no means uncommon with
princely ladies. Scherr also adduces many other such princely examples.
A festival at the Mecklenburg court is thus described in naive fashion
by Schweinichen in his diary: "The native squires as well as the noble
young ladies lost themselves little by little, until finally there
remained with me but two ladies and one knight, who began a dance. I
followed with the other lady. It did not last long; my good friend
slipped with his dancer to the next chamber; I followed him. As we came
to the chamber, two squires and ladies rested in a bed; the one who
danced before me fell also with his lady in one bed. I asked my lady
what we should do. She said in her Mecklenburg language: I should lie by
her. I did not have her ask me a long time, but lay down with mantle and
garments, so did the lady, and thus we chatted till the dawn of morning;
however, in all honor. This they call there 'to lie by a maiden on truth
and faith,' but I do not trust such a 'lying by' for such truth and
faith might easily become roguish." Evidently, so far as the nobility
were concerned, delicacy and propriety were quite unknown in sixteenth
century society.

CHAPTER VII

WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION

Woman, it has been said, always needs a background. She has one in early
sixteenth century Germany a splendid background of material prosperity.

The great free cities were at the zenith of their power. Organized labor
had triumphed. The guilds and the merchant corporations had done their
work well. From the sturdy, self-respecting German handworker, modestly
offering his own wares for sale, had been evolved the governing
patrician. Prince, pope, emperor, even foreign potentates, bowed before
the German patrician, for he held the purse strings of the world. Not a
sovereign in all Europe dared enter into a campaign without permission
of the Fuggers, the great merchant-bankers of Augsburg.

In their magnificent free cities the patricians of Germany lived in far
more than royal splendor. The chronicler, Wimpheling, writes: "It was
not an uncommon thing to eat from gold and silver plates at merchants'
tables as I, myself, did in company with eleven other guests at
Cologne."

AEneas Sylvius exclaims to Martin Mayer, Chancellor of Mainz: "How is it
that even in your inns you always serve drinks in silver vessels? What
shall I say of the knights and of the bits of their horses which are of
pure gold, of thei