“Arise! Fight the battle of the Lord! On! On! On! The wicked tremble when they hear of you. On! On! On! Be pitiless although Esau gives you fair words (Gen. xxxiii.). Heed not the groans of the godless; they will beg, weep, and entreat you for pity like children. Show them no mercy, as God commanded to Moses (Deut. vii.), and as He has revealed the same to us. Rouse up the towns and the villages; above all, rouse the miners.... On! On! On! while the fire is burning let not the blood cool on your swords! Smite pinke-pank on the anvil of Nimrod! Overturn their towers to the foundation: while one of them lives you will not be free from the fear of man. While they reign over you it is of no use to speak of the fear of God. On! while it is day! God is with you.” The words were meant to rouse the miners of Mansfeld. They failed in their original intention, but they sent bands of armed insurgents through Thüringen and the Harz, and within fourteen days about forty convents and monasteries were destroyed, and the inmates (many of them poor women with no homes to return to) were sent adrift. The revolt spread like a conflagration, one province catching fire from another, until in the early spring months of 1525 almost all Germany was in uproar. The only districts which escaped were Bavaria in the south, Hesse, and the north and north-east provinces. The insurgents were not peasants only. The poorer population of many of the towns fraternised with the insurgents, and compelled the civic authorities to admit them within their walls. § 4. The Twelve Articles. Statements of grievances were published which, naturally, bore a strong resemblance to those issued in the earlier social uprisings. The countrymen complained of the continuous appropriation of the woodlands by the proprietors, and that they were not allowed to fish in the streams or to kill game in their fields. They denounced the proprietors’ practice of compelling his peasants to do all manner of unstipulated service for him without payment—to repair his roads, to assist at his hunts, to draw his fish-ponds. They said that their crops were ruined by game which they were not allowed to kill, and by hunters in pursuit of game; that the landlord led his streams across their meadow land, and deprived them of water for irrigation. They protested against arbitrary punishments, unknown to the old consuetudinary village law-courts (_Haingerichte_).