ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors shall be preoccupied with Europe's peasants, their assumptions and particularly their protest movements. Verbal and argumentative aptitude, familiarity with custom, attention to details and knowledge of rights can be read into manifestos from various peasant revolts. The manifestos of peasant revolts often began with an explanatory preamble designed to win support, along with a concluding peroration. In terms of content, by carefully selecting manifestos an historian could prove with equal assurance widely different propositions about peasant revolts. Lent implies purification and carnival, and both have something to do with peasant revolts. Peasant revolts failed for a number of reasons, not the least being that they encapsulated the fatal division between Lent and carnival. Only the Hussite Reformation was ‘republican’, and its messianism, focused on Christ the King, confirms rather than negates the firm hold that kingship held over the popular imagination.
