STORY OF THE ENGLISH LAND 21 



of nearly every European nation. In Ger- 

 many the peasantry fought against their 

 privileged and untaxed oppressors with brutal 

 savagery, and hundreds of ruined castles 

 serve to-day as memorials of the peasant 

 revolts of the sixteenth century. In this 

 case, as in England, the military skill and 

 discipline of the governing class proved too 

 strong for the bauern, whose risings were 

 stamped out by reprisals of almost incredible 

 ferocity. Nevertheless the German peasant 

 was never cowed by that long and systematic 

 misery which has been well described as the 

 Via Dolorosa of the English labourer : he 

 succeeded in maintaining through the cen- 

 turies some measure, at least, of independence. 

 The sudden frenzy of the French Jacquerie 

 in the fourteenth century, with its peasant 

 atrocities and terrible repression, was too 

 local and short lived to exert any real influ- 

 ence on the subsequent fortunes of the rural 

 population. The real agrarian revolt came 

 to pass at a later and far more favourable 

 time. When the long-suppressed fury of 

 the peasants was let loose the landed 

 aristocracy was hated by the urban as well 

 as the rural inhabitants. The inspiration 

 of American independence on the one hand 

 and the menace of foreign intervention on the 



