ABSTRACT
What peasants felt about their condition and how they proposed that it should be remedied emerged more clearly in the German Peasants’ War than in any other pre-industrial popular movement. The hundreds of surviving lists of peasant articles were compiled in some respects like the cahiers of the French Revolution, but only in a few cases were they profoundly changed or reworded by the more educated and socially elevated leaders who put them to paper. The form and content of these complaints varied: some were as generalized as the Twelve Articles of the peasants of Upper Swabia which gained wide currency throughout Germany; others were the more particular complaints by the subjects of one overlord or in a single village; and yet others were the protests of individual peasants like the 400 submissions made by subjects of the prince-abbot of Kempten. Given the considerable variety and the great length and intricate detail of many of these gravamina, the Twelve Articles and several other relatively concise examples, drawn from Swabia and adjacent lands, may be taken as representative of the kind of grievances expressed also—though with variations—in Alsace, the Rhineland, Württemberg, the Black Forest, Thuringia, Franconia, Salzburg, the Tirol, Switzerland and elsewhere. Swabia not only provides the greatest variety of sources of quotable length, but in the history of the Peasants’ War, it was the region where, in the first months of 1525, the revolt gathered momentum after the initial hesitations in the original Black Forest rising at the end of 1524. Moreover, it was following the Swabian example and usually inspired by the Twelve Articles that many other regions in Germany and beyond its frontiers joined the rising during the ensuing months.
