fields, while water necessary for irrigating their meadows and turning their mills was cut off, and their crops were ruined by huntsmen trampling them down. They accused their lord of abusing his jurisdiction, of inflicting intolerable punishments, and of appropriating stolen goods; and in short they declared that they could no longer look for justice at his hands, or support their wives and families in face of his exactions.
These articles, which number sixty-two in all, are as remarkable for what they omit as for what they include. There is no trace of a religious element in them, no indication that their authors had ever heard of Luther or of the Gospel. They are purely agrarian in character, their language is moderate, and, if the facts are stated correctly, their demands are extremely reasonable. In its origin the Peasants' Revolt bore few traces of the intellectual and physical violence which marked its later course. It began like a trickling stream in the highlands; as it flowed downwards it was joined first by one and then by another revolutionary current, till it united in one torrent all elements of disorder and threatened to inundate the whole of Germany.
When once the movement had started, it quickly gathered momentum. A thousand tenants from the Stühlingen district assembled with such arms as they could collect, and chose as their captain Hans Müller of Bulgenbach, an old landsknecht who showed more talent for organisation than most of the peasants' leaders. In August he made his way south to Waldshut, probably with the object of obtaining the co-operation of the discontented proletariate in the towns. The towns had been permeated with new religious ideas to an extent which was almost unknown in the country, the upper classes by Lutheranism, the lower by notions of which Carlstadt and Münzer were the chief exponents. Waldshut itself was in revolt against its Austrian government, which had initiated a savage persecution of heretics in the neighbourhood and demanded from the citizens the surrender of their preacher, Balthasar Hubmaier. It was thus predisposed to favour the peasants' cause, but the often repeated statement that Müller, in August, 1524, succeeded in establishing an Evangelical Brotherhood is incorrect. That scheme, which probably emanated from the towns, was not effected until the meeting at Memmingen in the following February; and the intervening winter elapsed without open conflict between the peasants and the authorities. The Archduke Ferdinand's attention was absorbed by the momentous struggle then being waged in North Italy, and every available landsknecht had been sent to swell the armies of Charles V. The Swabian League, the only effective organisation in South Germany, could muster but two thousand troops, and recourse was had to negotiations at Stockach which were not seriously meant on the part of the lords. Many of the peasants, however, returned home on the understanding that none but ancient services should be exacted; but the lords,
