guide the reason, to direct
the lives and to determine the conscience of mankind, necessarily has an
ethical as well as a theological, a social as well as an individual
side. It concerns itself, not only with the relation of the individual
to God or the gods, but also with the relations and duties of man to
man. Hence the close relation and inter-relation of religion and
politics. Politics is the art or act of regulating the social relations
of mankind, of determining social or civic rights and duties. It is
neither more nor less than the practical application of accepted
abstract ethical, or religious, principles in the domain of social life.
Hence we cannot be surprised that almost every wide-spread religious
revival, every renewed application of reason to religion, which almost
necessarily gives prominence to its ethical or social side, has been
followed by an uprising of the masses against what they had come to
regard as the irreligious tyranny and oppression of the ruling
privileged classes. The teachings of Wyclif in England, in the
fourteenth century, were followed by the insurrection associated with
the name of Wat Tyler; the teachings of Luther and his associates, in
the sixteenth century, by the Peasants' Revolt.

To the economic causes of the unrest of the peasantry and labouring
classes during the fifteenth and sixteenth century, we can refer only
very briefly. At the time of the great migration of the fifth century,
the free barbarian nations were organised on a tribal or village basis.
By the end of the tenth century, however, what is known as the Feudal
System had been established all over Europe. "No land without a lord" was
the underlying principle of the whole Feudal System. Either by conquest
or usurpation, or by more or less compulsory voluntary agreement, even
the free primitive communities (_die Markgenossenshaften_) of the
Teutonic races had been brought under the dominion of the lords,
spiritual or temporal, claiming suzerainty over the territory in which
they were situated. The claims of the Feudal Magnates seem ever to have
been somewhat vague and arbitrary. At first they were comparatively
light, and may well have been regarded and excused as a return for
services rendered. The general tendency, however, was for the individual
power of the lords to extend itself at the cost and to the detriment of
the rural communities, and for their claims steadily to increase and to
become more burdensome.