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The significance of the crisis of the seventeenth century for the whole of Central Europe is not easily summed up. In some rural areas the years between 1620 and 1660 marked a decisive turning point, a watershed, a final break with the past that confirmed radical changes in the agrarian order. East of the Elbe River a new agrarian order took hold. Powerful landed noble families consolidated their hold on lands laid waste in the war, confiscated freehold properties, built up large estates, or latifundia, and forced peasants into a humiliating form of servitude, often called the second serfdom. In other regions, in the German West particularly, the structures of order, authority, and social control, built up slowly in the sixteenth century, proved far more resilient than one might at first suppose. The demographic crisis may have ended the expansion of population, contributed to a reversal in agricultural prices and wages, and altered the commercial climate for agriculture. But old systems of heritable land tenure, the seigneurial rights of lords, and the village social structure changed little, if at all. In the reconstructed agrarian world of the German West the essential structures of property survived the crisis intact. Scholars have often commented on the remarkable political and social stability that settled over Europe in the late seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last four chapters we have examined the search for order in the sixteenth century. Now we turn to the crisis of the seventeenth century, when order gave way to confusion. To understand the crisis in South Germany a number of characteristics of the agrarian order should be kept in mind. Never should one forget the tenuousness and the uncertainty of the social order, the fact that at every turn, when a measure of stability appeared at long last secure, deep and unresolved tensions still lay not far beneath the surface of events. In Hohenlohe the tensions flowed from the new terms of domination that weakened the state after 1610. The Assecuration became an embarrassing liability to the House of Hohenlohe, setting limits to state incomes and, from the point of view of Count Philip Ernst, creating a new sort of chaos in the territory: As we have repeatedly seen, there has been a striking amount of chaos since the establishment of the Landsteuer. Many of the rich are not assessed even half of their worth, not of their fixed property or of their movables. And this has led to considerable trouble and to a decline of our laws. And the poor and those with little property, because of this state of affairs, can avoid their responsibilities only with much greater difficulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1773 a newly published manual for rural householders drew public attention in Germany to the small land of Hohenlohe. The author of this manual, Johann Friedrich Mayer, a pastor from Kupferzell, was fast becoming known for his zealous efforts to reform agriculture and village society in his native land and in Germany. His voluminous correspondence and his treatises show a reformer who fought for numerous causes: improvements in fertilizer, the introduction of a more rational labor calendar, religious and moral instruction of young people, free trade, the planting of potatoes, the reform of the laws that governed inheritance and landholding, and the abolition of labor services. By the time he died he had accumulated five prizes for his works on agrarian reform, including coveted awards from the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, the Margrave of Ansbach, and Empress Maria Theresa. But it was his Lehrbuch für die Landund Hauswirte that earned him his fame as a quintessential agrarian reformer of the late eighteenth century. What is striking about this work, what draws my attention to it as I conclude this study, is not the content of Mayer's ideas. It is instead the social drama that unfolded as Mayer tried to put his reforms into practice. For that drama, hidden from the view of those who simply read the manual, pointed up patterns of relationships typical in a small German patrimonial state of the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To the modern observer looking back on the decades around 1580, the patterns of lordly and princely dominance, of paternalistic rule and deference, appear much more settled than they in fact were. Only with hindsight can one see in this period the decisive turning point that it most assuredly was: a watershed when South Germany's lords and princes established secure patterns of dominance over their villagers that would last well into the eighteenth century. Determined and zealous princes had clearly seized the initiative to broaden their authority over their domains and subjects, to use new power to impose order where disorder appeared to reign. That these feudal lords, their secretaries, pastors, and stewards sometimes justified these measures with the passionate rhetoric of religious reform or with time–honored appeals to their villagers' devotion to custom or justice did not matter. The effect was the same. The autonomy of the village commune had been broken. Willingly or not, the descendants of villagers who had fought in 1525 for the freedom of their rural communes were forced to weaken their corporate ties and redirect their loyalties to the territorial state. But for contemporaries, especially those who knew the circumstances of the small German states well, lord–peasant relationships appeared very much unsettled in these years, even more unsettled than in the two or three decades after 1525. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whatever stability the strict control of landed property introduced in family and village social relationships was inadequate to contain the threat to agrarian order that came from another quarter in the sixteenth century: market relationships and new sources of commercial wealth. By the end of the sixteenth century lords and peasants in Hohenlohe no longer looked upon market activities as peripheral or supplementary to the local economy. Whether for good or ill the place of villagers in the agrarian order depended as much on securing cash incomes to maintain their social standing as it did on securing access to landed property. Established tenant farmers needed movable wealth, not land, to endow sons and daughters in their marriages. Young heirs also needed cash incomes to meet the heavy burdens of family inheritance claims. The village poor, even if they did not have to meet as burdensome a demand in inheritance obligations as did tenant farmers, certainly needed cash incomes to buy grain, bread, and other food supplies to survive. As the century wore on, in fact the pressure to secure cash incomes in the market economy would increase steadily as the princes levied a more regular burden of taxes. These burdens were to be paid, if at all possible, in cash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we look back over the campaign to reform the family in the sixteenth century, this basic process was at work: The religious and moral ideals of the family were slowly made to fit the social conditions in the countryside. In the late Middle Ages, many laymen considered the church's ideals of marriage and the family to be a threat to social order, corrosive of marital discipline and morals in the society as a whole. With the Reformation, that began to change. The order that came to family life by the early seventeenth century – the firm rule of peasant elders over village youths – came about once the church and state embraced the ideal of the patriarchal family and then imposed, with the cooperation and help of village elders, as strict a marital discipline as the society would bear. Without this alliance, without solid social support for the patriarchal family in the countryside, any new marital discipline would have been difficult to establish. A similar pattern is evident when we turn to a second, but equally important, aspect of family reform: the effort to grasp the patriarchal family as a set of property relationships. For the state this effort marked a departure from past practice. It grew out of the state's new pastoral mission and its rapidly rising fiscal needs in the middle of the sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not easy to scan the broad spectrum of popular and learned responses to social conditions in Reformation Germany in the middle of the sixteenth century. Yet, if the pamphlet literature from this period can serve as a guide, one theme often stood out above all others: the fear of social, political, and religious disorder, the perception that the underpinnings of the whole social order were dangerously unstable, uncertain, continually in flux. That many pamphleteers still held up for their readers the social values of a society of orders – hierarchy, social harmony, religious unity, corporate solidarity, the common good, deference, obedience – could only have intensified the feeling for many that society had become unstable. For those ideals bore even less resemblance to social reality in 1550 than they had fifty years before. Out in the countryside, in a rural society like Hohenlohe, specific events and social conditions – the Peasants' War, the fear of rural unrest, the continued decay of the church, the uncertain power of the counts in the empire, the spread of poverty and population growth, the erosion of communal solidarity – lay behind the views voiced by contemporary observers of society. Protestant reformers called to Öhringen in the 1540s and 1550s, for example, were all deeply distressed by the social disorder and decay they saw around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some events alter a society, dramatically setting it on a new path for decades or generations to come. But many do not. They pass away quickly, their effects merging almost imperceptibly into the stream of other events altering day–today social relationships at a slower but steadier pace. This latter pattern was often the case in the wake of the great peasant uprisings of early modern Europe. For in the countryside the pace of social change was often slow, the structures of everyday life resilient and difficult to change at one blow. The Peasants' War was one such event in the sixteenth century. The revolt, despite the hopes it aroused among the peasantry and the fears it spread among the nobility, marked less of a turning point than is commonly understood. In most lands of South and Central Germany one can detect few sharp breaks with the past in the decades immediately after 1525. For the revolt came and went quickly and left few lasting structural changes in the day–to–day practice of domination and in the social relationships at the heart of the village community. The hurried deliberations in 1526 at the Diet at Speyer on the rebellion and the peasants' grievances, the small treaties concluded in some territories in the late 1520s, the criminalization of resistance to authority clearly spelled out in the imperial law code in 1532, the slow funneling of disputes into the courts, and the heated discussions concerning authority and obedience: All showed the heightened concern among elites about order and domestic security in the years following the revolt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No set of events illustrates more clearly the tenuousness of order and the weakness of princely domination of the countryside than do the risings of 1525. During the Peasants' War villagers not only challenged the authority of their lords and called into question the fundamental order of feudal society, they also began to fashion a radical new world to replace it. In some ways, the dynamics of the revolt were determined by the social, political, and economic strains common to many rural societies in Europe at the beginning of this long period of agrarian expansion in the sixteenth century. But the revolt also had its roots in the electrifying religious and political climate of South and Central Germany in the early 1520s. For the leaders of the German peasants, as they drew up grievance lists and hammered out political programs for the new order, built upon the bundle of complex ideas associated with the early evangelical movements. One must be careful not to read into these plans the ideas of Luther, Zwingli, or any other great reformer, although these reformers certainly influenced the shaping of some of them. These political plans, like the revolt itself, must be understood in the context of the complex inner dynamics of the peasant movements, the shifting, often contradictory, goals of the groups that made up the armies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting Two days after leaving the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main, just south of the town of Mergentheim a traveler on his way to Augsburg entered one of the most remote rural areas of Renaissance Germany. The important waterways and heavily traveled roads that linked Frankfurt with South Germany's rapidly growing, wealthy, and powerful imperial cities largely bypassed the tiny towns and villages of the Hohenlohe plain in 1500 (see Map 1.1). To reach Öhringen, the largest and most important town in Hohenlohe in 1500, one had first to travel either overland or by boat on the Main River to Wertheim. From there the road to Öhringen led overland on the major north–south axis of South Germany, the Emperor's Highway, up the winding valley of the Tauber River to Mergentheim. But here one had to branch off the main thoroughfare and head south on a smaller road to the tiny market town of Künzelsau on the Kocher River (see Map 1.2). Only then did a road lead on to the small town of Öhringen. Travelers heading east from the imperial city of Wimpfen to Schwäbisch Hall might take the older and more direct route to Öhringen. But in 1500 none of the major roads would take the traveler quickly and easily to this remote part of the German Southwest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems This study began ten years ago as a history of rural society in the age of the German Reformation. At that time scholars knew that the majority of the population lived and worked in the countryside, that the village formed the foundation, the cornerstone, of ecclesiastical and secular power, and that the Peasants' War had played a decisive role in shaping the course of the early Reformation. The old view of Leopold von Ranke no longer rang true. To him German villagers exploded onto the scene of the Reformation with the fury of a storm; but they then vanished, as does every storm, within a short time. What had vanished from the history of the Reformation was not the peasantry, however, but Ranke's interest in it. Yet, despite the attention paid the Peasants' War in the mid–1970s and the earlier pioneering work of Wilhelm Abel on the agrarian cycle, little was known of how villagers came to terms with the wrenching changes of the “long sixteenth century” in the German countryside. And these changes had only just begun to be felt in 1525. This strange neglect of the history of the German peasantry after 1525 was a symptom of a deeper problem. Astonishingly little attention had been paid to German social history as a whole in the early modern period. The historical literature on early modern German history at that time resembled a painting of Caravaggio, Titian, or even Goya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to understand the agrarian cycle and the great advance and fall of population that lay behind it, one must have a firm understanding of the productivity of the peasant household. Only with precise statistical data can one answer the pivotal questions that present themselves for any study of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How much surplus grain could the rural economy actually produce? When did marginal returns on the land begin to set in, and in which parts of the countryside? Which households produced enough grain to feed its dependents, and which could not? As I point out in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, answers to these questions help us not simply to understand agricultural productivity, they guide us to other key issues in the making of the social hierarchy in the village as well. For one of the key functions of hierarchy in this society was control over the distribution of land, scarce material goods, and food. How villagers understood the polarization that took place in village society between wealthy and poor, the role food supplies and land scarcity played in conflict, the ability of villagers to pay taxes, and even popular attitudes toward state authority were all conditioned, to some degree, by access to land and agricultural productivity. Every study of these problems should therefore have a precise understanding of who controlled and produced such resources, and how far these resources met the material needs of the peasant household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Table A.1. Distribution of wealth in Langenburg district, 1528 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]