The new jurisprudence was a very effectual instrument in the hands of an impoverished landlord class to ease the peasant of his superfluous wealth, and to keep him in his proper place. It was used almost universally, and the peasant rebellions were the natural consequences. But the more determined peasant revolts, which began with the _Bundschuh_ League, arose at a time when life was hard for peasant and artisan alike. The last decade of the fifteenth century and the first of the sixteenth contained a number of years in which the harvest failed almost entirely over all or in parts of Germany. They began with 1490, and in that year contemporary writers, like Trithemius, declare that the lot of the poor was almost unbearable. The bad harvests of 1491 and 1492 made things worse. In 1493, the year which saw the foundation of the _Bundschuh_, the state of matters may be guessed from the fact that men came all the way from the Tyrol to the upper reaches of the Main, where the harvest was comparatively good, bought barley there for five times its usual price, carried it on pack-horses by little frequented paths to their own country, and sold it at a profit. In 1499 the Swiss refused to submit to the imperial proposals for consolidating the Empire. Maximilian or his government in the Tyrol resolved to punish them, and the Swabian League were to be the executioners. The Swiss, highly incensed, had declared that if they were forced into war it would be a war of extermination. They were as bad as their word. An eye-witness saw whole villages in the wasted districts forsaken by the men, and the women gathered in troops, feeding on herbs and roots, and seeing with the apathy of despair their ranks diminish clay by day.(65) The Swiss war was worse than many bad harvests for the Hegau and other districts in South Germany. In 1500 the harvest failed over all Germany; 1501 and 1502 were years when the crops failed in a number of districts; and in 1503 there was another universally bad harvest. These years of scarcity pressed most heavily on the peasant class. In some districts of Brandenburg, peasants were found in the woods dead of starvation, with the grass which they had been trying to eat still in their mouths. Cities like Augsburg and Strassburg bought grain, stored it in magazines, and kept the poor alive by periodical distributions. This cycle of famine years from 1490 to 1503 was the period when the most determined and desperate social risings took place, and largely explains them.(66)