The rural economy was also affected by economic changes. 16th century Germany was mainly ruralised; in 1500 about 75% of the population lived in rural communities. From this it isn’t surprising that population pressures caused land hunger. In some parts of Germany it was possible to clear forest or plough mountain pasture, but opportunities to create new high quality farmland were limited. Many areas had no option but to subdivide existing farms and tenancies. Such action meant however lower yields and smaller incomes, and this forced many to leave for towns adding to pressures there.
In response to a growing urban market there were some improvements. In the Rhineland and along the Baltic coast, advances in agricultural developed in the Netherlands (such as careful selection of seed and breeding animals, better tools, better use of manure, deeper ploughing and much improved crop rotation) were imported. These raised efficiency and yields. Everywhere else, however, these improvements were ignored. The impact of inflation on the rural economy was marked. The growing population in the 16th century and the larger concentrations of urban dwellers required abundant supplies of food. In the course of the century, wheat prices steadily rose and money again flowed into the countryside to pay for food, especially wheat. Some parts saw mounting land hunger, and this was to be the main source of tension of the unrest on 1525.
In the short term the land hunger was met by encroaching on margins land: mountain pasture, forest or land reclamation in coastal areas and this expansion was successful in a few areas such as the Tyrol and East Frisia, though it offered a limited solution.
A further response to land hunger was the subdivision of plots in inheritance, but again when these became too marginal, the problem persisted.
Land hunger remained the key feature then - added to this was the fundamental inflexibility of farming methods. Yields in the bulk of German agriculture were very low, giving typically a return of about 5 to 1 of the sowing and it remained extremely hard to convert from subsistence farming to production for the market. Where growing market opportunities did emerge from the expansion of urban population, conflicts simply resulted from efforts of landlords to respond and peasants to resist.
Also, in adopting Protestantism the North German princes confiscated and sold ecclesiastical properties. It is difficult to assess the exact economic repercussions of these secularisations, but the placing of numerous properties upon the land market almost surely encouraged the injection of capital into the countryside.
Second, the high price of wheat did not everywhere make cereal cultivation the most remunerative use of the land. The price of wool continued to be buoyant, and this, linked with the availability of cheap wheat from the east, sustained the conversion of plough land into pastures that also had begun in the late Middle Ages.
Overall therefore it can be seen that there was a growing urban market and the need to provide for this created tension as both prosperous peasants and landlords wanted to engage in capitalist farming. Tension could be generated between those peasants wanting to commercialise production and thus resenting feudal restrictions and conservative landlords determined to impose or re-impose feudal dues and labour services in an effort to maintain their own income at a time of rising prices.
Also, tension could be generated between those progressive landlords wanting to enclose land and maximise commercial production and conservative peasantry resenting their loss of traditional common land and other rights. In both cases peasants complained of landlord harshness and a second serfdom.
As the countryside struggled, conflicts of interest also arose between landless peasants and prosperous peasants who owned or rented substantial, viable landholdings, but the more serious collision was between lords and their peasants. On average, the incomes of German nobles kept pace with inflation, but those heavily dependent on fixed rents were in grave danger. There were two possible methods to get round this. Firstly the landlord could raise ground rents. Secondly he could change the terms of tenancy agreements and the medieval feudal obligations peasants owed their lords. The two halves of Europe chose different approaches to this problem.
Germany to the west of the Elbe pushed rents up and converted rents payable in food or personal work to a cash sum. By contrast, Germany to the east of the Elbe kept and developed peasant labour services. Noble landowners in the east strengthened their own position by forcing their labourers into strictly controlled arrangements that left the peasants with greater work obligations and denied them the legal freedom to leave the village and look for other work.
On average, German peasants east of the Elbe were being paid for only 35 per cent of the days they worked in the 1530s (and the proportion continued to fall). Throughout the sixteenth century then, peasants were becoming serfs. The dividing line between these radically different solutions was the River Elbe, which cut Germany in half and meant that both systems operated within the empire. Historians are uncertain how to explain this remarkable difference, but suspect that the primary answer lies in the much thinner populations east of the river. Labour there was in short supply so it was that, rather than money, which lords needed the most.
The early modern countryside presents an infinitely complex mixture of old and new ways of holding and working the land and this helps explain the confusion and tensions in landlord-peasant relations which forms the backdrop to the Peasants Revolt. Whichever side of the Elbe, all such changes were deeply disturbing to the peasantry and, on top of falling real wages and rising prices, put them under growing strain. In the struggle to live, much peasant land had to be sold; on average, the proportion of land in German states owned by peasants fell from one-third in 1500 to one-sixth by 1550. In consequence, the number of peasants no longer self-sufficient in grain shot up, leaving them at the mercy of fluctuating market prices for basic food - guaranteeing yet higher rates of peasant debt and starvation. One consequence was peasant revolt.
In eastern Germany (with the exception of electoral Saxony) - and eastern Europe in general, marked generally by the line of the Elbe, the crucial change was the formation of a new type of great property, called traditionally in the German literature the Gutsherrschaft. The estate was divided into two principal parts: the landlord's demesne, from which he took all the harvest; and the farms of the peasants, who supplied the labour needed to work the demesne. The peasants (and their children after them) were legally serfs, bound to the soil. These bipartite, serf-run estates superficially resemble the classical manors of the early Middle Ages but differ from them in that the new estates were producing primarily for commercial markets.
The binding of the peasants of Eastern Europe to the soil and the imposition of heavy labour services constitute, in another traditional term, the "second serfdom."
In the more contemporary west, the characteristic form of great property was the Grundherrschaft ("ownership of land"). This was an aggregation of rent-paying properties. The lord might also be a cultivator, but he worked his land through hired labourers.
Historians distinguish two phases in its appearance. The nobility and gentry, even without planning to do so, accumulated large tracts of abandoned land during the late medieval population collapse. However, depopulation also meant that landlords could not easily find the labour to work their extensive holdings. Population, was growing again by 1500, and prices (especially the price of cereals) steadily advanced. Inflation threatened the standard of living of the landlords; to counter its effects, they needed to raise their incomes. They accordingly sought to win larger harvests from their lands, but the lingering shortage of labourers was a major obstacle. As competition for their labour remained high, peasants were prone to move from one estate to another, in search of better terms. Moreover, the landlords had little capital to hire salaried hands and, in the largely rural east, there were few sources of capital. They had one recourse however, to legally impose peasant restrictions binding the peasants to the soil and obligating them to work the lord's demesne. This was largely successful in Eastern Germany.
The second serfdom was less marked in western Germany, even though the stimulus of high wheat prices was equally powerful - largely since territorial princes themselves prevented landlords from doing so. The western princes did not want local magnates to dominate their communities, as this would erode their own authority. They consequently defended the peasants against the encroachments of the gentry. In addition, landlords in the west could readily find capital. They could use the money either to hire workers or to improve their leased properties, in expectation of gaining higher rents. The availability of capital in the west and its scarcity in the east were probably the chief reasons why the agrarian institutions of eastern and western Europe as a whole diverged so dramatically in the 16th century.
Nonetheless in Western Germany, there were similar efforts to do likewise and it was this which provoked the large scale peasant disturbances of the mid 1520s. In the west, in areas of plough agriculture, the small property remained the most common productive unit. However, the terms under which it was held and worked differed widely. In the Middle Ages, peasants were typically subject to a great variety of charges laid upon both their persons and the land.
They had to pay special marriage and inheritance taxes; they were further required to provide tithes to the parish churches. These charges were often small and were fixed by custom. They are often regarded as "feudal" as distinct from "capitalist" rents, in that they were customary and not negotiated; the lord, moreover, provided nothing in return for the payments.
The 16th century witnessed a conversion--widespread though never complete--from systems of feudal to capitalist rents. The late medieval population collapse increased the mobility of the peasant population; a peasant who settled for one year and one day in a "free village" or town received perpetual immunity from personal charges. Personal dues thus eroded rapidly; dues weighing upon the land persisted longer but could not be raised. It was therefore in the landlord's interest to convert feudal tenures into leaseholds, and this required capital.
The landlord (typically a wealthy townsman) purchased plots, consolidated them into a farm, built a house upon it, and rented it. Often, he also provided the implements needed to work the land, livestock, and fertilizer. The tenant gave as rent half of the harvest. The spread of this type of sharecropping in the vicinity of towns had begun in the late Middle Ages and was carried vigorously forward in the 16th century. Nonetheless, the older forms of feudal tenure, and even some personal charges, also persisted.
All of these had far-reaching consequences for German society. The unprecedented scale of peasant unrest led to the uprising of 1525. This uprising’s subsequent defeat meant that peasants were destined to lose any claim to political or social power and a continuation of extremes of wealth. Also there was considerable impact on the religious situation. The era of popular reformation was ended and replaced increasingly by princely control. Also, the decline of the imperial knights simplified the political landscape and saw the continued rise of the territorial prince, but this was mainly the responsibility of various economic and military factors.
The changes in towns were mixed, but the rise of a money economy and market opportunities could only benefit those able to respond.
The lower nobility, i.e. the Imperial Knights, were affected in varying ways. Some could benefit from the new market opportunities but few did so. Generally the position was one of decline and a clear shift in power away from the knights to the princes for both military and economic reasons.
In the Middle Ages as heavily armoured cavalry they had formed the core of armies and their castles of which there may have been as many as 10,000, had given them power. By 1500, they were clearly outdated, their military weaknesses having been clearly been highlighted by the massed archers, the Hussite and Swiss peasant armies and Italian professional mercenaries- the use of professional troops was indeed one reason why states themselves faced growing economic problems. The rise of powerful states in Germany led to the destruction of their castles and steady encroachment on their rights. Subordination to princes whether voluntary or enforced, led to the end of their autonomy. Many knights were also losing land as they were forced to pledge it and they found the only answer to their problems lay in placing higher burdens on their tenants adding to peasant discontent and social barriers hardened visibly in the between noble and non noble, as the former closed ranks given the decline in their status.
Organised crime was one outlet especially in the south and west, where states were weak and this added to the serious law and order problem of the late 15C. This culminated in the Great Knights War of 1522 led by Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen arising from a mixture of enthusiasm for Lutheranism and an attempt to regain lost status. There was a conscious appeal to German nationalism in attacking Rome and the so called plunder of the Church and many had a utopian picture of a decentralised political and ecclesiastical system which would restore their usefulness.
However, the collapse of the revolt was followed by a systematic razing of their castles and the majority lost all political power, seeking employment in imperial or princely service.
The role of the peasants also changed, mainly in response to changes in economic circumstances. Rising prices were forcing princes to augment revenue and also take advantage of the decline of the knights to augment and consolidate their lands. This was often at the expense of peasant rights in the lands that had previously belonged to the knights. Bureaucracies were developing along with the increasing advance of Roman rather than customary law. These were all part of a princely agenda to secure greater control over subjects. Bavaria had a legal code by 1495 and the city of Nuremberg in 1484, which was again seen by many as a cause of their problems but even with this no second serfdom really developed in western Germany, even though the stimulus of high wheat prices was remained powerful. This was largely since territorial princes themselves prevented landlords from doing so. The western princes did not want local magnates to dominate their communities, as this would erode their own authority. They consequently defended the peasants against the encroachments of the lords though largely to ensure that they were abler to tax them themselves. The peasants’ social conditions were hardly altered though they felt the weight of the state rather than local lords far more.
In the countryside there were to be significant social consequences as a result of the dramatic economic changes affecting peasants and peasant-landlord relationships, which were characterised again by rising population and increasing land hunger; the growing population in the 16th century and the larger concentrations of urban dwellers required abundant supplies of food, creating market opportunities for those landlords and indeed richer peasants to respond and the subsequent converging of the blades of late mediaeval price scissors and a steady rise in wheat and other grain prices.
There were short-term economic changes in response to the land hunger but when these became too marginal, the problem persisted. Added to this was the fundamental inflexibility of farming methods. Where growing market opportunities did emerge from the expansion of urban population, conflicts simply resulted from efforts of landlords to respond and peasants to resist.
The basic social consequence was in essence a real conflict between landlords and tenants as the former tried to re-impose services and dues which had been lost during the labour shortage of the 15th century, and raise both rents and divert land to producing for the urban market. This has been labelled as the attempted re-imposition of a ‘second serfdom’.
Many peasants felt under pressure. Agriculture was overwhelmingly the dominant activity and source of revenue for Church, government and nobility.
In the 14th and 15th centuries landlords and governments had suffered difficulties leading to the large scale conversion of labour services into money rents and the resulting tenure arrangements (involving mutual rights and obligations) were often complex and certainly led to disputed rights manifest in so many of the peasant grievances contained in their manifestoes in the Peasants War of 1524-6. In fact serfdom had largely disappeared in W Germany though not east of the Elbe and peasants had a perspective of relative prosperity within living memory and now what they thought were entirely new and unfair conditions being imposed by landlords - hence the impression of the Revolt being a class war. Serfdom had largely disappeared in Western Germany but from 1500 onwards, the sharp rise in population resulted in new difficulties. Some parts saw mounting land hunger and this was to be the main source of tension of the unrest on 1525.
It is fair to say that these conditions simply led to a widening of the gap between rich and poor, and between those with substantial holdings and those without. Within the peasant class, since only the richer were able to cash in on the market opportunities as were the landlord class.
One consequence of these changing conditions was the peasant revolt. Peasant resistance became part of German politics. There were 18 significant revolts between 1500 and 1524, all of which used the Bundschuh as their banner. These tensions became crystal clear in 1524-26 with the uprisings known as the "Peasants' War. The war was never one movement with one manifesto and one leader. In the beginning the uprisings were not even armed, but rather demonstrations and strikes.
Any clear pattern is hard to detect. There was only one rising east of the Elbe, yet opposition to developing serfdom was an issue in Swabia and the Black Forest. The absence of serfdom in Bavaria would seem to explain why that duchy was untouched, but Franconia and Thuringia, where serfdom was equally absent, were badly affected.
What is striking is that Bundschuh were often led by prosperous peasants and skilled craftsmen, and many spent a lot of time attacking landless peasants as well as landlords - an indication of the tensions created by market opportunities to which both some peasants and some landlords were responding - a class war certainly but in the peasants’ case a war within their class as well.
The manifestos of such groups were designed to appeal to comfortably off farmers and artisans anxious to preserve the sources of their prosperity from the hordes of the unskilled poor. Peasant demands even show self-confident peasants trying to gain access to new sources of wealth in forests and rivers. To a significant degree, some Bundschuh were conflicts between prosperous peasants and impoverished lords for control of the same resources.
Universally; the peasants demanded a return to the 'old law and customs'. The evidence here is strongly of an aggressive landlord class seeking to change local customs, encroach on common lands, raise rents and impose fresh labour services and marriage/death dues and a very self-confident peasantry convinced that tradition and custom were on their side. In this sense it would appear that even if their were prosperous peasants looking for market opportunities, the more typical response was of a conservative peasantry seeking custom and tradition to protect them against a rapacious landlord class imposing new demands ether to respond themselves to the market, or shore up their declining income at a time of inflation. This suggests very different types of landlord, but the general impact on the peasantry seems to have been the same.
In consequence, the Bundschuh were crushed mercilessly; about 75.000 peasants were killed. Most peasants lost the gains in economic position and legal status that their ancestors had won in the century and a half of labour shortages that followed the Black Death (1347-54). But some gains were made and some concessions won, most notably reductions in labour services in Swabia and the Tyrol. Of longer-term significance, fear of renewed rebellion moderated nobles' behaviour for several generations. Equally, many rural communities did not abandon collective action. Especially in south-west Germany, villages had understood that their lords depended on the law for what they were attempting. So, peasant communities funded appeals to the Imperial Chamber Court to fight their lords with the law. Hired lawyers became the champions of peasant rights.
The role of the Church in the relation to the Princes also changed. This was mainly due to the impact of the Reformation as such rather than more generally economic or social change, though the economic pressures on princes encouraged many to look on the Church as a new source of income. In Protestant states church lands were secularised and either sold or exploited by the prince, along with tithes and other church taxes. No Lutheran prince was ever out of pocket by converting to Protestantism. But Catholic princes too augmented their income by taking control of the Catholic Church in their lands through its appointments and its revenue.
Towns were experiencing mixed fortunes but in the first half of the century, the general picture was one which favoured them: commercial expansion due to rising market opportunities in the great manufacturing centres of the south and centre: eg Nuremberg or Augsburg with an emphasis on individual entrepreneurs of cheap textiles for mass consumption but there were political and social tensions especially with a influx from rural areas, usually denied citizenship and formed a voiceless urban proletariat and a large reservoir of discontent when economic activity declined
Population growth was the most significant factor, occurring as it did against a backdrop of major war, regular epidemics and all too frequent famine. Urban expansion reflected hardship in the countryside, but urban expansion caused social and political unrest. Housing could not cope and there was significant expansion of both suburbs and slums. There were not enough jobs and crime and unrest grew. In smaller rural towns dominated by a farming economy, overpopulation could add to pressures and certainly competition between a town and countryside.
Within many towns then there was actually a widening gulf between rich and poor especially with the price inflation and rise of a money economy exploited by the rich.
Social tensions, which were often expressed in anti-capitalist attacks on monopolists and usurers, were a marked feature of a picture then where there were clear winners and losers.
Towns were invariably controlled by small groups of patricians, often guild masters or substantial traders, which tended to be unchanging circles of families and considerable tension existed between these and those without citizenship or rights.
Calls for restrictions on money lending, forestalling, monopolies, and market privileges reflected the anti-capitalist mentality though it was often equally hostile to rural encroachment on crafts. In essence therefore the only common cause it shared with rural areas was hostility to the Church and nobility.
Finally some towns in the south ruled territories beyond their walls and behaved rather as territorial princes in seeking to extend their controls. Thus a picture of tension between rulers and ruled which could be highly unstable.
Urban society was greatly affected by population pressure - especially the influx from rural areas caused there by overpopulation and land hunger. Between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of early-sixteenth-century German peasants lived in one village for at most 10 to 20 years. Even if (as in most cases) they then travelled less than 20 miles, there were enormous numbers on the move at any moment. The towns could not cope with the flood of migrants, especially those without any craft skills. The towns suffered a disproportionate increase in the number of their poor. Augsburg in 1560 had doubled its population since 1490, but it had three times as many beggars.
There were two types of poor though, those permanently poor, as a result of structural unemployment, and those pushed temporarily into poverty. It was the latter that caused sixteenth-century authorities such anxiety as they were unpredictable and constantly fluctuating in numbers. They were regarded as a social danger, as carriers of disease and as criminals. By 1530 most German towns had introduced laws to have them arrested; whipped and expelled; a few put them to public work such as street sweeping. For the structural poor, by contrast, every imperial city had by 1541 copied Nuremberg and Strasbourg in setting up municipal charity, distributing free food every week funded from a compulsory rate levied on the citizens, to widows, orphans and selected others. During the Reformation, this charity soon had a religious qualification attached. Once issue of the dole became dependent on production of a certificate, the authorities used poor relief as a means of social and religious control. To get free bread, you had to belong to the "right" religion.
By 1550 however, the changes caused by state building and the Reformation bestowed little real benefit on the lives of ordinary people. Historians agree that the later 16th century was, for many, a time of economic hardship and social stress.
The rapid increase in population meant that the prices of grain were especially affected, with the result that an ever smaller share of the ordinary person's budget was available for the purchase of other products.
This had several effects, which, at least in outline, are well documented. The quality of nutrition for all but the wealthiest became much worse than it had been in the late Middle Ages, when meat consumption was at an all-time high. Illness and epidemic disease were frequent as the nutritional deficiency was aggravated by a series of bad harvests, perhaps caused by unusually severe winters in the decades after 1550.
Society was polarised by these developments. A minority of rich peasants lived amid struggling small holders hard-pressed by landlords who maximised their profits by increasing labour and tax burdens.
Cities and towns had generally prospered (though were to decline sharply after 1550) though in responding to a growing market much tension had emerged.
Journeymen could no longer anticipate becoming masters. Artisans employed in traditional handiwork felt the pressure of the putting-out system favoured by early capitalism, whereby much production was moved from the town to the countryside by entrepreneurs. Division of labour was introduced, gradually transforming self-employed craftsmen into dependent workers. In consequence, municipal guilds lost ground, not only economically but also politically, owing to the curtailment of their participation in urban policy-making. In the cities an upper crust of merchants and landed aristocrats faced a proletariat, whole sections of which were pauperised.
In the agricultural sector, high grain prices and rising land values improved the lot of peasant proprietors, but the real beneficiaries were land owning nobles and urban patricians with investments in agriculture though this was curbed in those states where princes were strong enough to prevent landlord oppression in the interests of taxing peasantry themselves. Political and economic power was more concentrated than ever before. Its new centres in Germany were the splendid courts of secular and ecclesiastical princes. For ordinary people, administrative centralisation and politically sanctioned Reformation had the effect of making their lives more rigid. A host of mandates flowed from centres of government, seeking to promote an ethic of order, productivity, and morality by shaping working and domestic activities as well as private habits and attitudes. These inroads caused resentment, and there is evidence of widespread resistance, most of it passive. Under these circumstances, the evangelical Reformation seems to have made but slight impact on the populace at large, whose effective religion continued to be a mixture of traditional Christianity and folk magic.
Overall therefore there were significant social transformations as a result of the changing economic conditions of the time. Society was increasingly polarised, power became more centralised, and the first fore-runners of modern legal and bureaucratic government can be seen within Germany. Obviously these are not all entirely influenced by economic conditions. Indeed it is in fact the taking advantage of the economic conditions by ruling elites, especially the territorial princes, to further their own power bases and political ambitions that in fact dictate some of these changes. However, these would not have been possible had the altering underlying economic conditions not been in the situation they were in to allow such gains. Therefore it can reasonably be said that the economic changes were in fact the main catalyst for the changes in German society between 1500 and 1555.
