So far as the townsmen are concerned, nothing need be added to what has already been said; but the causes of the growing depression of the peasantry were more complicated. The universal testimony of contemporaries is that the gradual introduction of Roman law brought the greatest change, by placing a means of universal oppression in the hands of the over-lords. There is no need to suppose that the lawyers who introduced the new jurisprudence meant to use it to degrade and oppress the peasant class. A slight study of the _Weisthümer_ shows how complicated and varied was this consuetudinary law which regulated the relations between peasant and over-lord. It was natural, when great estates grew to be principalities, whether lay or clerical, that the over-lords should seek for some principle of codification or reduction to uniformity. It had been the custom for centuries to attempt to simplify the ruder and involved German codes by bringing them into harmony with the principles of Roman law, and this idea had received a powerful impetus from the Renaissance movement. But when the bewildering multiplicity of customary usages which had governed the relations of cultivators to over-lords was simplified according to the ideas of Roman law, the result was in the highest degree dangerous to the free peasantry of Germany. The conception of strict individual proprietorship tended to displace the indefinite conception of communal proprietorship, and the peasants could only appear in the guise of tenants on long leases, or serfs who might have some personal rights but no rights of property, or slaves who had no rights at all. The new jurisprudence began by attacking the common lands, pastures, and forests. The passion for the chase, which became the more engrossing as the right to wage private war grew more and more dangerous, led to the nobles insisting on the individual title to all forest lands, and to the publication of such forest laws as we find made in Würtemberg, where anyone found trespassing with gun or cross-bow was liable to lose one eye. The attempt to reduce a free peasantry in possession of communal property to tenants on long lease, then to serfs, and, lastly, to slaves, may be seen in the seventy years’ struggle between the Abbots of Kempten and their peasants. These spiritual lords carried on the contest with every kind of force and chicanery they could command. They enlarged illegally the jurisdiction of their spiritual courts; they prevented the poor people who opposed them from coming to the Lord’s Table; they actually falsified their title-deeds, inserting provisions which were not originally contained in them.