ABSTRACT
'The peasants', wrote Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, 'are without history.' Equality was never a feature of the peasant world. The better-off peasants had long recognized the need, in their own interest, to limit the right to participation in decisions. The wide variety of systems of tenure and of natural resources in the German countryside, the 'chaotic variety' of which Abel speaks, meant that, while many peasants laboured under burdensome obligations and minimal return for their labour, others prospered. The peasants were inevitably the worst sufferers during the Thirty Years War, and, for many years after the peace, at the hands of marauding soldiers. The most important overall effect of the war for the peasant was that he became increasingly bound to the soil he tilled. The peasants rebelled too in Switzerland and Bavaria, especially in districts where once the peasants had enjoyed local representation, or whose neighbours in adjoining regions were thus represented.
