Of all classes the peasants around Wittenberg incurred his displeasure most severely. “They are all going to the devil,” he says when lamenting that, “out of so many villages, only one man taught his household from the Word of God”; with the young country folk “something” could be done, but the old peasants had been utterly corrupted by the Pope; this was also the complaint of the Evangelical deacons who came in touch with them.[205]—“I am very angry with the peasants,” he wrote in 1529, “who are anxious to govern themselves and who do not appreciate their good fortune in being able to sleep in peace owing to the help and protection of the rulers. You helpless, boorish yokels and donkeys,” he says to them, “will you never learn to understand? May the lightning blast you!—You have the best of it.… You have the Mark and yet are so ungrateful as to refuse to pray for the rulers or to give them anything.”[206] As a matter of fact, however, the great ones did not wait for the peasants to “give” anything. They oppressed the country people and plundered them. Melanchthon wrote, particularly after 1525, of the boundless despotism of the authorities over the people on the land. Since the overthrow of the social revolution very sad changes had taken place among the agriculturists. The violent “laying of the yokels” became a general evil, and, in place of the small holdings of the peasant class—the most virile and largest portion of the nation—arose the large estates of the nobles. Not merely where the horrors of war had raged, but even elsewhere, e.g. in the north-east of Germany, the peasant found himself deprived of his rights and left defenceless in the hands of the Junkers and knights.[207] “The reformation-age made his rights to his property and his standing more parlous than before.”[208] What Luther says of serfdom, the oppression and abuse of which had led to the Peasant Rising, is worthy of record: “Serfdom,” he says, “is not contrary to Christianity, and whoever says it is tells a lie!”[209]—“Christ does not wish to abolish serfdom. What cares He how the lords or princes rule [in secular matters]?”[210]