The most fundamental cause of all these risings alike was, of course,
the cry of the oppressed for justice. This is eternal, as is also one
of the main alignments into which society usually divides itself, the
opposition of the poor and the rich. It is therefore not very
important to inquire whether the lot of the third estate was getting
better or worse during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In
either case there was a great load of wrong and tyranny to be thrown
off. But the question is not uninteresting in itself. As there are
diametrically opposite answers to it, both in the testimony of
contemporaries and in the opinion of modern scholars, it is perhaps
incapable of being answered. In some districts, and in some respects,
the lot of the poor was becoming a little easier; in other lands and in
different ways it was becoming harder. The time was one of general
prosperity, in which the peasant often shared. The newer methods of
agriculture, manufacture and commerce benefited him who knew how to
take advantage of them. That some did so may be inferred from the
statement of Sebastian Brant that the rustics dress like nobles, in
satin and gold chains. On the other hand the rising prices would bear
hard on those laborers dependent on fixed wages, though relieving the
burden of fixed rents. The whole people, except the merchants,
disliked the increasing cost of living and legislated against it to the
best of their ability. Complaints against monopoly were common, and
the Diets sometimes enacted laws against them. Foreign trade was
looked on with {89} suspicion as draining the country of silver and
gold. Again, although the peasants benefited by the growing stability
of government, they felt as a grievance the introduction of the new
Roman law with its emphasis upon the rights of property and of the
state. Burdens directly imposed by the territorial governments were
probably increasing. If the exactions from the landlords were not
becoming greater, it was simply because they were always at a maximum.
At no time was the rich gentleman at a loss to find law and precedent
for wringing from his serfs and tenants all that they could possibly
pay. [Sidenote: Peasant classes] The peasants were of three classes:
the serfs, the tenants who paid a quit-rent, and hired laborers. The
former, more than the others, perhaps, had now arrived at the
determination to assert their rights. For them the Peasants