During the fourteenth century many causes had
combined to improve the condition of the industrial classes; and during
the end of the fourteenth and the early part of the fifteenth century the
condition of the peasantry and artisans of Northern Europe was better
than it had ever been before or has ever been since: wages were
comparatively high, employment plentiful, food and other necessaries of
life both abundant and cheap.[7:1] At the beginning of the sixteenth
century, however, the prices of the necessaries of life had risen
enormously, and there had been no corresponding increase in the earnings
of the industrial classes. Moreover, the Feudal Magnates had commenced to
exercise their oppressive power in a hitherto unparalleled manner: old
rights of pasture, of gathering wood and cutting timber, of hunting and
fishing, and so on, had been greatly curtailed, in many cases entirely
abolished, tithes and other manorial dues had been doubled and trebled,
and many new and onerous burdens, some of them entirely opposed to
ancient use and wont, had been imposed. In short, the peasantry and
labouring classes generally were oppressed and impoverished in countless
different ways.

In Germany, as indeed in most other parts of Feudal Europe, the
peasantry of the period were of three different kinds. Serfs
(_Leibeigener_), who were little better than slaves, and who were bought
and sold with the land they cultivated; villeins (_Hoeriger_), whose
services were assumed to be fixed and limited; and the free peasant
(_die Freier_), whose counterpart in England was the mediaeval
copyholder, who either held his land from some feudal lord, to whom he
paid a quit-rent in kind or in money, or who paid such a rent for
permission to retain his holding in the rural community under the
protection of the lord. To appreciate the state of mind of such folk in
the times of which we are writing, we should remember that "the good old
times" of the fifteenth century were still green in their minds, from
which, indeed, the memory of ancient freedom and primitive communism,
though little more than a tradition, had never been entirely banished:
which sufficiently accounts, not only for their impatience of their new
burdens, but also for their tendency to regard all feudal dues as direct
infringements of their ancient rights and privileges.

"We will that you free us for ever, us and our lands; and that we be
never named and held as serfs!" was the deman