press
manifesto, but one manufactured by the old Chroniclers.] No want of
complaint, nor of complainants: Town of Thorn, Town of Dantzig, Kulm,
all manner of Towns and Baronages, proceeded now to form a BUND, or
general Covenant for complaining; to repugn, in hotter and hotter
form, against a domineering Ritterdom with back so broken; in fine,
to colleague with Poland,--what was most ominous of all. Baronage,
Burgherage, they were German mostly by blood, and by culture were wholly
German; but preferred Poland to a Teutsch Ritterdom of that nature.
Nothing but brabblings, scufflings, objurgations; a great outbreak
ripening itself. Teutsch Ritterdom has to hire soldiers; no money to
pay them. It was in these sad years that the Teutsch Ritterdom, fallen
moneyless, offered to pledge the Neumark to our Kurfurst; 1444, that
operation was consummated. [Pauli, ii. 187,--does not name the sum.] All
this goes on, in hotter and hotter form, for ten years longer.

"PERIOD THIRD begins, early in 1454, with an important special
catastrophe; and ends, in the Thirteenth year after, with a still
more important universal one of the same nature. Prussian BUND, or
Anti-Oppression Covenant of the Towns and Landed Gentry, rising in
temperature for fourteen years at this rate, reached at last the
igniting point, and burst into fire. February 4th, 1454, the Town of
Thorn, darling first-child of Teutsch Ritterdom,--child 223 years old at
this time, ['Founded 1231, as a wooden Burg, just across the river, on
the Heathen side, mainly round the stem of an immense old Oak that grew
handy there,--Seven Barges always on the river (Weichsel), to fly to
our own side if quite overwhelmed' _Oak and Seven Barges_ is still the
Town's-Arms of Thorn. See Kohler, _Munzbelustigungen,_xxii. 107; quoting
Dusburg (a Priest of the Order) and his old _Chronica Terrae Prusciae,_
written in 1326.] and grown very big, and now very angry,--suddenly took
its old parent by the throat, so to speak, and hurled him out to the
dogs; to the extraneous Polacks first of all. Town of Thorn, namely,
sent that day its 'Letter of Renunciation' to the Hochmeister over
at Marienburg; seized in a day or two more the Hochmeister's Official
Envoys, Dignitaries of the Order; led them through the streets, amid
universal storm of execrations, hootings and unclean projectiles,
straight, to jail; and besieged the Hochmeister's Burg (BASTILLE of
Thorn, with a few Ritters in it), all the artil