The villein possessed the rights of family, of village, and partially of communal organization. But many of the galling characteristics of chattelhood were transfused into serfdom and villeinage. The nobles became, if possible, more insolent, exacting and oppressive. But the villeins and peasants began to feel their power, and to combine and act in common in the villages, and afterward in the communes.
Partial insurrections followed each other in various parts of Germany; here against one baron or master, there against another. Every insurrection, even if suppressed, nevertheless gave an impulse, though sometimes imperceptible, to amelioration and emancipation. Insurrections of the down-trodden and oppressed classes are like feverish efforts of diseased physiology to resist the disorder, to throw out the virus, and restore the normal condition in the economy of life. The whole world admires the glorious insurrection of the Swiss-German peasantry against their insolent masters. Then the bondmen, villeins, etc., individually or in small bodies, by the axe, by fire, and in every possible manner, protested their imprescriptible right to liberty. So also did the celebrated Münzer when the reformation dawned over Germany and Europe. He firmly believed that religious reform, to be beneficial to the poor, must go hand in hand with social ameliorations. The most notable insurrection, however, was the great uprising of the German peasantry in the sixteenth century. From the Vosgese mountains, from the Alps to the Baltic, numerous isolated forces rose in arms, each inspired by the same great idea. They had no centres, no possibility of a combination of effort, but all of them recognized the same covenant: 1. The gospel to be preached in truth, but not in the interest of their masters—nobles and clergy. 2. Not to pay any kind of tithes. 3. The interest or rent from landed property to be reduced to five per cent. 4. Forests to be communal property. 5. All waters free. 6. Game free. 7. Serfdom to be abolished. 8. Election of communal authorities by the respective communes. 9. Lands robbed from the peasantry to be restored to the original owners.
This great war of the peasants was terrible, pitiless, bloody. More than one thousand strongholds, burghs, and monasteries were destroyed; but the peasants were finally overpowered, the nobility being aided by the forces of the empire. Luther, too, thundered against the poor peasants.[17] But not in vain did they shed their blood. The oppression by the old frowen, strengthened by feudality, was finally broken at the roots. The imperial German diet declared to the nobles, that if they did not cease their cruelties, at the next revolt they should be abandoned to their fate.
Serfdom was not yet abolished, but was moderated in various ways. The direct and indirect influence of the Reformation on the condition of the peasantry has been already mentioned. Mild reforms were introduced in the dominions of various German sovereigns. Certain liberties were granted to rural communes, and the number of free tenants slowly but uninterruptedly increased. The conditions of villeinage on private estates began to be regulated by the respective governments; and absolute serfdom was slowly dying out. The prosperity of Germany increased proportionally with the emancipation, though but partial, of rural labor, and the freedom of the soil. On an average, those regions were most prosperous which contained the greatest number of emancipated rural communities, or where the villeinage was reduced, systematized, and made more and more free from the arbitrary exactions of the master.
The peculiar political organization of Germany prevented any unity of action in the extinction of rural servitude. Many of its features—some relating to the person, but principally to the soil—survived even to the present century in certain parts of the smaller German states; and in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, there is still room for infinite improvement in the condition of the peasantry. But the mortal disorder exists no more: the fundamental rights of man are recognized. Governmental maladministration, injustice, oppressive taxation, exactions by officials and landlords, are unhappily common; but all these are in flagrant violation of established laws. And, bad though they are, they cannot for a moment compare with the blighting influences of chattel slavery.
For long centuries, and with persistent pertinacity, have slavery and the oppression of man and his labor gnawed at the German vitals; and centuries must elapse before the recovery of a normal condition. But the Germans of the present day—moralists, statesmen, savants and professional men, as well as artisans, mechanics and agriculturists—are unanimous in condemning human bondage, whatever may be the race enslaved. Few, indeed, are there of the great German race whose minds are inaccessible to the nobler promptings of freedom and humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] See "America and Europe," by the present writer.