[Sidenote: Plunder the church]
Still more violent was the spoliation of the church. The confiscations carried out in the name of religion redounded to the benefit of the newly rich. It is true that all the property taken did not fall into their hands; some was kept by the prince, more was used to found or endow hospices, schools and asylums for the poor. {551} But the most and the best of the land was soon thrown to the eager grasp of traders and merchants. In England probably one-sixth of all the cultivated soil in the kingdom was thus transferred, in the course of a few years, into the hands of new men. Thus were created many of the "county families" of England, and thus the new interest soon came to dominate Parliament. Under Henry VII the House of Lords, at one important session, mustered thirty spiritual and only eighteen temporal peers. In the reign of his son the temporal peers came to outnumber the spiritual, from whom the abbots had been subtracted. The Commons became, what they remained until the nineteenth century, a plutocracy representing either landed or commercial wealth.
Somewhat similar secularizations of ecclesiastical property took place throughout Germany, the cities generally leading. The process was slow, but certain, in Electoral Saxony, Hesse and the other Protestant territories, and about the same time in Sweden and in Denmark. But something the same methods were recommended even in Roman Catholic lands and in Russia of the Eastern Church, so contagious were the examples of the Reformers. [Sidenote: 1536] Venice forbade gifts or legacies to church or cloisters. [Sidenote: 1557] France, where confiscation was proposed, [Sidenote: 1516] partially attained the same ends by subjecting the clergy to the power of the crown.
[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie]
Among the groups into which society naturally falls is that of the intellectual class, the body of professional men, scientists, writers and teachers. [Sidenote: Bribes the intelligentsia] This group, just as it came into a new prominence in the sixteenth century, at the same time became in part an annex and a servant to the money power. The high expense of education as compared with the Middle Ages, the enormous fees then charged for graduating in professional schools, the custom of buying {552} livings in the church and practices in law and medicine, the need of patronage in letters and art, made it nearly impossible for the sons of the poor to enter into the palace of learning. Moreover the patronage of the wealthy, their assertion of a monopoly of good form and social prestige, seduced the professional class that now ate from the merchant's hand, aped his manners, and served his interests. For four hundred years law, divinity, journalism, art, and education, have cut their coats, at least to some extent, in the fashion of the court of wealth.
[Sidenote: And subjugates the proletariat]
Last of all, there remained the only power that proved itself nearly a match for money, that of labor. Far outnumbering the capitalists, in every other way the workers were their inferiors,—in education, in organization, in leadership and in material resources. One thing that made their struggle so hard was that those men of exceptional ability who might have been their leaders almost always made fortunes of their own and then turned their strength against their former comrades. Labor also suffered terribly from quacks and ranters with counsels of folly or of madness.
The social wars of the sixteenth century partook of the characteristics of both medieval and modern times. The Peasants' Revolt in Germany was both communistic and religious; the risings of Communeros and the Hermandad in Spain were partly communistic; the several rebellions in England were partly religious. But a new element marked them all, the demand on the part of the workers for better wages and living conditions. The proletariat of town and mining district joined the German peasants in 1524; the revolt was in many respects like a gigantic general strike.
[Sidenote: Emancipation of the serfs]
Great as are the ultimate advantages of freedom, the emancipation of the serfs cannot be reckoned as {553} an immediate economic gain to them. They were freed not because of the growth of any moral sentiment, much less as the consequence of any social cataclysm, but because free labor was found more profitable than unfree. It is notable that serfs were emancipated first in those countries like Scotland where there had been no peasants' revolt; the inference is that they were held in bondage in other countries longer than it was profitable to do so for political reasons. The last serf was reclaimed in Scotland in 1365, but the serfs had not been entirely freed in England even in the reign of Elizabeth. In France the process went on rapidly in the 15th century, often against the wishes of the serfs themselves. One hundred thousand peasants emigrated from Northern France to Burgundy at that time to exchange their free for a servile state. However, they did not enjoy their bondage for long. Serfs in the Burgundian state, especially in the Netherlands, lost their last chains in the sixteenth century, most rapidly between the years 1515 and 1531. In Germany serfdom remained far beyond the end of the sixteenth century, doubtless in part because of the fears excited by the civil war of 1525.