German Culture Past and Present | Page 6

conquered
inhabitants. The latter, though not all reduced to a servile condition,
nevertheless held their land from the conquering body under conditions
which constituted them an order of freemen inferior to the new-comers.
To put the matter briefly, the military leaders developed into barons
and princes, and in some cases the nominal centralization culminated,
as in France and England, in the kingly office; while, in Germany and
Italy, it took the form of the revived Imperial office, the spiritual
overlord of the whole of Christendom being the Pope, who had his
vassals in the prince-prelates and subordinate ecclesiastical holders. In
addition to the princes sprung originally from the military leaders of the
migratory nations, there were their free followers, who developed
ultimately into the knighthood or inferior nobility; the inhabitants of the
conquered districts forming a distinct class of inferior freemen or of
serfs. But the essentially personal relation with which the whole
process started soon degenerated into one based on property. The most
primitive form of property--land--was at the outset what was termed
allodial, at least among the conquering race, from every social group
having the possession, under the trusteeship of his head man, of the
land on which it settled. Now, owing to the necessities of the time,
owing to the need of protection, to violence, and to religious motives, it
passed into the hands of the overlord, temporal or spiritual, as his
possession; and the inhabitants, even in the case of populations which
had not been actually conquered, became his vassals, villeins, or serfs,
as the case might be. The process by means of which this was
accomplished was more or less gradual; indeed, the entire extinction of
communal rights, whereby the notion of private ownership is fully
realized, was not universally effected even in the West of Europe till
within a measurable distance of our own time.[3]
From the foregoing it will be understood that the oppression of the
peasant, under the feudalism of the Middle Ages, and especially of the

later Middle Ages, was viewed by him as an infringement of his rights.
During the period of time constituting mediæval history, the peasant,
though he often slumbered, yet often started up to a sudden
consciousness of his position. The memory of primitive communism
was never quite extinguished, and the continual peasant-revolts of the
Middle Ages, though immediately occasioned, probably, by some fresh
invasion, by which it was sought to tear from the "common man" yet
another shred of his surviving rights, always had in the background the
ideal, vague though it may have been, of his ancient freedom. Such,
undoubtedly, was the meaning of the Jacquerie in France, with its wild
and apparently senseless vengeance; of the Wat Tyler revolt in England,
with its systematic attempt to envisage the vague tradition of the
primitive village community in the legends of the current ecclesiastical
creed; of the numerous revolts in Flanders and North Germany; to a
large extent of the Hussite movement in Bohemia, under Ziska; of the
rebellion led by George Doza in Hungary; and, as we shall see in the
body of the present work, of the social movements of Reformation
Germany, in which, with the partial exception of Ket's rebellion in
England a few years later, we may consider them as virtually coming to
an end.
For the movements in question were distinctly the last of their kind.
The civil wars of religion in France, and the great rebellion in England
against Charles I, which also assumed a religious colouring, open a
new era in popular revolts. In the latter, particularly, we have clearly
before us the attempt of the new middle class of town and country, the
independent citizen, and the now independent yeoman, to assert
supremacy over the old feudal estates or orders. The new conditions
had swept away the special revolutionary tradition of the mediæval
period, whose golden age lay in the past with its communal-holding
and free men with equal rights on the basis of the village
organization--rights which with every century the peasant felt more and
more slipping away from him. The place of this tradition was now
taken by an ideal of individual freedom, apart from any social bond,
and on a basis merely political, the way for which had been prepared by
that very conception of individual proprietorship on the part of the
landlord, against which the older revolutionary sentiment had protested.

A most powerful instrument in accommodating men's minds to this
change of view, in other words, to the establishment of the new
individualistic principle, was the Roman or Civil law, which, at the
period dealt with in the present book, had become the basis whereon
disputed points were settled in the Imperial Courts. In this respect also,
though to a lesser extent, may be mentioned the