But it is incumbent upon us to return to the beginning of the period of decadence and consider the decline in its sequence. During the era of chivalry the follies of the nobles were imitated by the peasants and burghers. Inter-marriages between poor nobles and rich peasants occurred now and then, liaisons and amours between them were much more frequent; the caricature of the _bourgeois gentilhomme_, whom Moliere satirized in his immortal comedy, was ever present. Neidhart's and Strieker's poems and Werner's _Meier Helmbrecht_ furnish delightful figures and caricatures of the upstart class which was so scorned, ridiculed, and snubbed by the "smart set" of the time. Yet, on the whole, it may be said that the boys and girls of the peasants and bourgeois led natural lives, courting and dancing and wooing, as long as they were kept from the influence of the chivalric craze. Instead of knight-errantry there were among these young people simple though not always platonic relations. The lords still exercised their harmful influence upon the freedom of the peasantry, but it gradually diminished. At springtide there was love and marriage, not always voluntarily, but in deference to the right of lords and princes to command their dependants to marry. In some localities a system of pairing prevailed, and maids were assigned as companions by lot, and mated couples danced together during an entire summer. Such play, very naturally, and not infrequently, became earnest. The nobles were mostly landed proprietors, but when the cities began to grow, urban patricians, proud and self-satisfied, arose. The common people, however, because of their number and increasing wealth, gained a share in the government. They formed themselves, for strength and self-defence, into "corporations and guilds." They won city rights. In the course of time, instead of the rule of the "families," or patricians, there came the rule of the guilds. The democracy gained control, though not until after hard and frequently very bloody fights of the factions at the polls for municipal supremacy. With the victory of democracy begins the industrial, commercial, and political vigor of the common people. This is manifested in the great and important city leagues: especially the _Hansa_, but also the League of Rhenish and of Suabian Cities unions that were at times more powerful than kings and emperors. Socially, nevertheless, the picture is reversed: the castes remain separated even in the church, as they were separated in dancing halls and other places of pleasure and drinking. Yet the free artisans, their wives and daughters, led a joyful life at their weddings, dances, and carnivals, though they dwelt in narrow lanes and alleys, in houses of wood, straw-covered and with a few windows, and these frequently with panes of paper or none at all. Goethe in Faust describes these abodes: