Such approximately would have been the view of a German city in the sixteenth century as presented to a traveller in a time of peace. More stirring times, however, were as frequent,--times when the tocsin rang out from the steeple all night long, calling the citizens to arms. By such scenes, needless to say, the year of the Peasant War was more than usually characterised. In the days when every man carried arms and knew how to use them, when the fighting instinct was imbibed with the mother's milk, when every week saw some street brawl, often attended by loss of life, and that by no means always among the most worthless and dissolute of the inhabitants, every dissatisfaction immediately turned itself into an armed revolt, whether it were of the apprentices or the journeymen against the guild-masters, the body of the townsmen against the patriciate, the town itself against its feudal superior, where it had one, or of the knighthood against the princes. The extremity to which disputes can at present be carried without resulting in a breach of the peace, as evinced in modern political and trade conflicts, exacerbated though some of them are, was a thing unknown in the Middle Ages, and indeed to any considerable extent until comparatively recent times. The sacred right of insurrection was then a recognised fact of life, and but very little straining of a dispute led to a resort to arms. In the subsequent chapters we have to deal with the more important of those outbursts to which the ferment due to the dissolution of the mediæval system of things, then beginning throughout Central Europe, gave rise, of which the religious side is represented by what is known as the Reformation. FOOTNOTES: [19] Sebastian Franck, _Chronica_, ccxvii. [20] _Cf._ Trittheim's letter to Wirdung of Hasfurt regarding Faust. _J. Tritthemii Epistolarum Familiarum_, 1536, bk. ii., ep. 47; also the works of Paracelsus. CHAPTER VI. THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD.