as unable to
establish a profitable feud of his own, united himself as an assistant
to another, and thus old comrades were often by the chapter of
accidents opposed, and then, in the full consciousness of doing their
duty, would beat and even stab each other.

This marauding life on the highways, in the woods and caverns, and with
drunken companions, was neither favourable to their family life nor to
their higher interests, nor was it even fitted to develop warlike
capacity except among the subordinates. At the best, it only formed
leaders of small bodies of mounted troopers for foraging expeditions
and surprises. Sickingen himself, the most skilful specimen of a Junker
of the sixteenth century, showed in his great and decisive feud, only
very moderate talents as a general; and the capacities of Goetz, in a
military point of view, do not stand higher than those of an
experienced serjeant of hussars. Thus wild, vicious, and detrimental to
the community, was the conduct of even the quietest of the lower
nobility. Their being a privileged order whose members considered
themselves superior to citizen of peasant, who kept themselves apart
from others, in marriage, business, law, manners, and ceremonials, made
them for centuries weak, and their existence a misfortune to the
people; but at the same time it saved them from the ruin consequent
upon their disorderly life. On retrospect of the act itself, there is
little difference to be seen between the robber who now waylays the
wanderer on the lonely heath, and the country nobleman who about the
year 1500 dragged the Nuremberger merchant from his horse and kept him
in a dark prison upon bread and water, whilst the noble's wife made
coats and mantles out of the stolen cloth. But three hundred and fifty
years ago, the noble robber practised his evil deeds with the feeling,
that though his actions were perhaps contrary to the decrees of an
Imperial Diet, yet they were looked upon by the whole nobility of his
province, indeed by the highest sovereigns of the country, as pleasant
or at the worst as daring tricks. Certainly if he was caught by the
city whose citizens he had injured, he might possibly lose his life, as
does now a murderer on the high-road, but the law of the city was not
his law, and if he died, his death would probably be revenged by other
active comrades. However unreasonable were the laws of honour according
to which he lived, he felt that these same laws were hono