Though there was nothing new in either the manner of oppression or in the demands of the third estate during the last decade preceding the great rebellion, there does seem to be a new atmosphere, or tone, in the literature addressed to the lower classes. While on the one hand the poor were still mocked and insulted as they always had been by foolish and heartless possessors of inherited wealth and position, from other quarters they now began to be also flattered and courted. The peasant became in the large pamphlet literature of the time an ideal figure, the type of the plain, honest, God-fearing man. [Sidenote: The peasant idealized] Nobles like Duke Ulrich of Wuerttemberg affected to be called by popular nicknames. Carlstadt and other learned men proclaimed that the peasant knew better the Word of God and the way of salvation than did the learned. Many radical preachers, especially the Anabaptist {91} Muenzer, carried the message of human brotherhood to the point of communism. There were a number of lay preachers, the most celebrated being the physician Hans Maurer, who took the sobriquet "Karsthans." This name, "the man with the hoe," soon became one of the catch-words of the time, and made its way into popular speech as a synonym for the simple and pious laborer. Hutten took it up and urged the people to seize flails and pitchforks and smite the clergy and the pope as they would the devil. [Sidenote: 1521] Others preached hatred of the Jews, of the rich, of lawyers. Above all they appealed to the Bible as the devine law, and demanded a religious reform as a condition and preliminary to a thorough renovation of society. Although Luther himself from the first opposed all forms of violence, his clarion voice rang out in protest against the injustice of the nobles. "The people neither can nor will endure your tyranny any longer," he said to them in 1523, "God will not endure it; the world is not what it once was when you drove and hunted men like wild beasts."