Thus they went to the last evening entertainment; those who were departing had often the escort of their friends, for protection and honour, far into the country.
There is something very attractive to our feelings in this hospitality given to the shooters. Not only were they frequently provided with drink on the shooting-ground during the shooting-hours, and refreshed by a collation, but they were at least once, and generally oftener, entertained in the city, sometimes daily, by the councillors; besides this, there were evening dances, in which the daughters of the most distinguished families partook. These hospitalities to the guests, in the fifteenth century, though very hearty, were also very simple; but at a later period they became sometimes profuse, and when such a festival lasted a fortnight, or, as at Strasburg, as much as five weeks, they must have been very expensive to the givers of the feast; more than once did critical chroniclers complain of the immoderate demands on their city coffers. Loud reproaches were made even at Strasburg, and it was reported of the Löwenbergers, after their bird-shooting in 1615, that the city had exerted itself far beyond its powers; for all had been very costly and splendid. In the fifteenth century, they knew better how to calculate. The great cross-bow shooting at Augsburg, in 1470, cost the city more than 2200 gulden, a high sum according to the then value of corn; and yet the influx of strangers was so great that the Augsburgers afterwards said they had suffered no loss. But, indeed, the entertainment of the 466 stranger guests was very simple.
The number of marksmen at the earlier cross-bow shootings was not large. At Augsburg, in 1425, there were only 130; in 1434, 300; and in 1470, 466. After fire-arms had been introduced, at the great country meetings, the number of marksmen was double. Thus, in 1485, at St. Gallen, there were collected 208 cross-bows and 445 guns; and in 1508, at Augsburg, there were 544 cross-bows and 919 guns. According to the old arrangements of the shooting, this large number of men protracted the festival to a great length; consequently, in the sixteenth century, we find efforts sometimes made to limit the number of invitations, but to increase the deposits of the shooters; and it appears that a festival, with from 200 to 300 shooting-guests, was considered most agreeable; in that case it lasted a week; the individual became of more importance, and the body of men was easier to guide. Even with a moderate number of marksmen, the concourse of strangers was incomparably greater than it would be now. Each marksman was accompanied by a lad, who waited upon him with cross-bow or gun; if princes or nobles were invited, they arrived with a large retinue of junkers, servants, halberdiers, and horses; a large rabble of beggars and rogues also flocked together, and the watchmen of the city had to guard against theft, robbery, and fire.
It was not always easy for the givers of the feast to keep order between the inhabitants and the strangers, for, together with a natural heartiness and wish to adapt themselves to their guests, there was in many haughty minds a very sensitive pride of home and self-confidence, which inclined them, more than would be the case now, to turn into ridicule the unusual dress, manners, and language of strangers. Betwixt certain districts there always floated, like small thunder-clouds, certain old satirical sayings and ironical stories. Swiss and Suabians, Thuringians and Franconians, Hessians and Rhinelanders, reported laughable things of each other. But a word spoken when drinking, or a mocking reminder, might disturb the peace of the festival, or excite parties to sudden anger; and words of conciliation and redoubled friendliness were not always successful. Thus the "Seehasen"[[70]] and the "Kühmelker" had a severe quarrel at the cross-bow shooting at Constance in 1458. A man from Constance, who was playing at dice with one from Lucerne, called the Bernese coin plappart, which he had won, a cow-plappart; the Lucerner fired up, blows and uproar followed. The Lucerne marksmen remained to the end of the festival; but they complained loudly that the laws of hospitality were broken, and their honour wounded. After their return home the people of Lucerne and Unterwalden raised the war-banner and fell on the territory of Constance, the inhabitants of which had to pay 5000 gulden as an expiation. Yet, in general, it was provided that such disturbances should be reconciled on the spot, or satisfaction given to the guests. Strictly were the shooting regulations administered by the chosen judges, and zealously did hosts and guests endeavour to enhance the feeling of duty in those belonging to them. Among the numerous specimens of city hospitality of that time the most pleasing is the kindly connection which existed for more than 100 years betwixt Zurich and Strasburg, frequently interrupted by many passionate ebullitions, but always renewed. In 1456, six years after the Swiss had established the first great shooting-feast at Sursee, in the country of Lucerne, some young Swiss, in the early dawn of morning, conveyed a large pot of hot millet porridge, in a vessel, from Zurich to Strasburg; they arrived in the evening; threw the famed Zurich rolls among the people, and delivered the still warm millet porridge to the council of the friendly city, as a token of how quickly their Swiss friends would come to their aid if they ever needed it in earnest; they danced the same night with the Strasburg maidens. After that, the excitement and sufferings of the Reformation knit new spiritual ties betwixt Zurich and the great imperial city. Bucer and the Swiss reformers, the literati and artists of both cities, had been in close alliance; though differences of confession had for a short time produced alienation. The Strasburgers had often experienced the hospitality of the Swiss. Now when, 150 years after the first journey of the porridge-pot, the city of Strasbourg had again announced a brilliant prize-shooting for crossbow and gun, and a strong detachment from Zurich had celebrated with them the first fortnight of the cross-bow shooting, then a number of young Zurichers, under the lead of some gentlemen of the council, determined to repeat the old voyage. Again, like their ancestors, they placed the great metal pot, weighing 120 pounds, filled with hot porridge, in the ship, and voyaged in the early dawn of morning, all dressed alike in rose and black, from the Limmat into the Aar, from the Aar into the Rhine, with trumpeters and drummers. The places by which the ship flew, in the sunny mid-day, greeted the jolly fellows with acclamations; in the evening they reached Strasburg, having been long before announced from the towers. The citizens thronged to meet them; delegates from the council greeted them; they carried the pot on shore and delivered it to the councillors; they scattered amongst the children of Strasbourg 300 strings of Zurich rolls, and again were the manly words spoken: "Quickly as we have come to-day in sport, we will come to help in earnest." And at the abundant supper the old homely dish, still warm, was enjoyed with pleasure. The Strasburger Fischart has described with hearty satisfaction the journey of the porridge-pot, and we find in his verses the warmth which then animated both hosts and guests. The course of the voyage of the porridge-pot, and even the sums which the Swiss deposited in the urn of fortune--"In the name of the fortunate ship and of the parent town"--were paid by the city of Zurich. In return they received the small silver utensils which were won in the urn by the Zurichers. The collective costs of the journey which Zurich then paid for its marksmen amounted to 1500 gulden.
It is of great interest to consider these brotherly festivals of the city communities, according to districts. In the middle of the sixteenth century, a journey from Nuremburg to Augsburg was neither so easy nor free from danger, as now from Leipsig to Zurich. The birds of prey of the country gladly flew from their castellated eyries into the woods which surrounded, in wide circles, the hospitable city; more than once was the fortunate marksman waylaid and robbed, by noble horsemen, of the beautiful purse with the guldens he had won, and his banner broken. Even to greater companies the road was insecure, and the travelling toilsome; the inns at small places were frequently very bad, without meat or drink. It is easily understood that at the largest prize-shooting, to which every unexceptional man was welcome, persons from a distance only took a part when accident had brought them into the neighbourhood. Therefore it is matter of surprise that the district to which cities sent their invitations was so large. The Wittenburghers were welcome guests at Ratisbon and the men of Stuttgart at Meissen. Sometimes accident or the friendship of distinguished citizens, knit these bonds of hospitality betwixt far-distant cities; then the invitations went forty, fifty, or one hundred miles. But, on the whole, we may divide these hospitable cities into groups. The Swiss, Suabians, and Bavarians were in close union. Augsburg, more than Nuremberg, was long the centre and pattern of these groups. To it belonged the Rhine as far as Strasbourg. The greatest and most splendid prize-shootings were for two centuries celebrated in this part of Germany. In Bavaria, about 1400, all the more powerful places were in firm intercommunion. There, the city whose marksmen, at one shooting, had won the first prize, was bound at the next shooting festival to produce the same first prize. Thus Kehlheim, which had won the ram at Munich, invited the Munichers, in 1404, to contend for it again.[[71]] But smaller festivals also comprehended a wide circle. At Ratisbon, for example, the Bavarians and Suabians shot with the larger cities of Thuringia and Meissen; also with Lindau, Salzburg, and some places in Bohemia. The Tyrolese and Salzburghers collected more especially at small shooting meetings of their districts; so also the Franconians north of the Maine. A lasting union of middle-sized and smaller places existed there. This Franconian union comprehended in the sixteenth century, together with Würzburg and Schweinfurt, forty-one cities and forty-two villages with free peasants, particularly from the bishopric of Würzburg and the royal county of Henneberg.
The chief prize was a neck chain--"The Jewel of the Country"--which the victor wore round his neck for a year, and which imposed upon the victorious place the duty of giving the next shooting meeting. If the community of the union who had to give the feast was small and poor, the meeting was badly attended. Thus at Neustadt, on Saale, in 1568, only delegates from eighteen cities and three villages appeared. The small participation of the village communities, at this period, is a proof that their strength was diminished in comparison with the former period. Another group comprehended the possessions of the House of Saxony; the Thuringians and many Franconians and Meisseners who sent the garland to one another. These also zealously maintained the cross-bow at their prize-shootings; the popinjay was seldom erected, except at smaller meetings, where it was long upheld. At these festivals the Franconians, up to and beyond Nuremberg, were regular guests; some of the Suabians and more of the German Bohemians. But, on the frontiers of this group, at Halle, another association began, the centre of which was Magdeburg; here the popinjay was more frequent. Thus at the great prize-shooting at Halle, in 1601, the expression "shooting court" appears, and many special usages. This circle embraced the Harz cities up to Brunswick, and the Altmark, and reaches further to the east and north, for the people of Halle sent their invitations as far as Berlin, Brandenburg, and even Griefswald. Again, the cities of the great province of Silesia were in close union, with Breslau for their centre point; there the popinjay shooting attained to its highest development, and the festivals were very frequent. Competition was not unfrequent between two cities; thus, in 1504, between Liegnitz and Neisse, when the Breslauers said, in answer to the invitation of Neisse, that they had already accepted the invitation of Liegnitz, and therefore could not go. The chief places of meeting of the cities of middle Rhine were Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle; but the great prize-shootings of this country, which flourished at the end of the fifteenth century, were embittered by religious discord. It is remarkable that in the countries of Lower Saxony, on the North Sea and Baltic, where the old Hanse towns had founded such noble city unions, the prize-shootings were less frequent and distinguished. The most zealous supporters of them were the Swiss, Suabians, Thuringians, Meisseners, and Silesians. With the Swiss these great festivals attained the character of exercises of arms; they were practical and serious; the waggish humour and the tricks of the pritschmeister flourished in Middle Germany.[[72]] It is not accidental that in the whole of the Protestant portion of the German empire, the power and comfort of the citizen have been most nobly developed.
If these particulars give only a very imperfect picture of the splendour, the opulence, and the independence which were developed in these festivals by the German cities in ancient times, yet they will succeed in making the reader feel, that though we have gained much in comparison with those times, we have also lost something. Only very lately it would have appeared hazardous to the greatest city communities to arrange festivals which, according to our rate of money, would cost perhaps more than fifty thousand thalers; not to do honour to the visit of some sovereign, but for the pleasure of German fellow-citizens, and which would last three or even five weeks, and commit many hundreds, or even thousands of guests during this period to the friendly hospitality, partly of individuals and partly of the city community. It is true that time has become more valuable to us, life is enjoyed more rapidly, and we compress into days what would have employed our ancestors for weeks. It is true that modern men seek recreation in summer in ways which were almost unknown three centuries ago. They isolate themselves from the bustle and hard daily labour of the world among mountain woods and alpine valleys; whilst our ancestors, on the contrary, sought pleasure and refreshment in large societies of men, and left the narrow boundaries of their walls,--the guild room and the council hall,--for those great re-unions in which they could gain honour and prizes by their own exertions. But it must not be forgotten that it was just in those last two centuries in which the great civic festivals became impossible, that many general interests were developed in German citizen life, which, however unsatisfactory they may be, form an immeasurable step in advance of the olden time. There is also a fundamental difference in culture which distinguishes us from our ancestors; but this difference does not rest on the necessary progress of a later race. We feel that the old brotherhood of cities and districts had something noble in it, in which our life is very deficient. The joyful self-assertion of man in social intercourse with others, the facility with which common usages unite together hundreds and indeed thousands, and, above all, the imposing vigour with which cities asserted their position, all this has been too long wanting to us. If it was seldom granted to our forefathers to feel, on the great occasions of life, the unity of German interests in Church and State, and through a common action and great triumph to ennoble the life of every individual, yet they knew at least how to open, by their fellowship, a domain in which expression was given to the German nature, to human relations and to community of spirit.
It is only within a few years that it has become a necessity to Germans to expand their life in this direction. It was no mere accident that made German men of science, in their wandering meetings, the first to give significant expression to some of the noblest interests of the nation by national association. They were followed by the singers and others, then the gymnasts, finally the shooters. We are now, after more than two centuries of preparation, again treading in the same path in which our ancestors so grandly trod, but with a freer and nobler feeling. It has been a long-denied pleasure for us thus to be able to vaunt ourselves. But we should at the same time be mindful, and it is the object of these pages to remind us, that the citizen-class of Germany has striven, for more than two centuries since the Thirty Years' War, to become again as powerful and manly in this respect as their ancestors were.
But even of that time of weakness, the century that followed the great war, a picture shall be given. But it must be short. The hospitable prize-shootings of the cities had ceased; here and there a ruler gave a family festival, or, as a special act of grace, a large country shooting meeting, at which prizes were awarded, and their subjects allowed to participate. In the cities the old shooting associations still existed, though in many cases robbed of their prize cups, chains, and jewels; even the cautious Leipzigers had not preserved the silver statue of their holy Sebastian. Many old customs were maintained in their desolate shooting houses; the cross-bow, at the popinjay and target, had dragged on a miserable existence; it lasts in a few cities as a curiosity up to the present day; the rifled weapon became naturalised; in larger communities the new Imperial nobility favoured shooting guilds and their old "Königsschiessen,"[[73]] and these festivals acquired a stiff pretentious character of pedantic state action. This great change in the city festival,--the only meagre feast of arms which remained to the German citizen in the eighteenth century,--is apparent in a description of the Breslau shooting in the year 1738. It is found where one would hardly look for it, in the laborious work of the physician Johann Christian Kundmann, entitled "Beruhmte Schlesier in Müntzen," 1738, i., p. 128, and is given as follows, literally, with few omissions:--
"At this time the following solemnities were observed at the 'Königsschiessen.' On Whitsunday the king of the preceding year went with the elders, the Zwinger brotherhood, also with some invited friends, in some twenty carriages, out to the Zwinger.[[74]] By the side of the carriage went the secretaries as servants, two outriders, the markers, and the king's own servant; they were received with kettle-drums and trumpets. After that, the perquisites of the king were read aloud to the shooters in the room, and those who wished to shoot for the kingdom were to sign their names with their own hand. Then appeared two gentlemen, commissaries of the worshipful and illustrious council, who are usually the two youngest councillors of the nobility; they wore Spanish mantles, trimmed with lace or fringe, and placed themselves opposite to the king in the room,--who stayed there in his kingly attire, bearing the great golden bird. The councillors state that they, as commissioners, have to be present at this shooting. After this the king goes to the shooting ground, accompanied by the commissioners, the elders, and shooters.