MIDDLE AGES***


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The Social Side of the Reformation in Germany

GERMAN SOCIETY AT THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Aberdeen University Press.



GERMAN SOCIETY AT THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

by

E. BELFORT BAX

Author of "The Story of the French Revolution," "The Religion of
Socialism," "The Ethics of Socialism," "Handbook of the
History of Philosophy," etc., etc.







[Illustration: Logo]

London
Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
1894




CONTENTS.


  CHAPTER                                                   PAGE

        INTRODUCTION,                                          1

     I. FIRST SIGNS OF SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS REVOLT,           43

    II. THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT,                             92

   III. LITERATURE OF REFORMATION PERIOD,                    114

    IV. FOLKLORE OF THE REFORMATION,                         139

     V. THE GERMAN TOWN,                                     156

    VI. THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD,                        165

   VII. COUNTRY AND TOWN AT THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES,      194

  VIII. THE NEW JURISPRUDENCE,                               219

        APPENDIX A,                                          231

            "    B,                                          260

            "    C,                                          272




PREFACE.


The work, of which the present volume is the first instalment, aims
at giving English readers a general view of the social condition and
the popular movements of Germany during the period known as that of
the Reformation. In accordance with this plan, I have only touched
incidentally upon the theological disputes then apparently uppermost
in the thoughts of men, or upon the purely political side of things.
They are dealt with merely in so far as they immediately strike across
the path of social and internal affairs. The present volume, which
has a more general character than its successors, deals with a period
limited, roughly speaking, by the closing years of the fifteenth
century on the one side, and by 1525, the year of the great Peasant
rising, on the other. It contains a narrative of the earlier popular
revolutionary movements at the close of the Middle Ages, the precursors
of the Peasants' War; and it also deals with the underlying causes,
economic, social and juridical, of the general disintegration of the
time.

The next volume will treat more in detail the events of the years 1524
to 1526. The third will contain a history of the Anabaptist Movement in
Central Europe from its rise at Zwickau in 1522 to its decline after
the capture of Münster by the Archiepiscopal and Imperial troops in
1536. The reign of the Saints in Münster naturally forms the leading
feature of this portion of the work.

As to the sources for the history of the Germany of this period, I
have endeavoured to incorporate everything available that seemed to
me important for the proper understanding of the time. The three
chief general histories of the Reformation, Ranke's _Geschichte
Deutschlands während der Reformations-Zeit_, Janssen's _Geschichte des
Deutschen Volkes_, and Egelhaaf's _Deutsche Geschichte im sechszehnten
Jahrhundert_, have, it is scarcely necessary to say, been laid under
contribution. The standpoint of Ranke, whose history is detailed
and in certain respects exhaustive, is that of general bourgeois
Philistinism. Janssen represents the Ultramontane Catholic view; but,
apart from its tendency, every one must admire the brilliant and in
most cases accurate scholarship that characterises it. Egelhaaf's
work may be regarded as the counterblast to Janssen's. Its point of
view is that of "liberal," middle-class German Protestantism; but it
also contains many hints and clues which may be followed up by the
industrious historian.

To rewrite history in the light of the researches of the later decades
of the nineteenth century will be the great task of the next two or
three generations. History has to be presented afresh on the basis
of primitive communism with its tribal and village groups, with its
sexual relations based on the _gens_, with its totemistic religious
conceptions, and from the standpoint of a continuous development from
these beginnings up to the individualism of the present day founded on
the complete disruption of early society.

The average student of any historical period invariably reads into
his interpretation the intellectual, moral and social atmosphere that
lies nearest to him. He cannot strip away the intervening time-content
between himself and the period in question. It is the most difficult