Pictures of German Life in the XVth XVIth and XVIIth Centuries Volume Ii Part 8

It is known that the great peace came very slowly, like the recovery from a mortal illness. The years from 1648 to 1650, from the conclusion of the peace to the celebration of the festival, were among the most grievous of that iron time; exorbitant war taxes were imposed, the armies of the different countries lay encamped in the provinces till they could be paid off, the oppression which they exercised on the unhappy inhabitants was so fearful, that a despairing cry arose from the people, which mingled itself with the wrangling of the negotiating parties. To this was added a plague of another kind; the whole country swarmed with a rabble that had no masters; bands of discharged soldiers with the camp followers, troops of beggars, and great hordes of robbers, roved about from one territory to another; they quartered themselves by force on those villages which were still inhabited, and established themselves in the deserted huts. The villagers also, provided with bad weapons and disused to labour, thought it sometimes more satisfactory to rob, than to till the fields, and made secret roving expeditions into the neighbouring territories, the Evangelical into the Catholic countries, and _vice versa_. The foreign children of a lawless race, the gipsies, had increased in number and audacity; fantastically dressed, with heavily laden carts, stolen horses, and naked children, they encamped in great numbers round the stone trough of the village green: whenever the ruler was powerful and the officials active, the wild rovers were encountered with energy. The villagers of the dukedom of Gotha were still obliged, in 1649, to keep watch from the church towers, to guard the bridges and fords, and to give an alarm whenever they perceived any of these marching bands. A well-regulated system of police was the first sign of that new feeling of responsibility which the governments had acquired: every one who wished to settle down was encouraged to do so. Whoever was established, had to render an account of how much land he had cultivated, of the condition of his house and farm, and whether he had any cattle. New registers of the farms and inhabitants were prepared, new taxes on money and on natural products were imposed; and by the severe pressure of these, the villagers were compelled to labour. The villages were gradually reinhabited; many families who had fled to the towns during the war repaired their devastated farms; others returned from the mountains or foreign countries; disbanded soldiers and camp followers sometimes bought fields and empty houses with the remainder of their booty, or returned to their native villages. There was much marrying and baptizing.

But the exhaustion of the people was still lamentably great. The arable land, much of which had lain fallow, was sown without the necessary manure; not a little remained overrun with wild underwood and weeds, and long continued as osier land. The ruined districts were sometimes bought by the neighbouring villages, and in some places two or three small communities united themselves together.

For many years after the war, the appearance of the villages was most comfortless; one may perceive that this was the case in Thuringia, from the transactions with the Government. The householders of Siebleben and some other communities round Gotha, had held, from the middle ages, the right of having timber free from the wooded hills. In 1650, the government demanded from them, for the exercise of this right, a small tax upon oats: some of the communities excused themselves, as they were too poor to be able to think of rebuilding their damaged houses. Ten years after, the community of Siebleben had forty boys who paid small school fees, and the yearly offering in the church amounted to more than fourteen gulden. A portion of this offering was spent in alms to strangers, and it is perceptible, from the carefully kept accounts, what a stream of beggars of all kinds pa.s.sed through the country; disbanded soldiers, cripples, the sick and aged; amongst them were lepers with certificates from their infirmaries, also exiles from Bohemia and Hungary, who had left their homes on account of their religion, banished n.o.blemen from England, Ireland, and Poland, persons collecting money for the ransom of their relatives from Turkish imprisonment, travellers who had been plundered by highwaymen, and others, such as a blind pastor from Denmark with five children; the strangers came prepared with testimonials. The governments, however, were unwearied in their efforts against harbouring such vagrants.

Much has been written concerning the devastation of the war; but the great work is still wanting, that would concentrate the statistical notices which have been preserved in all the different territories: however enormous the labour may be, it must be undertaken, for it is only from this irrefragable computation, that the full greatness of the calamity can be understood. The details. .h.i.therto known scarcely amount to a probable valuation of the loss which Germany suffered in men, beasts of burden, and productive power. The following inferences only attempt to express the views of an individual, which a few examples will support.

The condition of the provinces of Thuringia and Franconia is not ill adapted for a comparison of the past with the present; neither of them were more afflicted by the visitation of war than other countries; the state of cultivation of both provinces, up to the present time, answers pretty accurately to the general average of German industry and agriculture: neither of them are on the whole rich: both were hilly countries, without large rivers, or any considerable coal strata, with low lands, of which only certain tracts were distinguished by especial fertility, and were up to modern times devoted to agriculture, garden culture, and small mining industry. Thus this portion of Germany had known no powerful stream of human enterprise or capital, nor, on the other hand, was it the theatre of the destructive wars of Louis XIV.'s time, and the rulers, especially the grandson of Frederic the Wise, were even in the worst times tolerably sparing of the national strength.

There have been preserved to us from these districts, amongst other things, accurate statistical notices of twenty communities, which once were in the Hennebergen domain; but now, with the exception of one that is Bavarian, belong to Saxe Meiningen. It is nowhere mentioned, and from their condition need not be concluded, that the devastation in them had been greater than in other portions of the province. The government in 1649 ordered an accurate report to be given of the number of inhabited houses, barns, and head of cattle that existed when the worst sufferings of the war began in 1634. According to the reports delivered by the magistrates of the places, there had perished in the twenty communities more than eighty-two per cent, of families, eighty-five per cent, of horses, more than eighty-three of goats, and eighty-two of cows, and more than sixty-three per cent. of houses. The remaining houses were described as in many places damaged and in ruins, the still surviving horses as lame and blind, and the fields and meadows as devastated and much overgrown with underwood; but the sheep were everywhere altogether destroyed.[40]

It is a b.l.o.o.d.y and terrible tale which these numbers tell us. More than four fifths of the population, far more than four fifths of their property were destroyed. And in what a condition was the remainder!

Precisely similar was the fate of the smaller provincial towns, as far as one can see from the preserved data. We will give only one example from the same province. The old church records of Ummerstadt, an agricultural town near Coburg, famed, from olden times, throughout the country for its good pottery, report as follows:--"Although in the year 1632 the whole country, as also the said little town, was very populous, so that it alone contained more than one hundred and fifty citizens, and up to eight hundred souls, yet from the ever-continuing war troubles, and the constant quartering of troops, the people became in such-wise enervated, that from great and incessant fear, a pestilence sent upon us by the all-powerful and righteous G.o.d, carried off as many as five hundred men in the years 1635 and 1636; on account of this lamentable and miserable condition of the time, no children were born into the world in the course of two years. Those whose lives were still prolonged by G.o.d Almighty, have from hunger, the dearness of the times, and the scarcity of precious bread, eaten and lived upon bran, oil-cakes, and linseed husks, und many also have died of it; many also have been dispersed over all countries, most of whom have never again seen their dear fatherland. In the year 1640, during the Saalfeldt encampment, Ummerstadt became a city of the dead or of shadows; for during eighteen weeks no man dared to appear therein, and all that remained was destroyed. Therefore the population became quite thin, and there were not more than a hundred souls forthcoming." In 1850 the place had eight hundred and ninety-three inhabitants.

Still more striking is another observation, which may be made from the tables of the Meiningen villages. It is only in our century that the number of men and cattle of all kinds has again reached the height which it had already attained in 1634. Nay, the number of houses was still in 1849 less than in 1634, although, there the inmates of the smallest village houses, even the poorest, still anxiously endeavour to preserve their own dwellings. It is true that there is a trifling increase of the number of inhabitants in 1849 over that in 1634; but even this increase is dubious when we consider that the number of inhabitants in 1634 had probably already experienced a diminution from sixteen years of war. Thus we are a.s.suredly justified in concluding that two centuries were necessary, at least for this tract of Germany, to restore the population and productive power of the country to its former standard. These a.s.sumptions are supported by other observations.

The agriculture of the country, before the Thirty years' war, nay even the relative proportion of the value of corn to that of silver, at a time when the export of corn was only exceptional, lead to the same conclusions.

It is true that during the last two centuries, agriculture, owing to the mighty effects of foreign traffic, has developed itself in an entirely new direction. The countryman also now cultivates field vegetables, clover, and other herbage for fodder, which were unknown before the Thirty years' war, and agricultural produce is more lucrative for an equal amount of population. Perhaps our ancestors lived in a poorer style, and farmed less. We can compare the stock of cattle. The number of cattle kept now in the villages is precisely the same as before the war; they have still the short, thick, curly-woolled Spanish herds, which used to be reared in the pens of the peasants; the old wool fell in long locks; but judging from the value of the cloth and stuffs woven from it, and the price of sheep at that time, it must have been good.

On the other hand, the stock of horses has diminished by three fourths in comparison with 1634. This striking circ.u.mstance can only be thus explained: that the traditions of the troopers of the middle ages exercised an influence even upon agriculture; that the rearing of horses was more profitable than now, on account of the bad roads which made a distant transport of corn impossible, whilst the lowing of cattle in the narrow farm-yards of the towns was so general that the sale of milk and b.u.t.ter paid little; and finally, that a larger portion of the country people were better able to maintain teams. The breaking up of the ground was then, as may be seen from the old farm books in Thuringia, somewhat--but not considerably--less than now. In the present day the number of goats and of cattle belonging to small farmers has increased, as also the number of oxen, which probably in Middle and Southern Germany are now finer and higher bred than formerly. This is a decided progress of the present day. But on the whole, reckoning the amount of fodder required, the number of beasts which are maintained with advantage is very inconsiderably larger at present than in 1634.

Thus Germany, in comparison with its happier neighbours in England and the Low Countries, was thrown back about two hundred years.

Still greater were the changes which the war made in the intellectual life of the nation. Above all among the country people. Many old customs pa.s.sed away, life became aimless and full of suffering. In the place of the old household gear the rudest forms of modern furniture were introduced; the artistic chalices, and old fonts, and almost all the adornments of the churches, had disappeared, and were succeeded by a tasteless poverty in the village churches, which still continues. For more than a century after the war the peasant vegetated, penned in, almost as much as his herds, whilst his pastor watched him as a shepherd, and he was shorn by the landed proprietors and rulers of his country. There was a long period of gloomy suffering. The price of corn in the depopulated country was, for fifty years after the war, even lower than before. But the burdens upon landed property rose so high, that for a long time, land together with house and farm, bore little value, and sometimes were offered in vain as acquittance for service and imposts. Severer than ever was the pressure of va.s.salage, worst of all in the former Sclave countries, in which the peasantry were kept down by a numerous n.o.bility. With respect to their marriages, they were placed under an unnatural and compulsory guardians.h.i.+p; strict care was taken that the son of the countryman should not evade by flight the servitude which was to weigh down his future. He could not travel without a written permission; even s.h.i.+p and raft masters were forbidden under severe penalties to take such fugitives into their service.

Much to be lamented is the injury to civilization which took place in the devastated cities, especially the return to luxury, love of pleasure, and coa.r.s.e sensuality, the want of common sense and independence, the cringing towards superiors and heartlessness towards inferiors. They are the ancient sufferings of a decaying race. That the self-government of cities was more and more infringed upon by the princes, was frequently fortunate, for the administrators were too often deficient in judgment and feeling of duty.

The new const.i.tution of governments which had arisen during the war, laid its iron hands on town and country. The old territories of the German empire were changed into despotic bureaucratic states. The ruler governed through his officials, and kept a standing army against his enemies; to maintain his "state," that is, his courtiers, officials and soldiers, was the task of the people. But to make this possible, it was necessary to promote carefully the increase of the population, and the greater tax-paying capacity of the subject. Some princes, especially the Brandenburgers, did this in a liberal spirit, and thus in this dark period, by increasing the power of their new state, laid the foundation of the greatness of their houses. Others indeed lavished the popular strength, in coa.r.s.e imitation of French demoralization.

It was a mortal crisis through which Germany had pa.s.sed, and dearly was the peace bought. But that which was most important had been preserved, the continuity of German development, the continuance of the great inward process, by which the German nation raised itself from the bondage of the middle ages to a higher civilization.

The long struggle, politically considered, was a defensive war of the Protestant party against the intolerance of the old faith and the attacks of the Imperial power. This defensive struggle had begun by an ill-timed offensive movement in Bohemia. The head of the House of Hapsburg had law and right on his side, so long as he only put down this movement. His opponents put themselves in the position of revolutionists, which could only be vindicated by success. But from the day when the Emperor made use of his victory to suppress by means of Jesuits and soldiers the sovereignty of the German princes, and the old rights of the cities, he became in his turn the political offender whose bold venture was repulsed by the last efforts of the nation. But here we must take a higher point of view, from which the proceedings of Ferdinand II. appear still more insupportable. Just a hundred years before his reign, all the good spirits of the German nation fought on the side of the Emperor, when he, in opposition to existing rights and old usages, had founded a German Church and German state. Since that, the family of Charles V. had for a century, a short time excepted, done much by laborious scheming, or listless indifference, to destroy the last source of this new life, independence of spirit, thought and faith: it was for a century, a short time excepted, the opponent of the national German life; it had its Spanish and Italian alliances, and had arrayed the Romish Jesuits against the indigenous civilization of the nation, aided, alas! by some of the German princes. It was by such means that it had endeavoured to become great in Germany, and in the same spirit, an overzealous Emperor called forth the b.l.o.o.d.y decision.

On his head, not on the German people or Princes, lies the guilt of this endless war. The Protestant chiefs, with the exception of the lesser rulers, only sought to submit and make peace with their Emperor.

It was only for a few years they were led into open war, by the arrogance of Wallenstein, the scorn of Vienna, and the warlike pressure of Gustavus Adolphus; the alliance of the great electoral houses of Saxony and Brandenburg with Sweden did not last four years; at the first opportunity they receded, and during the last period of the war, neutrality was their strongest policy.

The princes obtained by the peace the object of their defensive opposition; the extravagant designs of the Imperial Court were crushed.

Germany was free. Yes, free! Devastated and powerless, with its western frontier for a century the fighting-ground and spoil of France, it had still to bear the out-pouring of an acc.u.mulated measure of humiliation and shame. But whoever would now clench their hands at this, let them beware of raising them against the Westphalian peace. The consequences that followed, the laying in ashes of the Palatinate, the seizure of Strasburg, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, were not owing to this peace. The cause of all this, was long before the Thirty years' war; it had been foreseen by patriotic men long beforehand. Since the Smalkaldic war the sovereignty of the German Princes, and the independence of portions of the empire, were the only guarantee for a national progressive civilization. One may deeply lament, but can easily understand this. Now at last this independence had been legally established by streams of blood. Whoever considers the year 1813,--the first kindling of the people since 1648,--as full of glory; whoever has at any time enn.o.bled himself by a sense of duty and enlarged moral sentiments, acquired from the severe teaching of Kant and his followers; whoever has at any time derived pleasure from the highest that man is capable of understanding, and from the nature and souls of his own and foreign people; whoever has at any time felt with transport the beauty of the new German poetry, the Nathan, Faust, and Guillaume Tell; whoever has taken a heartfelt partic.i.p.ation in the free life of our science and arts, in the great discoveries of our natural philosophers, and in the powerful development of German industry and agriculture, must remember, that with the peace of Munster and Osnaburg began the period in which the political foundation of the development of a higher life was in a great measure secured.

The war had nevertheless consequences which we must still deeply deplore; it has long severed the third of Germany from intellectual communion of spirit with their kindred races. The German hereditary possessions of the Imperial family have ever since been united in a special state. Powerfully and incessantly has the foreign principle worked which there prevails. For a long time the depressed nation scarcely felt the loss. In Germany the opposition between Romanism and Protestantism had been weakened, and in the following century it was in a great measure overcome. Even those territories which were compelled by their rulers to maintain their old faith, had partic.i.p.ated in the slow and laborious progress which had been made since the peace. It is not to be denied that the Protestant countries long remained the leaders, but in spite of much opposition, those of the old faith followed the new stream, and the results of increasing civilization flowed in brotherly union from one soul to another; joy and suffering were in general mutual, and as the political requirements and wishes of the Protestant and Roman Catholics were the same, the feeling of intellectual unity became gradually more active. It was otherwise in the distant countries which Ferdinand II. and his successors had bequeathed as conquered property. The losses which the German races had experienced were great, but the injury to the Austrian nationalities was incomparably greater. To them had happened what must now appear, to any one who examines accurately, most terrible. Almost the whole national civilization, which in spite of all hindrances had been developed for more than a century, was expelled with an iron rod. The ma.s.s of the people remained; their leaders--opulent landed proprietors of the old indigenous race, manly patriots, men of distinguished character and learning, and intelligent pastors, were driven into exile. The exiles have never been counted, who perished of hunger, and the horrors of war; those also who settled in foreign countries can scarcely be reckoned. Undoubtedly their collective number amounted to hundreds of thousands. It is thanks to the Bohemian exiles, that Electoral Saxony recovered its loss in men and capital quicker than other countries. Yet it is not the numbers, however great, which give a true representation of the loss. For those who fell into calamity on account of their faith and political convictions were the n.o.blest spirits, the leaders of the people, the representatives of the highest civilization of the time. But it was not the loss of them alone that made the Emperor's dominions so weak and dormant; the millions also that remained behind were crushed. Driven by every low motive, by rough violence or the prospect of earthly advantage, from one faith to another, they had lost all self-respect and the last ideal which even the most commonplace man preserves, the feeling that he has a place in his heart that cannot be bought. Everywhere throughout Germany in the worst times after the war, there were thousands who were fortified by the feeling that they also, like their fathers and neighbours, had resisted armed conversion to the death. In the converted Austrian territories of the Emperor, this feeling was rare. For almost a century and a half the Bohemian and German races vegetated in a dreary dream life. The Bohemian countryman hung the various saints of the restored church by the side of his pictures of Huss and Zisko, but he kept a holy lamp burning before the old heretic; the citizen of Vienna and Olmutz accustomed himself to speak of the Empire and Germany as of a foreign land; he accommodated himself to Hungarians, Italians, and Croats, but at the same time he remained a stranger in the new state in which he was now domiciled. Little did he care for the categorical imperative, imposed by the new worldly wisdom; later he learned that Schiller was a German poet. Only then did a new spring begin for the Germans, in which freedom of mind and beauty of soul were sought for as the highest aim of earthly life; when the new study of antiquity inspired them with enthusiasm, when the genius of Goethe irradiated the court of Weimar, then sounded from dormant Austria, the deepest and most mysterious of arts, a fullness of melody. There also the spirit of the people had found touching expression in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

CHAPTER VII.

ROGUES AND ADVENTURERS.

The war had fearfully loosened the joints of burgher society. The old orderly and disciplined character of Germans appeared almost lost.

Countless was the number of unfortunates who having lost house and farm, maintenance and family, wandered homeless through inhospitable foreign countries; and not less numerous were the troops of reprobates who had habituated themselves to live by fraud, extortion, and robbery.

Excitement had become a necessity to the whole living race, for thirty years the vagrant rabble of all Europe had chosen Germany as their head-quarters.

Thus it happened that after the peace the doings of the fortune hunters, adventurers, and rogues increased to an extraordinary extent.

A contrast of weakness and roughness is, in the following century, a special characteristic of the needy, careworn family life, into which the spirit of the German people had contracted itself. Some particulars of this wild life will be here related, which will denote the gradual changes it underwent. For like the German devils, the children of the devil have also their history, and their race is more ancient than the Christian faith.

People are hardly aware of the intimate connection between German life and Roman antiquity. Not only did the traditions of the Roman empire, Christianity, Roman law, and the Latin language become parts of the German civilization, but still more extensively were the numerous little peculiarities of the Roman world preserved in the middle ages.

German agriculture acquired from the Romans the greater part of its implements, also wheat, barley, and much of the remaining produce. The most ancient of our finer kinds of fruit are of Roman origin, equally so our wine, many garden flowers, and almost all our vegetables; also the oldest woollen fabrics, cotton and silk stuffs, and all the oldest machines, as for example, watermills, and the first mining and foundry works; likewise innumerable other things, even to the oldest forms of our dress, house utensils, chairs, tables, cupboards, and even the panels of our folding doors. And if it were possible to measure how much in our life is gathered from antiquity, or from primitive German invention, we should still, after the lapse of fifteen centuries, find so much that is Roman in our fields, gardens, and houses, on our bodies, nay, even in our souls, that one may well have a right to inquire whether our primeval ancestors were more under the protection of Father Jove or of the wild Woden.

Thus amongst numberless others, the despised race of Gladiators, Histrions, and Thymelei--or jesters, were preserved throughout the storm of migration, and spread from Rome among the barbarian races.

They introduced amongst the b.l.o.o.d.y hordes of Vandals the dissolute Roman pantomime; they stood before the huts of the Frank chiefs, and piped and played foreign melodies, which had perhaps once come with the orgies of the Asiatic G.o.ds to Rome; they intermingled with the Gothic congregation, which poured out of the newly built church into the churchyard, and there opened their chests in order to show a monkey in a red jacket as a foreign prodigy, or produced the grotesque figures of old Latin puppets, the _maccus_, _bucco_, _papus_, and whatever else the ancient fathers called our jack-puddings, for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the young paris.h.i.+oners, who opened wide their large blue eyes at these foreign wonders. Meanwhile other members of the band of jugglers offered on payment, to execute gymnastic games before the warriors of the community, which they performed with sharp weapons and all the artifices and cunning of the Roman circus; then these foolhardy men formed a ring and carried on with pa.s.sionate eagerness, for the sake of pay, the dangerous hazards of the combat, which the spectators admired the more, the bloodier it became, whilst they held the unfortunates, who thus struggled for money, in no greater consideration than a couple of wolves or hungry dogs. But for the distinguished spectators there were other more enticing artists. Women also roved with the men amongst the German tribes, dexterous and bold, dancers, singers, and actresses, in brilliant cavalcades. When they shook the Greek tambourine or the Asiatic castanets, in the licentious mazes of the baccha.n.a.lian dance, they were generally irresistible to the German barons, but were extremely offensive to serious people. In the year 554 a Frank king interposed with his authority against the nuisance of these foreign _rovers_, and the worthy Hinkmar, paternally warned his priests also against these women, whose foreign sounding designation was expressed by the true-hearted monk with a very well known but bitter word.

To these foreign jugglers were speedily added numerous German recruits.

The German races had had wandering singers from the primitive times, bearers of news, spreaders of epic songs and poems. These also moved from farm to farm, highly welcome in the large houses of persons of distinction, honoured guests, trusted messengers, who often received from their hosts a more affectionate reward than golden bracelets or new dresses. They had once upon a time sung to the harp by the fireside, of the adventurous expedition of the thunder G.o.d to the world of giants, and of the tragic fall of the Nibelungen, then of Attila's battle, and the wonders of southern lands. But to the new Christian faith, this treasure of old native songs was obnoxious. The high-minded Charlemagne made a collection of the heroic songs of the German race, but his Popish son Louis hated and despised them. These songs undoubtedly were so thoroughly heathen, that the Church had reason to remonstrate against them in synodical resolutions and episcopal decrees. Together with them, the race of singers who carried and spread them, fell into disfavour with the church. The songs did not however cease, but the singers sank to a lower scale, and finally a portion of them at least fell into the cla.s.s of vagrants, and the people were accustomed to hear the fairest heritage of their past from the lips of despised players.

Another heritage also from German heathendom fell to these strollers.

Even before the time of Tacitus there were simple dramatic processions in Germany; on the great feast days of the German G.o.ds, there already appeared the humorous ideas of the pious German regarding his world of deities, a.s.sociating with them comic processions of mummers, the figures of goblins and giants, gray winter and green spring, the bear of Donar, and probably the magic white horse of Woden, which in the oldest form of dramatic play opposed each other either in mimic combat, or for their rights. The wandering jugglers, with great facility, added these German masks to the grotesque Roman figures which they had brought into the country; and in the churchyard of the new Christian congregation, the bear of the baccha.n.a.lian Asen bellowed beside the followers of the Roman G.o.d of wine, and the satyr with his goats' feet and horns.

Thus this race of wanderers soon Germanized themselves, and during the whole of the middle ages roved about amongst the people--in the eye of the law homeless and lawless. The Church continued to rouse suspicion against these strollers by repeated decrees; the clergy would on no account see or listen to such rabble, nay, they were denied the right of taking a part in the Christian sacraments. The old law books allowed hired pugilists to kill each other without penance, like stray dogs; or what was almost worse, they granted to the injured vagrant only the mockery of a sham penance. If a stroller was struck by a sword or knife, he could only return the thrust or blow upon the shadow of his injurers on the wall.

This ignominious treatment contrasted strongly with the favour which these strollers generally enjoyed. Singly, or in bands, they went through the country, and streamed together by hundreds at the great court and Church fetes. Then, it was the general custom to distribute among them food, drink, clothes, and money. It was thought advisable to treat them well, as they were well known to be tale-bearers, and would publish in satirical songs throughout the whole country the scandalous conduct of the n.i.g.g.ardly man, with a vindictiveness which was sharpened by the feeling that such revenge was the best means of making themselves feared. It was rarely that a prince like Henry II., or a pious bishop, ventured to send away these bands from their fetes without a reward. Almost everywhere, till quite into the fifteenth century, they were to be found wherever a large a.s.semblage of men sought for amus.e.m.e.nt. They sang ballads, satirical songs and love songs, and related heroic tales and legends from foreign lands, on the stove-bench of the peasant, in tins ante-room of the burgher, or the hall of the castle. From the latter its lord is absent perhaps on a crusade, and his wife and servants listen anxiously to the fables and lies of the wandering player. To-day he is the narrator of foreign tales of marvel, and to-morrow the clandestine messenger betwixt two lovers; then he again enters for a time the service of knightly minne-singers, whose minne-songs he accompanies with his music, and undertakes to spread them through the country, as a journal does now; or he dresses himself up more strikingly than usual, takes his bauble in his hand, places a fool's cap on his head, and goes as travelling fool to some n.o.bleman, or follower of some distinguished ecclesiastic.

Wherever his fellows collected together in numbers, at courtly residences and tournaments, or in churchyards at great saints' feasts, he quickly pitched his tent and booth by the side of those of traders and pedlers, and began his arts; rope-dancing, jongleur exercises, sham-fights, dramatic representations in masks, shows of curiosities, songs, masked artistic dances, and playing for dances and festive processions. In the churchyard itself, or within the boundaries of some castle, were heard the sounds of noisy pleasure; and the sun-burnt women of the band slipped secretly through side doors into the castle or the priests' house.

Only some of the practices of these vagrants deserve special mention.

The influence which these musicians exercised on the progress of epic and lyrical popular poetry, has been already mentioned; it is even now discerned in heroic poetry, for the players often endeavoured to introduce fellows of their own cla.s.s into the old poetry, and took care that they should play no contemptible role. Thus in the Nibelungen, the brilliant form of the hero Volker the fiddler, is the representation of a musician; similar figures, grotesque in appearance, but rougher and coa.r.s.er, hectored in the later poems and popular legends, as for example the monk Ilsan in the Rosengarten.

But it was not only in the German epos, that the strollers smuggled in, beautiful copies of their own life; despised as they were, they contrived, with all the insolence of their craft, to introduce themselves into the nave and choir of the church, though almost excluded from its holy rites. For even in the first strict ecclesiastical beginnings of the German dramas, they crept into the holy plays of the Easter festivals. Already in the beginning of the middle ages the history of the crucifixion and resurrection had a.s.sumed a dramatic colouring; alternate songs between Christ and his disciples, Pilate and the Jews, were sung by the clergy in the church choir; a great crucifix was reverently deposited in an artificial grave in the crypt, and afterwards there was a solemn announcement, on Easter morning, of the resurrection, songs of praise by the whole congregation, and the consecration of psalms. They began early to bring forward more prominently, individual roles in dramatic songs, to put speeches as well as songs into their mouths, and to distinguish the chief roles by suitable dress and particular attributes. On other Church festivals the same was done with the legends of the saints, and already in the twelfth century whole pieces were dramatically performed in the German churches, first of all in Latin, by the clergy in the choir. But in the thirteenth century the German language made its way into the dialogue; then the pieces became longer, the number of roles increased, the laity began to join in it, the dialogues became familiar, sometimes facetious, and contrasted wonderfully with the occasional Latin songs and responses, which were maintained in the midst of them, and which also gradually became German. The personages in the Biblical plays still appear under the same comic figures, with the coa.r.s.e jokes and street wit which the roving people had introduced into the churchyards. Generally the fool entered as servant of a quack.

From the oldest times these strollers had carried about with them through the country, secret remedies, especially such as were suspicious to the Church, primitive Roman superst.i.tions, ancient German forms of exorcism, and others also which were more noxious and dangerous. At the great Church festivals and markets, there were always doctors' booths, in which miraculous remedies and cures were offered for sale to the believing mult.i.tudes. These booths also of the wandering doctors are older than the Augustine age; they are to be seen depicted on the Greek vases, and came to Germany through Italy, with the grotesque masks of the doctors themselves and their attendant buffoons, and were the most profitable trade of the strollers. These doctors and their servants were introduced as interludes to the spiritual plays, with long spun out episodes of the holy traffic, in which ribaldry and drubbing are not wanting.

But the strollers introduced another popular person into the holy plays, the devil, probably his first appearance in the church. Long had this spirit of h.e.l.l spit out fire under the tents of the churchyard, and wagged his tail, and probably he had often been beaten and cheated, to the delight of the spectators, by clever players, before he a.s.sisted in the thirteenth century as a much-suffering fellow-actor, in the holy Easter dramas, to the edification of the pious paris.h.i.+oners.

Such was the active industry carried on by these strollers through the middle ages. Serving every cla.s.s and every tendency of the times, coa.r.s.e in manners and morals, as privileged jesters both cherished and ill treated, they were probably united amongst themselves in firm fellows.h.i.+p, with secret tokens of recognition; they were distinguished by their outward attire, and chiefly by fantastic finery, and by the absence of long hair and beard, the honourable adornment of privileged people, which they were forbidden to wear.

In the fifteenth century the severity of the laws against them were relaxed, for the whole life of all cla.s.ses had become more frivolous, daring, and reckless; an inordinate longing after enjoyment, an excessive pleasure in burlesque jesting, in music and dancing, in singing and mimic representations, was general in the wealthy towns.

Thus many of the race of strollers contrived to make their peace with the burgher society. They became domestic fools in the courts of princes, the merry-andrews of the towns, a.s.sociates of the town pipers, and players to the bands of Landsknechte.

But besides the players and their followers, there appeared along the roads of the armies, and in the hiding-places of the woods, other children of misfortune less harmless and far more awful to the people, first of all the gipsies.

The gipsies, from their language and the scanty historical records that there are of them, appear to be a race of northern border Indians, who lost their home, and their connection with their Indian relatives, at a time when the transformation of the ancient Sanscrit into the modern and popular languages had already begun. In their wanderings towards the west, which had gone on for centuries, they must have lived in continual intercourse with Arabians, Persians, and Greeks, for the language of these people has had a marked influence on their own. They were possibly, about the year 430 but more probably about 940, in Persia. They appeared about the twelfth century as Ishmaelites and braziers,[41] in Upper Germany. They were settled in the fourteenth century in Cypress, and in the year 1370, as bondsmen is Wallachia. The name of Zingaro or Zitano, is a corruption from their language; they still call themselves Scindians, dwellers on the banks of the Indus; their own statement also, that they came from Little Egypt, may be correct, as Little Egypt appears then to have denoted, not the valley of the Nile, but the frontier lands of Asia.

In the year 1417, they came in great hordes, with laughable pretensions and grotesque processions, from Hungary, into Germany, and shortly afterwards into Switzerland, France, and Italy. A band of three hundred grown-up persons, without counting the children, proceeded as far as the Baltic, under the command of a duke and count, on horseback and on foot; the women and children sitting with the baggage on the carts.

They were dressed like comedians, and had sporting dogs with them as a sign of n.o.ble birth; but when they really hunted, they did so without dogs, and without noise. They showed recommendations and safe-conducts from princes and n.o.bles, and also from the Emperor Sigismund. They a.s.serted that their bishops had commanded them to wander for seven years through the world. But they were great swindlers, and pa.s.sed their nights in the open air, for better opportunities of stealing. In 1418, they appeared in many parts of Germany, and the same year went under the command of Duke Michael, from Little Egypt into Switzerland.

A rendezvous of many hordes seems to have taken place before Zurich.

They numbered according to the lowest computation a thousand heads.

They had two dukes and two knights, and pretended to have been driven from Egypt by the Turks: they carried much money in their pockets, and maintained that they had received it from their own people at home: they ate and drank well, and also paid well, but they have never shown themselves again like this. From thence they appear to have turned to France and Italy; in 1422, a band of them came under a duke from Egypt to Bologna and Forli. They stated that the King of Hungary had compelled about 4000 of them to be baptized, and had slain the remainder; the baptized had been condemned to the penance of seven years' wandering. They wished to go to Rome to visit the Pope. In 1427, the same band, probably, appeared before Paris with two dukes. They a.s.serted that they had letters and a blessing from the Pope. The Pope had held council concerning them, and had decided that they were to wander through the world seven years, without lying on a bed; then he would send them to a fine country. For five years they had journeyed about, and their king and queen had died during their wanderings, &c.

These were followed by other bands.