the working class was the
rise in prices. Wages have always shown themselves more sluggish in
movement than commodities. While money wages, therefore, remained
nearly stationary, real wages shrank throughout the century. In 1600 a
French laborer was obliged to spend 55 per cent. of his wages merely on
food. A whole day's labor would only buy him two and one half pounds
of salt. Rents were low, because the houses were incredibly bad. At
that time a year's rent for a laborer's tenement cost from ten to
twenty {557} days labor; it now costs about thirty days' labor. The
new commerce robbed the peasant of some of his markets by substituting
foreign articles like indigo and cochineal for domestic farm products.
The commercialization of agriculture worked manifold hardship to the
peasant. Many were turned off their farms to make way for herds of
sheep, and others were hired on new and harder terms to pay in money
for the land they had once held on customary and not too oppressive
terms of service and dues.

Under all the splendors of the Renaissance, with its fields of cloth of
gold and its battles like knightly jousts, with its constant stream of
adulation from artists and authors, with the ostentation of the new
wealth and the greedily tasted pleasures of living and enjoying, an
attentive ear can hear the low, uninterrupted murmurs of the wretched,
destined to burst forth, on the day of despair or of vengeance, into
ferocious clamors. [Sidenote: No pity for the poor] Nor was there
then much pity for the poor. The charity and worship for "apostolic
poverty" of the Middle Ages had ceased, nor had that social kindness,
so characteristic of our own time that it is affected even by those who
do not feel it, arisen. The rich and noble, absorbed in debauchery or
art, regarded the peasant as a different race--"the ox without horns"
they called him--to be cudgeled while he was tame and hunted like a
wolf when he ran wild. Artists and men of letters ignored the very
existence of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, "I hate the
vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were aroused for a
moment by the noise of civil war merely remarked, with Erasmus, that
any tyranny was better than that of the mob. Churchmen like Matthew
Lang and Warham and the popes oppressed the poor whom Jesus loved.
"Rustica gens optima flens" smartly observed a canon of Zurich, while
Luther blurted out, {558} "accursed, thievish, murderou