Byways of History, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century

Front matter

BYEWAYS OF HISTORY, -■BOM THE TWELFTH TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. TO WHICH 13 NOW FI P.3T ADDED, A SKETCH OF J. SilMiait firagjrt as % £stetnt|[ €mht& FROM HIS DIARY, RECENTLY DISCOVERED. B, MES. PEECT SINNETT. " Yet, I doubt not, through the ages one unceasing purpose runs. And the thoughts of men are widen'd, with the process of the suns." Tennyson LONDON : RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. OLIVER & BOYD, EDINBURGH ; HODGES -fe SMITH, DUBLIN and to be had or all booksellers, and at all the railway stations. 1854. PRINTED BY HARRISON AND SONS, LONDON GAZETTE OFFICE, ST. MARTIN'S LANE.

Preface

TO THE PRESENT EDITION. The present edition has been carefully revised, and I have been enabled to add to it a very curious historical relic, in a sketch of the life and adventures of Sir Hans of Schweinichen, a Silesian knight of the sixteenth century, who passed many years in the service of the pro digal and spendthrift Duke Henry of Liegnitz and Brieg, with whom he went through a long course of rambling adventures, and traversed the German empire in all directions. Being, probably, more familiar with the pen than most German nobles of his time, as he had, in the course of his duty as Hofmeister, or master of the household, to keep many accounts ; he also undertook and continued through many years a diary of his life, which affords a remarkable contribution to the history of manners and morals of the age in which he lived, as well as a pair of striking and life-like portraits of the simple hearted autobiographer himself, and the jovial princely vagabond to whom he rendered such long, faithful, and disinterested service.

The original MS. was discovered about thirty years ago in the Castle of Furstenstein in Silesia, and it was afterwards printed and published by the Silesian Historical and Antiquarian Society at Breslau. The Diary has been compared to that of Pepys, as throwing the same light on the manners of the Germans of the sixteenth century, as the celebrated memoirs have done on those of the English under Charles II., but in personal character the old knight has greatly the advantage. London, December 24, 1853.

PREFACE.

TO THE FIRST EDITION. The purpose of this work will perhaps be sufficiently indicated by its title. It was, in the first instance, my intention merely to introduce to English readers the sub ject of the Peasant War of Germany, one of those inte resting and important episodes which we sometimes meet with in rambling through what may be called the " Byeways of History," and which usually make us better acquainted with the true character of an epoch than a journey of greater extent along its beaten Highways. But in doing so I found it desirable, if not absolutely necessary, to glance at the previous condition of the society from which this fearful phenomenon arose. The term " Byeways " may, I fear, be considered in some measure a misnomer, with respect to events that have filled so large a space in history as the conquests of the Teutonic Knights (the Masters of Prussia); but it may be referred perhaps rather to the humble rise, than to the meridian splendours, of the Order.

I must plead guilty, however, to having been tempted rather further than necessary by the interest of the subject ; I believe, I may add, its novelty to most English readers, and the illustration it affords of the power of a pure motive, even when struggling through the fogs and thick darkness of ignorance and fanaticism. In conclusion, it is perhaps not altogether superfluous to add, since this little work is intended as a contribution, however trifling, to history, I should not think the slightness of its texture any excuse for departing, in the smallest instance, from the truth — as far as I have been able to ascertain it. In the legends of saints, &c, I need hardly say my object was not to represent the actual fact, but what appeared such in the ages in question. I have subjoined a list of the sources of information to which I have applied, with the exception of one or two, which, having seen only in foreign public libraries, and neglected to note down, I am not now able to give with accuracy.

For the account of the Peasant War, I have been principally indebted to Dr. Zimmerman's Allgemeine Geschichte des Bauern-Krieges, though I have consulted every authority that I could find on the subject. London, December, 1850. CONTENTS. Page Introduction ....... 1 Chap. I. The Castles of Germany and their Inmates . . 13 II. Fist Law . . . . . . . . 27 III. Free Cities of Germany . . . . .37 IV. The Hansa at Home and Abroad . . .50 V. Fathers of the Desert ..... 70 VI. Monks in Early Times . . . . .82 VII. The Abbey of Altenberg 87 VIII. The Abbey of Altenberg (continued) . . .95 IX. The Abbey of Altenberg (continued) . . . 103 X. The Masters of Prussia . . . . .123 XI. PrusBia in the Old Time 133 XII. The House of Marienberg ..... 158 XIII. Before the War 180 XIV. The Drummer of Niklashausen .... 189 XV.

The Brothers of the Order of Bread and Cheese . 193 XVI. The Clouted Shoon . . " . . . .199 XVII. Poor Conrad - . .211 XVIII. Insurrection in Carinthia ..... 226 XIX. Ulrich von Hutten 230 XX. Mutterings of the Storm . . . ' . .242 XXI. The Prince-Abbots of Kempten and their Subjects . 247 XXII. Movement Men ...... 254 XXIII. Movement Men (concluded) .... CONTENTS. VI Page Chap. XXIV. An unexpected Ally 206 XXV. The Twelve Articles 269 XXVI. Luther and the Peasants . . . .275 XXVII. A brief Triumph 280 XXVIII. Wars and Rumours of Wars . . .* .284 XXIX. The Catastrophe of Weinsperg . . .' 300 XXX. The Imperial City of Heilbronn . . .311 XXXI. The Peasants and the Knight of the Iron Hand 322 XXXII. The Field of Frankenhausen . . .333 XXXIII. The Siege of the Castle of the Frauenberg . 338 XXXIV The Last Scene of the Tragedy . . .346 XXXV.

Passages from the Diary of a German Knight . 360 XXXVI. Passages from the Diary (continued) . . 374 XXXVII. Passages from the Diary (continued) . . B BYEWAYS OF HISTORY.

Introduction

. As antiquity was the childhood of the world, busying itself with the ever new delights of its freshly awakened senses, yet amidst a thousand aimless sports, often recog nising by happy intuition the truths " which we are searching all our lives to find," the middle ages were its youth, with their pride in individual strength, their exu berant activity of fancy, thirst of action, effervescent passion, their crude notions of honour, and enthusiasm for what was great and noble, their fervent love and boundless reverence. A bold free spirit was abroad, bursting sometimes into frantic excesses, but manifesting itself also in virtues of which we have perhaps lost the measure. One striking characteristic of those ages, once called the " dark," but more honourably distinguished since as " ages of faith," is the strong line of demarcation drawn between different classes of society.

Our high and low and middling classes are now often like the North Sea, or the Bay of Biscay — only parts of the same great world ocean ; it is impossible to perceive the point where they meet it, for they are all mixed and confounded together in its multitudinous waters. BYEWAYS OF HISTORY. In the middle ages, the noble, the peasant, the citizen, the monk, were separated by strong barriers difficult to pass, impossible to overlook. Their education, their habits of life, were wholly different ; their interests, apparently at least opposite * their paths of life lay widely apart. But for that all-pervading religious element in which they were all immersed, a cohesive force for which there is no substitute, it seems that the heterogeneous parts of the social fabric must have fallen asunder. Chivalry, indeed, flaming forth from the united action of three great forces, religion, valour and love, concen trated into one burning focus, fused together many dis cordant elements, and shed a splendour not its own upon the feudal system, which in its turn served to secure and consolidate the more etherial essence of chivalry ; but both are so intimately connected, that it is scarcely possible to consider the one without the other.

We must not forget, however, that what is known of the one is certain and unquestionable ; of the other, more than half fable ; and on looking closely into the facts even of the history of chivalry, much of the glory thrown round it by poetry and romance entirely vanishes, and its real annals remain prosy and melancholy enough. It seems unlikely that more than a very few, even of those who professed it, were ever really actuated by its pure spirit ; and even the whole body of the knights of Europe was a very inconsiderable number compared with that of the classes whom they trampled in the dust, whom the knight regarded as of no more worth than his dog or his falcon, beyond comparison less than his war horse.* The peculiar features by which successive ages are dis tinguished, present themselves more or less prominently in various countries.

As the " monarchy of the middle classes" might perhaps best be studied in England at the present day, or the era of cabinet and court ascendency in the history of France, during the eighteenth century, so the characteristic features of European society, from the 12th to the 16th centuries, are in no other country so * Amongst the crusaders at Jerusalem, the ransom of a war horse was three times as much as for a serf.

INTRODUCTION.

. 3 strikingly presented as in Germany, The similarity of religious and political institutions, and of the relative position of various classes of society throughout Europe during the ages in which it prevailed, produce indeed a certain uniformity of character to whatever country we turn (a uniformity which steamboats and railroads are bidding fair to bring about by quite a different method for the next generation). But nowhere else did that system of society continue so long, or leave such strong and enduring traces — traces which are, indeed, still per ceptible in the character and manners of the people — in the condition of the peasantry, and in many still subsist ing institutions, as to the eye in the innumerable ruins scattered over the German soil, which neither storm, nor lightning, nor the fury of man, nor the swift ravages of fire, nor the slow tooth of time, have yet been able to destroy.

The change in the condition of the bulk of the German people from that which is described in the earliest records to what we find it in the middle ages and down to the seventeenth century or later, is so great, and so incom parably for the worse, that it is difficult to believe it was not the effect of some violent and overwhelming con quest, instead of being brought about step by step by a series of events whose consequences were not foreseen, and by the gradual encroachments of one class upon another. In the earliest time in which we find mention of the Germans, they seem to have resembled in their manners and mode of life the present inhabitants of the Asiatic steppes— a nomadic race, living by pasturage and hunting, roving about with their flocks and herds, and wives and children, but having also something like the organisation of an army ; "being divided into companies and squadrons, and every man being bound to attend his chief in war.

At a subsequent period, when they had laid aside their wandering habits, and made thus one step in advance towards civilisation, society among them assumed a form of which a tolerably correct parallel may be seen at the present day among the tribes of the Caucasus. The land was divided in equal portions amongst the B BYEWATS OP HISTORT. free warriors, and every man dwelt upon his own estate* or allod, no such thing as a town or even a village existing: over the whole country. The houses stood in the middle of the land, surrounded by fields, meadows, and woods ; they consisted mostly of one great wooden shed or barn, in the midst of which was the hearth, regarded as the seat of honour, and the sanctuary of the wife, exactly as it is now in the tents of the Tatars. In the dwellings of the most opulent, a separate house was frequently erected for the exclusive use of the women,* a custom afterwards continued in many of the feudal castles.

There was also attached to it a " house of sacrifice," and sheds for cattle, horses, and corn, and for the abodes of the slaves. The allod was the inviolable pro perty of the owner ; no one had a right so much as to enter it without his permission, and any offence offered to him within its limits had to be expiated three-fold. Even on the commission of a serious crime, it was not lawful for any one to enter a man's house to take him, though in such a case the house might be set on fire. Laws were made by great assemblies of the people held in the open air (as they now are in Circassia), and the German of those days acknowledged no law that he had not helped to make. They are accused even of having been in then* love of freedom unruly to excess ; " non juberi non regi, sed cuncta ex libidine aqere."

Forest and river were in those days the property of all, and all disputes were settled by judges chosen by the ma jority of voices of the people themselves in the great national assemblies, the grounds of choice being, not birth but admired personal qualities, such as valour, long expe rience, or even sometimes, for property will have influence, the possession of great wealth in flocks or land. The dukes mentioned as existing then were merely leaders in war, chosen when they were wanted for that occasion only, every free man being equally eligible for the office. In following the fate of nations, it is easier than in that * It was called the Frauen Haus, or Frauenzimmer ; and the word has continued in use, though with a curious change of meaning, as it now signifies not the woman's dwelling, but the woman herself.

INTRODUCTION.

. of individuals to trace the course of the avenging Nemesis — to see how even-handed justice " doth commend the ingredients of their poisoned chalice to their own lips," when they have done evil ; or reward with full measure, pressed down and running over, whatever seeds of wisdom or genuine goodness have been sown. A nation, it has been truly said, always deserves its fate ; and perhaps none ever inflicted a wrong upon another without by that very act bringing evil on itself. Even in those comparatively happy days of freedom, to which we cannot wonder that " Young Germany," entangled in bureau cratic meshes, often looks back with fondness ; even then there existed, it seems, a canker in the state in the shape of a class of men reduced to slavery. They were mostly prisoners of war, the inhabitants of districts invaded as the great Germanic tribes moved westward.

As they extended their conquests, the relations of the Germans among themselves underwent many changes. It was now found expedient that the chiefs or kings, who had before possessed their power only for a limited period, should retain it permanently, for war was almost incessant. The affections of the people were of course little interested in the soil they so frequently abandoned to invade the richer possessions of their neighbours, but were concen trated on the leader who could guide them to victory and pillage, and help them to retain possession of the countries they had seized. By the time they were settled in their new dominions, they were also more widely scattered, and it was found inconvenient to call the people together as before, to deliberate on all matters concerning the public welfare.

The chiefs, therefore, mostly met and deliberated in their stead ; and the people seeing nothing of the consequences of this and similar departures from ancient custom, cared apparently little about the matter, and lived on as yet unmolested on their own farms, and cultivated their own fields. There are few lessons of history more certain than that no class ever long possessed power without misusing it. " We are sinners all," and there is perhaps no permanent security against the abuse of authority, but the knowledge and vigilance of those over whom it is to be exercised. In the reign of Charlemague, Counts were appointed over each of the far-extending gauen or districts now occupied by the Germans. They were to regulate all ordinary affairs on their own authority, and only appeal to the assembly of great leaders on important occa sions ; and the task of raising the national militia or heerbann with which they were intrusted, was easily turned into a source of further power and profit to themselves.

The Count often released from the obligation of attendance such freemen as were willing to pay good fees for the privilege of exemption, or who would consent to hold their land in dependence upon him ; and he took care to summon, again and again, such as refused compliance. Sometimes the poorer freemen would attempt to com promise matters by voluntarily performing for their powerful neighbour certain services — helping to cultivate his lands, or get in his harvests ,* but in these cases a claim was sure to be soon set up for such services as a matter of right. To enable them to support these and other encroachments the nobles found it expedient to collect around them bands of armed followers, easy to be main tained by exactions from the very men whom they helped to oppress. The struggles of the Carlovingian race increased the power of the nobles ; for many a free peasant's farm was laid waste in these quarrels, and the owner and his family had to sell themselves to slavery to escape starvation.

As the sovereign also, anxious to increase the number of his adherents, was willing to grant almost all the demands of his great vassals, they easily found means to appropriate districts which they had been originally appointed to administer for the Crown. The condition of the people of course grew worse every day ; the land which had been formerly sufficient for the support of a freeman and his family would not enable him to meet the ever new exactions to which he was exposed ; and he was often compelled to exchange, of his own accord, his nominal freedom for the service and protection of some powerful lord of a neighbouring castle ; for by this time most of the counts and nobles

INTRODUCTION.

. 7 had built themselves strongholds in which they and their misdeeds might find a refuge. Where the peasant had made no voluntary resignation of freedom, the most simple relations in which he stood to the noble were often forged into fetters for his unsuspecting ignorance. Little presents, made from time to time with a view to purchase the good-will of a powerful neighbouring noble, were counted as tokens of vassalage, and claimed as rightful tribute. We look further on, and find matters ever growing worse with him. In another century or two the peasant has to furnish to his lord not only money taxes, but contributions in cattle, skins, meat, poultry, fish, corn, wine, eggs, oil, malt, beer, honey, wax, cheese, flax, hemp, hay, &c. The death of the owner of the estate often costs the peasant his best garment or his hand somest cow ; and for the entrance of the successor, as well as for every son that comes of age, the peasant must still pay !

Of every animal in the farm-yard — foals, calves, lambs, pigs, kids, geese, fowls, and even bees — tribute was demanded ; and for the various kinds of forced labour, on the chase, in the forest, for the erection of castles — " Jagdfrohnen," " Baufrohnen," " Forest dienste," and so forth — so much time was required that one cannot well imagine how any was left. On many special occasions also — on visiting the emperor's court, on the marriage of a daughter, or the knighthood of a son — extraordinary contributions were demanded ; the nobles were not ashamed to throw on the peasant even the expenses of their attendance at the diet ; and on all occasions they measured their demands merely by their own wants or their greediness, without the slightest regard to the capabilities of the payer. In the contests between the temporal and spiritual powers, the iron hand of war tore asunder the few feeble restraints on violence and injustice that still existed.

Of the state of private morals among the German nobles, a significant hint is given in the truce effected by Frederick II. "Whatever son shall drive his father from his castle with fire and sword, or shall attack, wound, or imprison his father, shall forfeit his fief, and be regarded as dishonoured and an outlaw." The terrible Secret Tribunal also was, it is known, regarded at first in the light of a remedial measure. Private declarations of war were recognised among ordinary legal remedies, not only for princes and knights, but for courtiers and men in office, and even for merchants and traders. Some of these are still extant ; as that of the bakers of the Margrave of Baden, against the towns of Esslingen and Reutlingen in 1450 ; of the bakers of the Palatinate against the cities of Ulm and Augsburgh • of the journeymen shoemakers of Leipsig against the University in 1471.

Naked physical force, or what was well named faust-recht, that is, fist law, became openly the law of the land. To facilitate the carrying on of these feuds, the princes and nobles began to take into their service hordes of lanzknechts, mercenary soldiers, who were dismissed as soon as the war was over, and had no resource, when their money was spent, but highway robbery or mendicancy ; for, as a writer of the sixteenth century observes, — " Every lanzknecht seems to have taken an oath that, when he has once shouldered his lance, he will never do a day's work again." * * "It is a do nobody any good race that runs about unasked, unsought, to breed war and misfortune. The subjects whom obedience to their lords hath carried to the wars, when they are completed return again, and sit down to their work * but this unchristian and lost rabble, whose trade is robbing, murder ing, hacking, hewing, burning, drinking, gaming, and blaspheming — making widows and orphans, rejoicing in every man's sorrows, nourished by every man's wrongs, is, whether in or out of war, the plague of all the world.

They ask not of justice ; but if the devil should offer them good pay, would swarm about him like flies in summer." * The year 1495 is usually considered as the epoch of the abolition of the faustrecht, and the commencement of the settlement of disputes by legal decision ; but the benefits of the " Perpetual Peace " were almost confined to the estates of the empire ; and it was not till several years * Sebastian Frank.

INTRODUCTION.

. 9 afterwards that the citizens and peasants were allowed to claim its protection even against such nobles, knights, and prelates as were not their liege lords. That they should claim any rights against those who were, does not seem to have been even contemplated ; and for the restraints to which the lord was now subjected in his intercourse with his equals, he not unfrequently made himself amends by tightening the yoke on his unhappy vassals. The whole burden of the contributions for the expenses of the empire fell on the peasantry and the cities, for the nobles and clergy contributed nothing ; whilst, at the same time as the demands were made to the estates of the empire only, and the manner in which the taxes were to be collected from the people was left entirely to them, the electors, princes, and counts did not fail to make a little profit of their agency, and often included in their charges not only their own and their proxies' necessary expenses at the diet, but even a "consideration" for their services.

From the net of rents, taxes, duties, and claims for forced labour spread over him, the peasant had as little as ever the means of escaping, and if the lord wished to stretch his exactions beyond even what then were their legal limits, the doctors of the Roman law now came to his assistance, and extended to the German peasant the principles of a state of slavery from which it was pre tended he had proceeded, and he found himself thus oppressed by a double despotism — by open arbitrary power, and by a law which was often but the same flagrant injustice in a petrified form. Thus a country, endowed by nature with everything needed for the wants or the enjoyment of man, exhibiting every varied beauty of mountain, stream, woodland, and fertile plain, watered by glorious rivers, bringing forth with bounteous increase every seed committed to her bosom — this fair land came by degrees to be cultivated by a wretched race, whose ceaseless toil scarcely procured them the means of a coarse and joyless existence.

The people of Germany consisted towards the end of the fifteenth century " of a multitude of slaves and their drivers — slaves drilled to perform certain tasks for the use and benefit of their masters, living on their native soil like foreigners, strangers in their own house, like Ulysses sitting at the threshold of his own palace, and receiving the bones and morsels thrown to him by those who were revelling within upon his substance."* In watching the slow extinction of the light of freedom in Germany — in seeing the tyranny of the nobles becom ing ever harsher, the slavery of the people more hopeless, and that every fresh encroachment placed in the hands of the oppressor fresh instruments of wrong — we are naturally led to ask, what counteracting principles of good were at work amidst all this evil, by which men might at least live and struggle on ? for no society can subsist upon mere mephitic vapour and choke damp ; some pure and wholesome air must breathe in, or it will perish.

It seems to have proceeded from two sources; first, from the religious spirit, which, sometimes flaming up in splendour and far shooting radiance, sometimes flickering faint and low, was never wholly extinguished ; and, secondly, from the discovery that in courage, self-reliance, and brotherly co-operation, there is always hope — a disco very embodying itself in the rise of the free cities, — the free cities which were and are, and are to be, the centres of the national health and strength of Germany, behind whose walls and towers civil liberty took root and flourished — where the noble " ceased from troubling," and the weary peasant was at rest. The power of the church has been mentioned as among the chief causes of the misery aud depression of the people ; but the truth of this assertion depends much on the period under consideration.

In many cases it was not so much an original source of many of the evils in question, as itself contaminated by the influence and example of the nobility. The younger branches of their families who crowded its ranks brought with them habits and tempers very ill-suited to their profession, and occasioned many corruptions and abuses, especially in the convents* but it is probable that they rather improved than deteriorated under the discipline to * "Allgemeine Geschichte des Bauern Kriegs."

INTRODUCTION.

. which, more or less, they were compelled to submit. The state of morals in the convents bad, as it often was, was at all events not worse than in the lay societies of the period; and if we are more shocked at it, it must be because we assume that these institutions afforded means of improvement which their inmates might have used if they would. We cannot in that case regard the system of monasticism in itself as a necessary cause of corrup tion ; for, if it were, these immoralities would be not more but less the subjects of animadversion, being rather the consequences of a fatal error of the understanding, than of depravity of the will. Such an excuse, however, is hardly admissible ; for that, however unsuitable to a later age, they were adapted to the wants of an earlier period, and capable of affording the means of pure religious cul ture, there is proof enough.

Our judgment of the charac ter and influence of monasticism will, however, depend much on time and place; their chief mistake, perhaps, was the attempt to preserve unchanged their outward form, for in this world all bodily forms are destined to decay. In the middle ages monasticism seems often to have afforded the most suitable embodiment of the reli gious spirit. While popes and prelates were contending with temporal princes for worldly power and wealth, the monks were often devoting themselves, with the most disinterested zeal, to the cause of Christianity, burying themselves in the depth of woods, and travelling alone through pathless wildernesses to carry its glad tidings to nations yet in the darkness of heathenism. It was to the church that Europe was indebted for the first great effort made for the restraint of the fierce private warfare by which it was distracted.