circulating medium, was
explained, to the disadvantage of the hated monopolists, by a crude form
of the "mercantile" theory. The new merchant, in contradistinction to
the master craftsman working _en famille_ with his apprentices and
assistants, now often stood entirely outside the processes of
production, as speculator or middleman; and he, and still more the
syndicate who fulfilled the like