Paul Freedman 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
Approaches to the Question of Peasant Resistance 
Until recently, peasants of past as well as contemporary times have been 
regarded by historians and other scholars as lying outside the drama of 
historical progress. If they were involved in important events, it was as 
uncomprehending victims or as manipulated mobs. Their role in resisting 
the French Revolution in the Vendée, for example, supposedly epitomized 
both their attachment to traditional arrangements and the futility of rural 
organized movements. The disappearence of the peasantry in the twentieth 
century was thought, by a wide spectrum of learned opinion, to be inevita-
ble. In Western Europe this disappearence has indeed taken place. Ironi-
cally (considering the contempt in which they were held for so long), the 
demise of this ancient class in the West has provoked a good deal of unease, 
even lamentation. Regional and local identity, national sentiment for the 
agrarian virtues, and holding back the tide of post-industrial consumer cul-
ture are all undermined by the abandonment of the land and its conver-
sion into large-scale corporate farming.1 From Mexico to Pakistan, however, 
the contemporary peasantry has shown a degree of resilience not anticipated 
by most social theorists of either the left or right. 
For most of the last century Marxist and non-Marxist social scientists 
agreed that peasants represented a retrograde factor in economic develop-
ment and that progress would leave them behind. In orthodox Marxist think-
ing peasants are either a hinderance to revolutionary progress or at best 
followers and indirect participants. That the urban proletariat alone could 
forge a true revolution was reiterated by Stalin, who considered early Rus-
sian peasant uprisings as worthy of notice but "tsarist" in motivation hence 
irrelevant to true revolutionaries.2 The forced collectivization of agriculture 
in the Soviet Union was a logical, if particularly savage, outcome of an atti-
1 For France, for example, see Michel Gervais et al„ La fin de la France paysanne de 1914 
nos jours, Histoire de la France rurale, vol. 4 (Paris, 1976); Michael Bess, "Ecology and 
Artifice: Shifting Perceptions of Nature and High Technology in Postwar France," 
Technology and Cultured (1995),pp. 830-862. 
2 Notably in correspondence with Emil Ludwig, cited in Leo Yaresh, "The 'Peasant 
Wars' in Soviet Historiography," The American Slavic and East European Review 16 
(1957), p. 241. 
Filozofski vestnik, XVIII (2/1997), pp. 179-211. 179 
Paul Freedman 
tude that saw the proletariat as the vanguard of revolution and industrial 
modernization as possible in a backward society only by destroying its small 
agricultural proprietors. 
Certain peasant movements of the past have been regarded with favor 
by Marxist thought. There is a tradition exalting the German Peasants' War 
of 1525 that goes back to Friedrich Engels, however, he interpreted the strug-
gle as a manifestation of the contradictions feudal society and the transition 
to capitalism. The peasants could not be said to serve as historical actors in 
their own right. Following Engels, East German historiography saw the re-
volts of 1525 as an episode in the "early bourgeois revolution" whose origins 
and real significance lay in the cities and the impetus of the Reformation. The 
peasant uprising failed but helped usher in the new mode of production.3 
For theorists of development in the twentieth-century West, the peasant 
has also been relegated to a nether-world of historical irrelevance and pow-
erlessness. Progress towards modernity and industrialization is measured by 
the decrease in rural population and the "rationalization" of agriculture for 
export and into larger units of cultivation. Experts in the field of economic 
development viewed with equanimity the breaking apart of the insular world 
of the village by agricultural, industrial and communications technologies that 
have reorganized formerly subsistence economies. 
Although not conceptually allied with such an aggressive view of progress, 
historians in the West have agreed with the proponents of industrial develop-
ment in considering peasant movements as marginal to the real stream of 
historical change. The German Peasants' War of 1525, according to the once-
dominant view, was more a symptom of German political crisis than a peas-
ant movement. The leading historian of the revolt, Günther Franz, regarded 
it as part of a larger struggle over the fate of the German Reich.4 Other histo-
rians, while not quite so completely minimizing the social aspects of the war, 
regarded the peasants as acted on from outside by the Reformation and its 
concomittant subversive ideas that originated in cities.5 
3 Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (New York, 1926); Adolf Laube et al., 
Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschenfrühbürgerlichen Revolution (Berlin, 1974); Diefrühbürgerliche 
Revolution in Deutschland: Referate und Diskussion zum Thema "Probleme der frühbürgerliche 
Revolution in Deutschland 1476-1535", ed. Gerhardt Brendler (Berlin, 1961). 
4 Günther Franz, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, 12th ed. (Darmstadt, 1984), p. 288. 
5 Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort 
and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. (Durham, N.C., 1982); Steven Ozment, The Reformation in 
the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New 
Haven, 1975); A. G. Dickens, The German Nation and Martin Luther (New York, 1974); 
Heiko Oberman, "Tumultus rusticorum: Von 'Klosterkrieg' zum Fürstensieg," Zeitschrift 
für Kirchengeschichte 85 (1974), pp. 157-172. 
180 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
Modern attitudes towards the peasantry in a curious way parallel those 
of the Middle Ages that saw peasants as hapless, inarticulate, capable of 
dangerous but irrational and unfocused rebellions, but lacking in any sense 
of program or progress. Peasant resistance thus was regarded as frequent 
but futile, an instinctual rage rather the expression of any sort of organized 
plan.6 Such peasant movements as did seem worthy of notice were either 
irrational outbursts (of which the French Jacquerie of 1358 might be taken as 
a typical example), or dependent on the enterprise of more articulate classes 
(especially townspeople). 
Much of this, however, has changed in recent years as the resource-
fulness and rationality of peasants has come to be more positively evaluated. 
Some of this has come about as the result of a belated disenchantment with 
the social costs and ecological effects of development. The spectacular fail-
ure of Soviet agriculture or the deleterious effects of disinvestment in agri-
culture in favor of ill-advised or corrupt schemes (in Africa, for example), 
have weakened some of the confidence in what is "rational" or "irrational" 
in agricultural practices. The rediscovery of the work of A. V. Chayanov, for 
example, has inspired a favorable view of the peasant family economy.7 
Instead of regarding peasants as inefficient or their familial orientation as a 
bar large-scale mechanized exploitation, Chayanov considered the forms 
of family agricultural enterprise in terms of perfectly rational and under-
standable calculations compatible with a self-sustaining working of the land. 
But the major shift in how peasant are considered, both in their present 
and past incarnations, has come about through reexamination of what con-
stitutes peasant resistance. Rather than looking exclusively at rebellions and 
other overt manifestations, observers of contemporary peasant societies such 
as James Scott have called attention to the indirect forms of peasant resist-
ance, such things as evasion, foot-dragging, sabotage and other forms of non-
cooperation that constitute "everyday forms of resistance."8 These may not 
in the long run be particularly effective. Scott's formulations resulted from 
field work in Malaysia, a country where arguably the small-scale rice farm-
6 E.g. Roland Mousnier, Fureurs paysannes: les paysans dans les révoltes du XVIIe siècle 
(France, Russie, Chine) (Paris, 1967). 
7 A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, trans. Christel Lane and R. E. F. Smith 
(Homewood, Illinois, 1966; orig. publ. Moscow, 1925). 
8 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 
1985). See also Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, ed. Forrest D. Colborn (Armonk, 
N.Y., 1989); articles on everyday forms of peasant resistance in Southeast Asia collected 
in Journal of Peasant Studies 13, no. 2 (1986); Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday 
Social Relations in South Asia (Berkeley, 1992). 
181 
Paul Freedman 
ers and others who attempted to resist the consolidation of holdings and 
changes towards heavy technological inputs could only delay rather than hold 
off the extinction of their way of life. On the other hand, in his later work, 
which spans historical epochs and continents, Scott has shown not only how 
redoubtable peasant resistance could be but also its visible historical effects. 
Crucial events such as the mass desertion from the Russian army in the First 
World War and its consequent disintegration (which paved the way for the 
Russian Revolution) must be understood as large-scale examples of indirect 
resistance that required no over-arching ideology but rather the desire to 
survive.9 
It is possible to criticize the emphasis on indirect resistance as disguis-
ing how often peasants cooperate with and accept the terms of their sub-
ordination.10 There are also many divisions within the subordinated who 
do not present an unambiguously united front against a clearly identifiable 
oppressor. The tendency to ignore these divisions may be seen as romanti-
cizing peasant resistance.11 Finally, in another expression of the disillusion-
ment with twentieth century movements in the name of freeing the peasantry, 
the Subaltern Studies school questions the degree to which the voices of the 
subordinated can really be recovered without distortion that serves the in-
terests of those purporting to speak for them.12 
Of course it is true that not all opposition can be regarded as carefully 
thought out defiance. Gossip, grumbling, satire can accord with deference 
and even bolster the terms of a dominant discourse.13 Peasants did not nec-
essarily define themselves under all circumstances in terms of a binary op-
position between themselves and their lords. 
Yet there really is a long-standing struggle that takes several forms al-
though any fixed boundary between "serious" and "complicitous," or even 
direct and indirect is not easy to draw. A useful result of the emphasis on 
9 James C. Scott, "Everyday Forms of Resistance," in Colburn, ed. Everyday Forms of 
Peasant Resistance, p. 14. 
1 0 Christine Pelzer White, "Everyday Resistance, Socialist Revolution, and Rural 
Development: The Vietnamese Case," Journal of Peasant Studies 13:2 (1986), 56 writes 
of "everyday forms of peasant collaboration." 
1 1 Sherry B. Ortner, "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal," in The 
Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 
281-304, especially pp. 287-288. 
1 2 An overview of Subaltern Studies is given in Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as 
Potcolonial Criticism," American Historical Review 99 (1994), pp. 1475-1490. 
I Q 11 
A point made by C. J. Wickham, "Gossip and Resistance Among the Medieval 
Peasantry," Inaugural Lecture, School of History, University of Birmingham (printed 
separately, Birmingham, 1995). 
182 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
everyday resistance is to revise how peasants are thought to regard their own 
situation; to emphasize their role as historical actors, as agents in their own 
destiny. Borrowing a term from E. P. Thompson, Scott described the "moral 
economy" of the peasants, a subsistence ethic neither immutable nor stub-
bornly irrational but a local response to adversity (including human exploi-
tat ion).1 4 Central to the moral economy is an emphasis on what Scott 
elsehwere refers to as "the small decencies" of labor, family, community and 
a desire for some minimal autonomy and control of one's environment.15 
That these aspirations are not necessarily universal or pure does not render 
them the figment of a romantic imagination. 
Scott has been especially concerned to deny theories of hegemony that 
assume a deluded acquiescence by the oppressed to their subordination. 
By attending exclusively to insurrection and other forms of violent resist-
ance, observers wrongly take everything else for acceptance. Behind the 
formulae of deference there is a rich but hidden vocabulary of resistance. 
Far from buying into the hegemonic ideology of the dominant classes, the 
subordinate are capable of creating a space for dissent, forwarding a spe-
cifically peasant discourse and action, and even taking advantage of the of-
ficial justifications for the social order.16 The claims that the dominant class 
enjoys its power for legitimate and ethical reasons in the interests of all can 
be turned against it on the basis of failure to live up to those claims.17 For 
example, what Luther and many modern historians have regarded as the 
German peasants' over-literal understanding of Christian equality and free-
dom can be seen as a sincere but also opportunistic use of a widely shared 
system of ideas. 
The peasants in 1525 were not, therefore, deluded in believing that the 
teachings of the Reformation meant that they should no longer be serfs and 
that they should govern their own communities and elect their own pastors. 
Rather they made use of ideas of reform as well as taking advantage of the 
1 4 James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast 
Asia (New Haven, 1976). 
1 5 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, p. 350. 
1 6 Examples of such favorable assessmets of peasants' knowedge of their situation and 
the actions result ing f rom that knowledge include Steven Feierman, Peasant 
Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison, 1990); Steve J. Stern, "New 
Approaches to the Study of Peasant Rebellion and Consciousness: Implications of 
the Andean Experience," in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant 
World, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries (Madison, 1987), ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison, 
1987), pp. 3-25. 
1 7 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 
1990). 
183 
Paul Freedman 
confusion of the political order in Germany to press already existing resent-
ments. In this view they are neither passive agents of an essentially urban move-
ment nor naive followers of what they took to be Luther's message of liberation 
but acted according to passionate but also rational calculation.18 Similarly peas-
ants in traditional Russia who believed that the tsar would support their rebel-
lions were not simply credulous but rather resourceful in legitimating resist-
ance to authority and fomenting revolts while invoking conservative, pious, tra-
ditionalist values.19 
The whole matter of how to consider peasant resistance is affected by the 
relation between indirect and direct means (evasion versus insurrection) and 
peasant self-awareness (whether their revolts are to be understood as calculated, 
stirred up from the outside, or despairing spasms). 
This becomes clearer if we look at typologies of peasant resistance devel-
oped by medieval and modern historians. Nearly fifty years ago the Soviet his-
torian Boris Porchnev posited a distinction between what he called "primary" 
and "secondary" forms of peasant resistance. The primary were open rebel-
lions while the secondary correspond to indirect or everyday forms of resist-
ance, within which Porchnev identified particularly non-cooperation and flight20 
For Porchnev the peasants were attacking the feudal system of property 
holding and exploitation, so that even when disturbances began as protests over 
royal taxation, they escalated quickly into attempts to end what were regarded 
as the abusive conditions of the seigneurial regime.21 
Within the context of Soviet historiography, Porchnev was innovative and 
courageous in depicting peasant revolts as progressive and motivated by an 
accurate reading of social conditions. In 1951 this would earn him censure from 
the historical division of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He was particu-
larly attacked for minimizing the role of the bourgeoisie and was forced to is-
sue a retraction.22 Even Porchnev at his most daring, however, considered 
1 8 The work of Peter Blickle has emphasized the communal and social basis of the 
German Peasants' War while seeing it as profoundly influenced by the movement of 
Reform. See, for example, his Die Revolution von 1525 (Munich, 1975), also published 
as The Revolution of1525: The German Peasants' War from a New Perspective, trans. Thomas 
A. Brady,Jr. and H. C. ErikMidelfort (Baltimore, 1981), and Gemeindereformation:Die 
Menschen des 16. Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Heil (Munich, 1985). 
1 9 Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston, 1976). 
2 0 Boris Porchnev (Porschnew), "Formen und Wege des bäuerlichen Kampfes gegen 
die feudale Ausbeutung," Sowjetwissenschaft, Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Abteilung 1952, 
pp. 440-459. First published in Izvestija Akademia nauk SSSR: seria istorii ifilosofil, no. 3 
(1950), pp. 205-221. 
2 1 See Porchnev's studies of the early French peasant revolts, Die Volkaufstände in Frankreich 
vor der Fronde, 1623-1648 (Leipzig, 1954). 
2 2 Described inYaresh, "The 'Peasant Wars' in Soviet Historiography," pp. 255-256. 
184 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
peasant uprisings lower forms of the class struggle that were not only unsuc-
cessful but led to the perfection of absolutism rather than any progressive 
change in agrarian conditions. 
Most other typologies have tended to minimize the extent to which such 
revolts really involve peasants rallied against their masters. Roland Mousnier 
took issue with Porchnev's approach to French revolts by distinguishing 
between a few that might be said really to be peasant uprisings and a larger 
number that were either led by nobles, or manipulated by them, and that 
expressed local grievances against centralized fiscal exactions rather than a 
class conflict. Peasants in these latter instances enacted as conservative an 
agenda as that held by their social superiors. Their demands were for the 
restoration of customs regarded as beneficial, not the abolition of obliga-
tions. The enemy was change and fiscal oppression represented by the grow-
ing royal absolutism.23 
This tendency to separate "real" peasant revolts from those that are in 
fact about something else is at the heart of many typologies. The factor that 
most appears to vitiate the revolutionary implications of many manifesta-
tions of peasant discontent is that demands were traditionalist or reaction-
ary. Invoking "good old law" is thought to imply that a radically different 
order of things could not be imagined. Demands framed in this fashion would 
be relevant to only one locality as customs of course changed from one ju-
risdiction to another. The very frequency and small-scale of early-modern 
uprisings, for example, might be interpreted as meaning that the grievances 
behind them were so local as to be incapable of spreading. Peter Burke 
distinguishes traditional f rom radical peasant movements, the former 
amounting to circumscribed demands for restoring the past while the latter 
envision a new society that ignores custom. The radical movement has more 
potential to spread, but is less common, certainly in the period after 1525.24 
Eric Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels also describes what are seen as archaic 
forms of resistance limited both geographically and ideologically.25 Their 
significance lies in how they reflect the aspirations of a large, usually inar-
2 3 Mousnier, Fureurs paysannes. Discussed in M. O. Gately et al., "Seventeenth Century 
Peasant 'Furies': Some Problems of Comparative History," Past and Present 51 (1971), 
pp. 63-80; C. S. L. Davies, "Peasant Revolts in France and England: A Comparison," 
Agricultural History Review 21 (1973), pp. 122-134. For a somewhat different French 
view of Porchnev that even more than Mousnier sees the peasants as frenzied but 
ineffectual, Robert Mandrou, "Les soulèvements populaires et la société française 
du XVIIe siècle," AnnalesE.-S.-C. 14 (1959), pp. 756-765. 
2 4 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modem Europe (New York, 1978), pp. 173-178. 
2 5 Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th 
and 20th Centuries (Manchester, 1959). 
185 
Paul Freedman 
ticulate population and only secondarily and exceptionally in any connec-
tion to true revolutionary organizations. Hobsbawm identified a few archaic 
movements (such as millenarian peasant groups) that approach something 
like revolutionary rather than reformist sentiment as opposed to a majority 
that are little more than variations on social banditry.26 On the other hand, 
Hobsbawm did acknowledge elsewhere that peasants could create revolu-
tions without intending to challenge the order of society or the structures of 
property.27 
In discussing the German peasantry and the events preceeding the great 
war of 1525, Giinther Franz considered all uprisings before the very end of 
the fifteenth century to have been motivated by a defense of custom, a justi-
fication for revolt based on "Old Law". Beginning with the Bundschuh 
movements in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, reference was 
made to "Godly Law" arguments born of a more urgent and drastic desire 
to make social conditions fit not an imagined past happiness but divine and 
unalterable natural law. What made medium-scale revolts such as the 
Bundschuh and the widespread cataclysm of 1525 possible was a common 
program based not on local bylaws but on the teachings of radical religious 
reform.28 
With regard to the late-medieval peasant uprisings, some of which we 
will discuss shortly, there has been the same tendency to ascribe the motiva-
tion to outside forces, or to deny that they were rebellions altogether. Guy 
Fourquin, for example, regards these movements either as demands for the 
social mobility of already affluent elements of the population, or as Messianic 
(hence irrational), or as the product of extraordinary political crises (a 
category that would include both the French Jacquerie of 1358 and the Eng-
lish Rising of 1381).29 In their study of late-medieval revolutions, Michel 
Mollat and Philippe Wolff take the social demands of the peasants more 
seriously but mingle them with urban movements such as the Florentine 
Ciompi of 1381 or the antijewish riots in Barcelona in 1391.30 
These observers have very different political and methodological pre-
dispositions but agree in defining nearly all peasant uprisings as lacking the 
revolutionary requirement of imagining a complete break with the past. In 
2 6 Ibid., pp. 3-8. 
2 7 Eric Hobsbawm, "Peasants and Politics," Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (1973), p. 12. 
2 8 Franz, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, pp. 1-91. 
2 9 Guy Fourquin, The Anatomy of Popular Rebellion in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam, 1978; 
orig.publ. Paris, 1972), pp. 129-160. 
3 0 Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, trans. 
A. L. Lytton-Sells (London, 1973; orig. publ. Paris, 1970). 
186 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
describing movements by lower classes generally, not merely peasants, 
Barrington Moore made use of a similar distinction. The main way in which 
oppressed groups contest their situation is to criticize the upper orders of 
society (most freqeuntly particular individuals in power) for not living up 
to a social contract that was observed in the past. They therefore accept the 
legitimacy of the dominant stratum rather than making an issue of the claims 
of that stratum to exert authority.31 There is, thus, again an implicit contrast 
between genuine and traditionalist demands. 
Such typologies are undermined by three factors that play an increas-
ingly important role in the discussion of peasants (and broadly the subordi-
nated elements of society): an emphasis on peasant agency (that peasants 
can act out of a realistic assessment of their situation), on indirect forms of 
resistance as efficacious rather than as inferior to open defiance, and finally 
a disillusioned realization of the limitations of radical revolutions. This last 
deserves some emphasis. In contrast to how things seemed when Hobsbawm 
or Moore wrote on peasant uprisings, radical revolutions of the twentieth 
century do not seem to have lived up to their promise, to put it mildly. They 
have led to disastrous upheavals in which life was transformed, but not for 
the better and at immense social cost. Where they might naturally have been 
expected to have the most constructive effects, in the Third World, struggles 
in the name of the peasantry have singularly failed. The experience of Marxist 
or soi-disant Marxist revolutions has called into question what constitutes 
effective resistance and false consciousness. As long as we were confident 
that we knew what a "real" revolutionary ideology looked like, a tradition-
alist revolt evoking a harmonoius past seemed primitive, secondary, or at 
best a "lower form of class struggle." 
Scott's "small decencies" of a modest but sufficient tenure, fixed and 
reasonable obligations and a modicum of human dignity appear less com-
promised or insufficiently radical in light of the nightmarish consequences 
for the peasants themselves of revolutions that claimed to be freeing them. 
Rather than supposing a Gramsician hegemony that imprisons the oppressed 
rural class in a false conscioussness of deference, their conservative demands 
can be seen as a strategy, producing what Scott calls "a space for a dissident 
subculture" and a "political disguise." We have already mentioned Field's 
analysis of Russian peasant rebels whose exaltation of the tsar was a strategy 
of legitimation, the seizing of the moral high ground, rather than a literal, 
3 1 Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y, 
1987), p. 84, a statement critiqued in Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 91-
96. 
187 
Paul Freedman 
childish faith in a beneficent father figure.32 Far from naive, frenzied or 
Messianic, the peasant rebels in such circumstances were astute in their 
expectation that the established order was not likely to be abolished. As Scott 
points out: 
"So long as that expectation prevails, it is impossible to know from the public tran-
script alone how much of the appeal to hegemonic values is prudence and formula 
and. how much is ethical submission. 
Ascribing rationality and political or ideological awareness to peasants 
restores to them a degree of voice, and renders their historical role less 
helpless or dependent on outside forces. This is important when examining 
the period of European history with the most serious and widely diffused 
peasant revolts, that between the Black Death of 1347-1349 and the German 
Peasants' War of 1525. 
Late Medieval Peasant Revolts 
Between 1350 and 1515 Europe was convulsed by large-scale peasant 
revolts. While the medieval agrarian economy, as Marc Bloch remarked, 
experienced peasant uprisings as frequently as stikes characterize the world 
of industrial capitalism,34 the geographic extent, scale and duration of the 
late-medieval revolts was more extensive than those during the earlier peri-
ods and would never be repeated after 1525. 
These revolts were not the only form in which a space for dissidence 
was created. The medieval system of exploitation was effective but organ-
ized around small-scale units both of cultivation and of jurisdiction. The 
opportunities for indirect resistance hence were numerous given the absen-
tee nature of lordship. There were also direct actions possible that do not 
appear as full-scale rebellions but that achieved a certain measure of suc-
cess. In a study of the occasional murder of lords in medieval France, Robert 
Jacob has shown that it was surprisingly widely recognized that grossly un-
just lords deserved to be resisted, even violently, even by peasants, as long 
as this was not the signal for some general disobedience.35 Moreover, local 
uprisings could be presented even by non-peasants as representing a com-
3 2 Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar. 
3 3 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 92. 
3 4 March Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet 
Sondheimer (Berkeley, 1966; orig. publ. Paris, 1931), p. 170. 
3 5 Robert Jacob, "La meurtre du seigneur dans la société féodale: la mémoire, le rite, la 
fonction," AnnalesE.-S.-C. 45 (1990), pp. 247-263. 
188 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
mendable desire for liberty. The revolt of 1476 by villagers of Fuenteovejuna 
in the region of Cordoba resulted in the death of their oppressive lord, the 
commander of the Order of Calatrava. Fuenteovejuna would become an 
emblem of anti-seigneurial rebellion and the defense of liberty, later fur-
nishing the subject for a celebrated play by Lope de Vega.36 Finally there 
are instances of the establishment of self-governing peasant communities such 
as the rural cantons of Switzerland.37 Less well known is the creation of a 
peasant republic at Dithmarschen along the North Sea coast of Holstein. 
First recognized in the thirteenth century, the terrae universitatis Dithmarsiae, 
as it was known, would last until the mid-sixteenth century.38 Its liberty was 
defended against the rulers of Schleswig and the king of Denmark so that, 
like the Swiss, the inhabitants of Dithmarschen formed an effective armed 
force aided by familiarity with a difficult terrain. That the Swiss conflicts with 
the Hapsburgs or the Dithmarschers battles with the Danes are not consid-
ered peasant revolts is due both to their success and to the eventual recog-
nition accorded to their polities. 
There were still other form of medieval rural conflicts in addition to 
the large, well-known late medieval wars and the peasant confederations. 
There were frequent local and regional peasant uprisings especially begin-
ning with the four teenth century. For the German Empire alone Peter 
Bierbrauer has counted 59 peasant insurrections between 1336 and 1525.39 
In what follows, some attempt is made to assess peasant motives and 
justifications for resistance. The rebellions that have left at least indirect 
eveidence of motivations tend to be those that attracted the more than glanc-
ing attention of chroniclers. Therefore, although the distinction between small 
local revolts and large regional ones is somewhat artificial (a matter of scale 
more than qualitative difference), I have limited the following discussion to 
3 6 Emilio Cabrera and Andrés Moros, Fuenteovejuna: La violencia antiseñorial en el siglo XV 
(Barcelona, 1991). 
3 7 P e t e r Blickle, "Das Gesetz der Eidgenossen: Überlegungen zur Entsthehung der 
Schweiz, 1200-1400," Historische Zeitschrift 225 (1992), pp. 561-586; Guy P. Marchai, 
"Die Antwort der Bauern: Elemente und Schichtungen des eidgenössischen 
Geschichtsbewusstseins am Ausgang des Mittelalters," in Geschichtsschreibung und 
Geschichtsbewusstsein im Spätmittelalter, ed. Hans Patze, Vorträge und Forschungen 31 
(Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 757-790. 
3 8 On Dithmarschen see William L. Urban, Dithmarschen: A Medieval Peasant Republic 
(Lewiston, N.Y. 1991); Walther Lammers, Die Schlacht bei Hemmingstedt: Freies Bauerntum 
und Fürstenmacht im Nordseeraum, 3rd ed. (Heide im Holstein, 1982). 
3 9 Peter Bierbrauer, "Bäuerliche Revolten im alten Reich. Ein Forschungsbericht," in 
Aufruhr und Empörung? Studien zum bäuerlichen Widerstand im Alten Reich, ed. Peter 
Blickle et al. (Munich, 1980), pp. 26, 62-65. 
189 
Paul Freedman 
the better-known conflicts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries while at 
least setting them in the context of a climate of f requent smaller revolts. 
The English Rebellion of 1381 
The immediate cause of the English Rising was the imposition of a poll 
tax by the royal government. Resistance to the tax began in May of 1381. 
Rebels from Kent and Essex marched on London in June, congregating at 
Blackheath and Mile End. The most dramatic phase of the rebellion —the 
execution of Archibishop Simon Sudbury, the burning of John of Gaunt's 
palace, the invasion of the Tower of London and the death of Wat Tyler at 
Smithfield— took place on and around the Feast of Corpus Christi. The 
festive inversion of social power and propriety that took place during the 
rebels' brief hold on the capital has been linked, both by contemporaries 
and by recent observers, to the traditional celebrations of Corpus Christi.40 
The significance of the date may have also affected the planning of the con-
vergence on London, which was more a planned, coordinated movement 
than a spontaneous mob activity.41 
What were the demands of those who revolted? On the one hand they 
seem to involve a radical political restructuring that would have, in effect, 
abolished the nobility. Rodney Hilton describes the rebels' goal as that of 
imposing a state ruled by a king but without nobles and a very circumscribed 
church, thus essentially the king and common people with few inter-
mediaries.42 On the other hand, the agenda of the local rebels (those who 
did not flock to London to confront the king), was not so different from 
that of earlier movements that had aimed at restoring a supposed earlier 
just relation between lords and men without eliminating lordship alto-
gether.43 Recent scholarship has tended to emphasize not only the coher-
4 0 Paul Strohm, Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 
1992); pp. 45-56; Margaret Aston, "Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the 
Peasants' Revolt," Past & Present 143 (1994), pp. 3-47; Stephen Justice, Writing and 
Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 156-176. 
4 1 Nicholas Brooks, "The Organization and Achievements of the Peasants of Kent and 
Essex in 1381," in Henry Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore, eds., Studies in Medieval 
History Presented to R. H. C. Davis (London, 1985), pp. 247-270. 
4 2 R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry of the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p. 15. 
4 3 Especially important in this regard is Rosamond Faith, "The 'Great Rumour ' of 1377 
and Peasant Ideology," in The English Rising of 1381, ed. R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston 
(Cambridge, 1984), pp. 43-73. 
190 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
ence of peasant aims but also their connections to older ideas of justice, 
especially complaints against arbitrary lordship. We can reconstruct some 
idea of peasant ideology even from the works of hostile chroniclers who were 
intent on portraying the peasants as unreasoning savages, a disorganized 
mob. 
While the demands of the peasants in London were for the abolition 
of lordship, movements in places such as St. Albans were considerably more 
moderate challenges to onerous and arbitrary incidents and rights of lord-
ship: rights to the use of common woods and meadows, rights to hunt game, 
an end to monopolies (such as the abbot's prohibition on tenants' posses-
sion of hand-mills), an end to death-duties.44 What unites these local demands 
is the revolt against the arbitrary perquisites of lordship. Even seemingly 
moderate demands, such as over the hand-mills, had radical symbolic (as 
well as practical) significance and imagery. In an earlier rebellion the ab-
bot of St. Albans had confiscated hand-mills that had allowed tenants to es-
cape his right to compel the milling of grain at his mill (which required a 
fee), and used them as paving for the floor of his parlor. In 1381, they were 
dug up and split into fragments to be given out as proof that the rebels (towns-
men and peasants) had accomplished their goal and also a symbol of their 
solidarity, a token of communion.4 5 With the suppression of the rebellion, 
the millstones were returned. 
Studies of the rebels who did not march on London show that their 
demands concerned seigneurial and manorial jurisdiction and admini-
stration, in particular serfdom and claims to levy exactions by reason of 
lordship over villeins.46 Similar to other great rebellions of the period, 
opportunities afforded by the weakness of government or alliances with other 
groups did not obscure the issues of status and rural lordship that most 
concerned peasants. Those who came to London and held the young King 
Richard II hostage went beyond the expression of grievances against taxa-
tion and the corruption of royal officials to demand the abolition of servi-
4 4 Faith, "The 'Great Rumour '" , pp. 62-70. 
4 5 Jus t i ce , Writing and Rebellion, pp. 168-176; Faith, "The 'Great Rumour ' ," p. 66 
(translating f rom the Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani): They took the stones 
outside and handed them over to the commons, breaking them into little pieces and 
giving a piece to each person, just as the consecrated bread is customarily broken 
and distributed in the parish churches on Sundays, so that the people, seeing these 
pieces, would know themselves to be avenged against the abbey in that cause. 
4 6 See, for example, the case of Essex in L. R. Poos, A Rural Society After the Black Death: 
Essex 1350-1525 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 231-252. 
191 
Paul Freedman 
tude and a radical alteration of lordship.47 The revolt resulted from a com-
bination of what might be called "political" circumstances, involving griev-
ances against governmental administration, and tensions in the relationship 
between landlords and tenants. 
The Black Death and the consequent radical diminution of population 
had altered the economic and social relationships in rural society. Land-
lords were squeezed by rising wages and falling prices for agricultural prod-
ucts and attempted to control more closely those tenants who remained by 
limiting wage increases, restricting freedom of movement, and levying ex-
actions that could be claimed from servile tenants. Not only were peasants' 
expectations of improvement thus frustrated, but in many instances their 
social condition was lowered as lords either imposed servitude on those 
previously considered free, or coerced those who had previously been al-
lowed to escape supervision. The seigneurial reaction was motivated by 
economic considerations rather than a desire for social control, but its ef-
fect was to sharpen the resentment of tenants against servitude. Those who 
were legally of villein status now saw a real disparity between their opportu-
nities and obligations and those of their free neighbors more able to take 
advantage of a favorable labor and rental market.48 Christopher Dyer, a 
careful observer of the entire sweep of medieval English social and economic 
history, writes of a "second serfdom" imposed by lords in the years leading 
up to the great rebellion.49 The conjunction of expectations of improved 
negotiating positions for peasants and attempts of lords to preserve or re-
impose servile dues and arbitrary lordship must be seen as the primary motor 
of revolt. 
Questions of freedom and servitude were not exclusively focused on 
matters of legal status, but neither were they mere rhetorical masks for other 
demands. What was at issue both before and after 1381 was the ability of 
lords to constrain their tenants by overturning or undermining traditions 
and practices favorable to peasants. This gives a seemingly conservative 
4 7 On the English Rising and its causes, see Christopher Dyer, "The Social and Economic 
Background to the Rural Revolt of 1381," in The English Rising pp. 9-42; E. B. Fryde 
and Natalie Fryde, "Peasant Rebellion and Peasant Discontents," in The Agrarian 
History of England and Wales, vol. 3, ed. Edward Miller (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 744-819; 
Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising 
of 1381 (New York, 1973); John Hatcher, "England in the Aftermath of the Black 
Death," Past & Present 144 (1994), pp. 3-35. 
4 8 J. H. Tillotson, "Peasant Unrest in the England of Richard II: Some Evidence f rom 
Royal Records," Historical Studies (Melbourne) 16 (1974), p. 14. 
4 9 Dyer, "Social and Economic Background", p. 25. 
192 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
character to the English Rising (as is the case elsewhere), with the peasants 
defending the "good old law" against attempts to consolidate holdings or to 
regularize obligations. As argued earlier, it is not profitable to formulate a 
typology of "reactionary" versus "progressive" social movements. Radical 
means (violent insurrection) were sometimes deployed toward conservative 
ends, to restore what was perceived as an earlier just order. It did not re-
quire a paradigm shift or a revolutionary religious sentiment to desire the 
overthrow of at least certain aspects of the seigneurial regime. Only a mi-
nority of peasant movements envisioned the complete end of lordship, in-
cluding some clearly inspired by religious reform. Nevertheless, it is worth 
taking seriously the range of peasant grievances which made use of com-
monly agreed definitions of liberty, servitude, human equality and Christ's 
sacrifice. 
To distinguish sharply between 1381 as a unique occasion and earlier 
local revolts makes obvious sense in terms of scale, but not ideology. Long 
before 1381 there had been persistent lawsuits and revolts concerning local 
grievances that anticipate the agenda of the 1381 rebellion, grievances re-
lated to changes in manorial custom imposed by landlords that bolstered 
their arbitrary power over tenants.50 In the thirteenth and early fourteenth 
centuries, before the economic consequences of the disaster of 1348-1349 
were felt, lords attempted to rationalize their holdings and to define their 
tenants as villeins. In the mid-thirteenth century, Robert de Mares and then 
his widow, Sibyl, attempted to reduce the status of the villagers of Peatling 
Magna in Northamptonshire to villeinage, asserting the right to tallage at 
will and the collection of merchet.51 The inhabitants of Peatling Magna won 
their case in 1261. Not so fortunate were their neighbors in Stoughton who 
lost their claims to freedom to Leicester Abbey in 1276.52 A poem written at 
the Abbey on that occasion asked, "What can a serf do unless serve, and his 
son?" It continued: 
5 0 Rodney Hilton, "Peasant Movements in England Before 1381", in Hilton, Class Conflict 
and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London, 1985), pp. 122-138; 
Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Peasant Resistance to Royal and Seigniorial Impositions", in 
Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages: Papers of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Center 
for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, ed. Francis X Newman (Binghamtom, 1986), 
pp. 30-40. 
5 1 D. A. Carpenter, "English Peasants in Politics, 1258-1267," Past & Present 136 (1992), 
repr. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (London and Rio Grande, Ohio, 1996), pp. 
325-326 (of reprint) . 
5 2 Ibid., p. 342; R. H. Hilton, "A Thirteenth-Century Poem on Disputed Villein Services," 
English Historical Review 56 (1941), pp. 90-97, repr. Hilton, Class Conflict, pp. 108-113. 
193 
Paul Freedman 
He shall be a pure serf deprived of freedom. 
The law's judgment and the king's court prove this. 
Beginning in around 1277, the men of the villages of Darnell and Over 
in Cheshire quarrelled with their lord, the abbot of Vale Royal, over his claims 
that they owed huge death-duties, leyrwithe upon marriage of a daughter, and 
various annoying services (feeding the abbot's puppies, keeping his wild horses 
and bees) .53 The villages had formerly belonged to the crown, and the condi-
tions under their new master were perceived as dramatically inferior. The 
Darnell villagers had complained to King Edward I shordy after the gift was 
made. The king is supposed to have told a throng of men carrying plowshares 
"As villeins you have come, and as villeins you shall return." There ensued a 
long series of suits and acts of violence. The villagers rose up against the ab-
bey in 1336, complaining that they were free and that the abbot had imposed 
on them the obligations of villeins. They petitioned the justice of Chester, (Sir 
Hugh de Fren), King Edward III, parliament, and Queen Phillippa. The queen 
ordered the abbot to restore what he had despoiled, but after the abbot ap-
peared before the rulers, the villagers were once again declared villeins. They 
ambushed the abbot in Rutland on his way back from the court, managing to 
kill a groom before being captured. They threw themselves upon the abbot's 
mercy and were compelled to perform repeated ceremonies in church dem-
onstrating their unfree status. One is struck not only by the persistence of the 
unfortunate tenants ofVale Royal but their touching faith in the judicial proc-
ess of the realm. 
Peasant movements to seek legal redress were organized before 1381. 
Opposition to arbitrary treatment in the fourteenth century is evident in the 
petition of the villagers of Albury in Hertsfordshire to parliament in 1321-2 
over seizures and imprisonment perpetrated by their lord. Numerous com-
plaints were registered by tenants attempting to prove their free status against 
lords' claims to hold them as serfs, as at Elmham in Suffolk (1360), and Great 
Leighs in Essex (1378).54 No less than forty villages in the south of England 
in 1377 were swept by what a contemporary called the "great rumor": a 
movement to assert personal liberty and oppose labor service demands by 
reference to Domesday Book.55 By purchasing certified copies of Domes-
5 3 On these disputes and the uprising of 1336, The Ledger-Book of Vale Royal Abbey, ed .John 
Brownbill, Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society 68 (1914), pp. 37-42, repr. G. G. Coulton, 
TheMedieval Village, (Cambridge, 1925, repr. New York, 1989), pp. 132-135; also in The 
Peasants' Revolt of 1381, ed. R. B. Dobson (London, 1970), pp. 80-83; also in H. E 
Hallam, "The Life of the People", in The Agrarian History of England and Wales vol. 2, 
ed. Hallam (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 846-849. 
5 4 Examples cited in Dyer, "Social and Economic Background", p. 31. 
5 5 Faith, "The 'Great Rumour"', pp. 43-73; Tillotson, "Peasant Unrest", pp. 1-16. 
194 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
day (exemplifications) referring to their tenancies, the villagers attempted 
to prove that they formed part of the ancient demesne of former crown lands 
whose tenants should be protected by the royal courts. The peasants who 
submitted Domesday exemplifications considered them as proving freedom 
from villein status altogether. Parliament and the Royal Council rejected 
attempts to use Domesday in this fashion, but the effort shows the peasants' 
knowledge of law and belief in its efficacy. There was a continuity between 
actions at law and local organized opposition which brought pressure by 
extra-legal means once the courts and appeals seemed fruitless. 
Many of the locales involved in the 1381 revolt had experienced ear-
lier suits or acts of insubordination, and a sample of individuals identified 
as rebels in 1381 shows that many of them already had experienced con-
frontations with their lords over fines or servile status.56 At issue in 1381 and 
before were questions of rent, service and other obligations of tenants that 
lords had attempted either to impose, reimpose or preserve in an environ-
ment of what can fairly be termed rising expectations. Questions of status 
were inextricably linked with these quarrels over revenues because if lords 
could show that those who complained of arbitrary violations of favorable 
customs were villeins, they could prevent them from appealing to the pub-
lic courts.57 The petitions for freedom from servitude in 1381 were not a 
cover for more practical, economic conflicts but the point at issue for oppo-
sition to arbitrary seigneurial power. 
Such demands were couched in conventional terms but the conclusions 
and programs that followed might be more radical. At the sermon given to 
the peasants assembled at Blackheath on the day of Corpus Christi itself, 
the renegade priest John Ball is reported by Thomas Walsingham to have 
argued on the basis of the well-known couplet "when Adam delved and Eve 
span, who was then the gentleman?" that all were created equal by nature. 
Servitude had been introduced contrary to God's will, by the wickedness of 
men (thus not by some primordial, divinely punished trespass). Had God 
3 6 Dyer, "The Social and Economic Background", pp. 34-35; John F. Nichols, "An Early 
Fourteenth Century Petition from the Tenants of Bocking to their Manorial Lord", 
Economic History Review 2 (1929-1930), pp. 300-307. Tillotson, "Peasant Unrest", notes 
(pp. 7-8) the importance of Wiltshire in the 1377 disturbances, a region that was 
relatively quiet in 1381. 
5 7 Hilton, "Peasant Movements", pp. 127-138 (of reprinted ed.). On the centrality of 
the demand for the end to serfdom, see also Hilton, "Social Concepts of the English 
Rising of 1381", in Class Conflict, pp. 216-226 (originally published in German in 
HistorischeZeitschrift, Beiheft 4 [Munich, 1975], pp. 31-46); Hilton, "PopularMovements 
in England at the End of the Fourteenth Century", in Class Conflict, pp. 152-164 
(originally in Rtumulto dei Ciompi [Florence, 1981], pp. 223-240). 
195 
Paul Freedman 
wished to create serfs, He would right at the beginning have established who 
was a serf and who was a lord.58 
Steven Justice has shown how Ball's sermon and letter fit with five Eng-
lish letters preserved in Henry Knighton's chronicle rallying peasants to 
the cause. They were probably not all written by John Ball, as used to be 
believed, but by other rebel spokesmen. Justice argues that the very act of 
fomenting rebellion by means of circular letters and broadsides is a defi-
ant gesture against those who regarded peasants as little better than ani-
mals, announcing "the documentary competence of the insurgent popula-
tion, a determination not to be excluded from documentary rule."59 One 
may not completely accept this valuation placed on literacy as the crux of 
rebellion. Nevertheless, Justice allows us to appreciate not only that the 
chroniclers' insistence that the peasants were unreasoning savages is false, 
but that much of what they report in the way of the burning of documents 
was something other than the act of frenzied mobs intent on destroying 
education along with lordship.60 Not only were the rebels rather selective 
in what they destroyed (Walsingham and the author of the Westminster 
Chronicle acknowledged that the burning of the Savoy Palace was carefully 
policed and that looting was strictly forbidden) , they also did not assume 
that all written records were tools of their subjugation.61 An exaggerated 
reverence for charters and ancient documents that inspired earlier move-
ments is apparent again in 1381. The rebels at St. Albans burned charters 
and rolls listing obligations but demanded an older parchment with az-
ure and gold capital letters that they believed had established their free-
dom. One can at a safe distance be amused at the villeins' belief that the 
Mercian King Offa was the author of such a charter and at the abbot 's 
rather bewildered promise to search a l though he had never seen no r 
heard of it. Similarly we can be confident that Bury St. Edmunds did not, 
in fact, have a charter of liberties issued by the monastery's founder King 
Cnut as the rebels there claimed.62 The same reverence before writing is 
found in the insistence of the rebels when they had the king in their power 
that he write a charter freeing them of service to their lords and pardon-
5 8 Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, Rolls Series 28, part 
1, vol. 2 (London, 1864), p. 33 and Walsingham, Chronicon Angliae, ed. Edward Maunde 
Thompson, Rolls Series 64 (London, 1874), p. 321. 
5 9 Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 36. 
6 0 A point argued strongly injustice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 43-51. 
6 1 Strohm, Hochon'sArrow, p. 44. 
6 2 Described from the works of Thomas ofWalsingham by Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 
pp. 47-48. 
196 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
ing them. Dissatisfied with the document they obtained, they then are sup-
posed to have ordered that men of law and others familiar with legal docu-
ments be executed.6 3 
The peasants also appear to have been capable of using to their own 
purposes arguments made with a different intention to a different audi-
ence by Wyclif and Langland. This was a process of deliberate shaping, 
not of ill-digested misunderstanding. Thus Wyclif himself was careful to 
join his denunciations of excessive church property-holding with provisions 
for its orderly transfer to secular rulers while the peasants could enunci-
ate his program in terms of a more literal understanding of the canon-law 
phrase (which Wyclif frequently invoked) that the goods of the Church 
belong to the poor (bona ecclesiae sunt bona pauperum). Wyclif may have 
meant his words to inspire the king and the great men of his realm to action, 
but his address to the laity was, as Steven Justice put it "overheard" by the 
peasants.6 4 Similarly the figure of Piers Plowman could be taken from 
Langland to serve as a vivid emblem of the virtuous countryman and 
Langland's allegory of "Truth" could be adapted to a more activist idea of 
imposing a new and just social order. 65 
Protection of traditional local rights and protection (or freedom) from 
servile status were the substance of the revolt. Despite the radical means 
by which the rebels' demands were put forward, one observes the same 
faith in written documents and legal concepts that informed earlier move-
ments such as the "Great Rumor" of 1377. In discerning (if not actually 
reconstituting) a peasant "voice" from the hostile texts that have survived, 
recent scholars have often wanted to see an authentic peasant alternative 
ideology, what Justice calls the "idiom of rural politics" and Strohm refers 
to as "rebel ideology."66 Such ideas were sufficiently antithetical to the 
dominant ideologies so that contemporary observers regarded them with 
fear mingled with ridicule. 
Strohm and Justice agree on the chroniclers' ignorance (willful or oth-
erwise) with regard to peasant demands but I question whether they were 
indeed so unaware. Naturally it would be hard to argue that Walsingham, 
Knighton or Froissart displayed any "sympathy" for the rebels, but they put 
into their mouths arguments that were neither novel nor incomprehensi-
ble. Froissart says that the people of Kent, Essex, Sussex and Bedford stirred 
63 Ibid. pp. 49-50. 
64 Ibid., pp. 82-90. 
65 Ibid., pp. 118-139. 
6 6Just ice , Writing and Rebellion, pp. 140-192; Strohm, Hochon's Arrow, pp. 51-56. 
197 
Paul Freedman 
because they were kept in servitude and declared that no one should be a 
bondsman unless he betrayed his lord (as Lucifer betrayed God). They were 
not of this nature for they were men, formed in the same fashion as their 
masters and so should not be kept like beasts.67 That bondage violates di-
vine law, that it was instituted by force, that it amounts to treating humans as 
animals - these are by no means new ideas and were comprehensible to 
peasant and lord alike. 
It was possible for the chroniclers to imagine the terms in which peas-
ant insurrection would be justified and expressed. This does not minimize 
their scorn and in some cases hysteria, their portrayal of the rustics as do-
mestic animals who have gone wild, or as vermin. Of course they were aghast 
at the danger to order and hierarchy but they did not live in a world com-
pletely innocent of what the complaints of those under them would be were 
they to be voiced. Their reports depict this voice in stylized terms, yet au-
thentic details are revealed through chinks in what might seem to be an 
effective hegemonic discourse. 
How hegemonic that discourse was in the first place is open to ques-
tion. It has been argued that the English chroniclers were more objective in 
their opinions than the historians of the French Jacquerie of 1358 who de-
scribed this peasant uprising as an act of unmitigated savagery.68 Yet even 
contemporary historians of the Jacquerie were varied in their attribution of 
rational motives for the revolt or the blame to be attached to the nobility 
for causing the uprising in the first place.69 Walsingham, Knighton, Froissart, 
or the Anonimalle Chronicle did not have to acknowledge the legitimacy of 
peasant demands to reproduce them in a way that is legible not only to the 
modern critic or historian inclined to be sympathetic to the rebels' cause 
but to contemporary members of the literate elite who were not. 
The Catalan Civil War, 1462-1486 
This protracted conflict, the only successful peasant revolt on a large 
scale in late medieval Europe, involved a process of appropriation, contes-
tation and comprehensibility in peasant demands which quite clearly 
6 7 Froissart, ChroniquesX, pp. 97-107, trans. Berners, as reproduced in Dobson, ed., The 
Peasants'Revolt, pp. 369-372. 
6 8 Neithard Bulst, " 'Jacquerie ' und 'Peasants ' Revolt' in de r f ranzösischen u n d 
englischen Chronistik", in Patze, ed., Geschichtsschreibung, pp. 791-817. 
6 9 As shown in Marie-Thérèse de Madeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs: une étude comparée de 
récits contemporains relatant la Jacquerie de 1358 (Paris, 1979). 
198 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
centered on the abolition of servitude.70 The servile peasantry of northern 
Catalonia ("Old Catalonia" as distinguished from the territories conquered 
from Islam to the south and west in the twelfth century) were known in the 
late Middle Ages as Remences, a Catalanized version of the Latin "redemp-
tion" (redimencia). These tenants made up about one-half the rural popula-
tion of Old Catalonia and had been subordinated in several stages, begin-
ning perhaps as early as the eleventh century but culminating in the dec-
ades around 1200 when restrictions on their freedom were first effectively 
defined and enforced.71 They were subject to a group of customary levies 
that included a redemption or manumission payment that gave the name 
to their condition. The exactions were collectively known as the "bad cus-
toms," (mals usos) even in official documents. The bad customs included 
the right to require heavy death payments in the event of there being no 
adult male heir (exorquia) or of intestate death (intestia). In addition, lords 
could confiscate as much as one-third of the properly of a peasant whose 
wife committed adultery and left him (a right with the humiliating name of 
cugucia, i.e. cuckoldry). 
The Catalan lords also held a legal right to "mistreat" their servile ten-
ants. The ius maletractandi constituted not only a seigneurial right to confis-
cate and coerce without royal interference but implied a vocabularly of 
oppressive gestures. In 1462, on the eve of the outbreak of the conflict, a 
failed attempt at a negotiated settlement produced a list of peasant griev-
ances (drawn up in Catalan) that included the right to "maltractar", com-
pulsory wet-nurse service and the unique example of a complaint by ten-
ants of the droit de seigneur?'2 The lords offered to accept the abolition of the 
right to mistreatment (a major concession) and renounced any claim to 
require wet-nurse service. They expressed disbelief that anyone had ever 
really claimed a right of the first night, but if so abandoned it without fur-
ther ado. It was the group of "bad customs," however, that proved intracta-
ble because they were valuable rights and also included the key provision 
of redemption that bound tenants and on which lordship itself seemed to 
depend. 
7 0 Paul Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 
1991), pp. 179-202. 
7 1 Ibid., pp. 56-118. 
7 2 The document is El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo d.II. 15, ff. 27r-31v, ed. 
Eduardo de Hinojosa, El régimen señorial y la cuestión agraria en Cataluña durante la 
Edad Media (Madrid, 1905); repr. in Hinojosa' Obras, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1955), appendix 
11 (pp. 313-323 of repr.). 
199 
Paul Freedman 
The actual success of the sustained peasant revolt is due to the compli-
cated circumstances of the Catalan Civil War that pitted an alliance of urban, 
noble and parliamentary groups against an unpopular ruler whose political 
and military survival depended in significant measure on the support of peas-
ant armies.73 The political context of the struggle does not obscure the con-
sistent purpose of the peasant demands over an end to servitude. Indeed, much 
of the unpopularity of the king was due to a policy instituted by his predeces-
sors that favored the peasants and opportunistically, inconsistently but never-
theless dangerously (from the nobles' point of view) raised the possibility of 
their liberation. As early as the turn of the fifteenth century the queen of Aragon 
had attempted to have her kinsman the Avignonese Pope Benedict XIII abol-
ish servitude on Catalan church lands. Even earlier King Joan I in 1388 at-
tempted to find proof in his archives that servitude had been imposed (per-
haps by Charlemagne) for a limited time that had by now come to an end.74 
What we lack from this war (as from every peasant movement before 
1525) is substantial evidence of how peasants might have framed their objec-
tions to the moral implications and context of their subjugation beyond the 
general complaints expressed in their position during the 1462 negotiations. 
There is a curious document from shortly before 1450 regarding the organ-
izing of peasant syndicates. It begins by invoking a familiar excerpt from a 
letter of Pope Gregory the Great: that Christ assumed human flesh in order 
to restore to us that original liberty that had been taken from us by the bond 
of servitude.75 The document then refutes a common aristocratic myth attrib-
uting serfdom to the cowardice of Christian peasants who failed to aid Char-
lemagne by the counter-claim that the ancestors of the Remences had not been 
Christians at all but in fact Muslims. 
As an argument against serfdom, the prologue follows the pattern of 
much of the rest of Europe in pointing to Christ's sacrifice (especially as in-
terpreted through the letter of Gregory the Great) as the basis for a Christian 
liberty that servitude violated. Catalonia as a whole demonstrates the possi-
bility of constructing a moral argument against servitude in the absence of a 
religious reform movement. Unlike Germany in 1525 or England (if one 
accepts the connection between Wyclif and the 1381 Rising), there was no 
7 3 On the war, J. Vicens Vives, Historia de los Remensas (en el siglo XV) (Barcelona, 1945); 
Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal and j aume Sobrequés i Callicó, La guerra civil catalana del 
segle XV: Estudis sobre la crisi social i económica de la Baixa Edat Mitjana, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 
1973). 
7 4 Freedman, Origins of Peasant Servitude, pp. 172-173, 179. 
7 5 Girona, Arxiu Historic de l 'Ajuntament, Secció XXV.2, Llibres manuscrits de tema 
divers, lligall 1, MS 8, fols. lr-2v, ed. Freedman, Origins of Peasant Servitude, pp. 224-226. 
200 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
religious revolutionary sentiment in fifteenth-century Catalonia. The Church 
was, to be sure, a large owner of unfree peasants, but the revolt neither tar-
geted churches nor was it accompanied by any particular anti-clericalism. The 
Catalan peasant movement shows the possibilities for achieving a radical 
agenda within a traditional vocabulary. 
Catalonia also shows more clearly than anywhere else the fissures that 
undermined the unity of the powerful classes. The crown was not consistently 
on the side of the peasants but ultimately its grudging support and depend-
ence on peasant armies led to the abolition of servitude in 1486 after the reso-
lution of the civil war. Even without the opportunistic alliance, however, there 
were serious doubts among members of the royal court and jurists about 
whether servitude could be justified and a widespread suspicion that it vio-
lated religious, natural and national law. 
The Hungarian Revolt of 1514 
In a volume dedicated to the memory of the late Bogo Grafenauer, I 
attempted to describe the course of the Hungarian Peasants' War of 1514 and 
to use it as an example of peasant ideology.76 Not wanting to repeat myself 
here excessively, I would simply reiterate that this conflict shows quite clearly 
how a legitimate, in fact reactionary idea, the crusade, could be used to jus-
tify an anti-noble uprising. The peasants appropriated the crusade against the 
Turks proclaimed by Pope Leo X at the instance of the ambitious archbishop 
of Esztergom. Denouncing the Hungarian nobility for its failure to support 
the crusade and to allow their tenants to participate, the forces gathered to 
answer the military appeal at Buda turned their wrath from the Turks to the 
nobles. The scale of the revolt differentiates it from previous unrest but there 
are clear connections with earlier ideas. Accusing the nobles of dereliction in 
the war against the Turks was also a feature of the Belgrade Crusade of 1456.77 
Although very close in time to the German Peasants' War, the Hungar-
ian uprising has left much less evidence of anything amounting to a peasant 
program. The Cegled Proclamation may reflect the ideas motivating Gyorgy 
Dozsa, the noble leader of the revolt, but it is not the text of an actual speech 
in the manner of John Ball's sermon at Blackheath. A letter issued by lead-
7® Paul Freedman, "The Hungarian Peasant War of 1514," in Grafenauerjev Zbornik, ed. 
Vincenc Rajsp (Ljubljana, 1996), pp. 431-446. 
7 7 As reported by Giovanni de Tagliacozzo, Annates Minorum seu trium ordinum a S. 
Francisco institutorum, ed. Luke Wadding, vol. 12, pt. 3 (Quaracchi, 1932), p. 793. 
201 
Paul Freedman 
ers of the crusade (who call themselves the "principes cruciferorum") purporting 
to be the text of the papal proclamation, roundly condemns those lords who 
continue to extort unjust revenues from their peasants and calls for their 
excommunication and rebellion against them.78 
Themes that are repeatedly underscored insofar as the grievances of 
the peasants can be reconstructed are the un-Christian behavior of the no-
bility, its cowardice in face of the Turks, and the injustice of serfdom. As in 
England, Germany and Catalonia, the rebellion was at least in part directed 
against the constraints of servile subordination and a response to a seigneu-
rial attempts to use reimpose servitude in order to increase rents and obli-
gations. After the failure of the 1514 revolt, the Hungarian laws ordained 
permanent servitude for the Hungarian peasantry.79 
The Hungarian revolt also shows connections between elite and popu-
lar concepts ofjustice.Jeno Sziics demonstrated that Franciscans in the first 
years of the fifteenth century elaborated condemnations of seigneurial op-
pression that appear to have influenced those who led the revolt of 1514.80 
The German Peasants ' War of 1525 
Even more than with the English and Catalan revolts, there has been a 
desire to see the German Peasants' War as something more than merely a 
peasant insurrection. This stems from several factors, among them an as-
sumption that peasants were unlikely to have acted on their own initiative, 
and concentration on the two dramatic and lasting aspects of sixteenth-cen-
tury German history: the Reformation and the inability of the emperor (or 
anyone else) to achieve a unified rule over German-speaking lands. Regarded 
as a crucial event in the overall history of the German nation, the 1525 up-
rising was until recently annexed to the perennial question of the origins of 
German disunity and early-modern backwardness. 
The rediscovery of peasant agency has tended to put back the actual 
demands of those who revolted to the center of the discussion. Neverthe-
78 Monumenta rusticorum in Hungaria rebellium, anno MDXTV, ed. Anton Fekete Nagy et 
al. (Budapest, 1979), no. 49, p. 95. 
7 9 Istvan Werböczy, Tripartitum (= Werböczy Istvân Härmaskönyve), ed. Sândor Kolosvâri 
and Kelemen Övari (Budapest, 1897), part I, tit. 3, pp. 56, 58 and part III, dt. 25, p. 
406. 
8 0 J e n o Szücs, "Die oppositionelle Strömung der Franziskaner im Hintergrund des 
Bauernkrieges und der Reformation in Ungarn," in Études historiques hongroises 1985, 
vol. 2 (Budapest, 1985), pp. 483-512. 
202 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
less, it is still often maintained that the revolt of 1525 was not really about 
agrarian grievances, or that it was touched off by the more progressive and 
articulate forces of society. 
The event that inevitably colors any interpretation is of course the 
Reformation. The teachings of Luther, Bucer, Karlstadt and Zwingli empha-
sized the dignity of the laity, the ability of ordinary people to interpret Scrip-
ture, the right to question authority and tradition, and a more favorable 
view of the common man. The Reformation is thought to have galvanized 
peasant resentment, already prepared by the long habit of anticlericalism.81 
The charged climate of religious ferment that accompanied and im-
mediately preceded 1517 is supposed to have produced a crucial change in 
the nature of peasant demands. Rather than taking up arms in defense of 
what were perceived as traditional relations with their lords that protected 
communal rights ("Old Law"), the peasants were now acting under the in-
fluence of more abstract (hence universal), ideas of social-religious justice 
("Godly Law"). Instead of defending local privileges or custom, they now 
demanded a reordering of society in accord with divine justice. Long be-
fore the sixteenth century, however, it was possible to imagine justifications 
for revolt that centered around divine law or that combined particular griev-
ances against exactions, servitude, and arbitrary lordship with a general state-
ment of human liberty. Servitude was among the most important issues in 
1525 and the nature of complaints over it was not completely new nor com-
pletely dependent for its formulation on the radical energies and vocabu-
lary released by the Reformation. 
Servitude and seigneurial rights attendant on serfdom were the major 
issue in a large number of German revolts of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries that antedated 1525. What might seem purely economic struggles 
over taxes or seigneurial revenues were enmeshed in questions of status. 
Thus, for example, lords attempted to increase revenues by reimposing large 
succession Fines, but to do so required depriving peasants of the right to 
inherit freely, which in turn meant placing them in servitude. The exten-
sion of territorial lordship, the demands of lords in the face of declining 
revenues, and questions of servile status were intermingled. 
As with the Engish and Catalonian rebellions, the German Peasants' 
War was connected to an earlier accumulation of grievances and attempts 
to act on them. There were a large number of similar revolts in small south-
8 1 Henry J. Cohn, "Anti-Clericalism in the German Peasants' War, 1525", Past & Present 
83 (1979), pp. 3-31; Heiko A. Oberman, "Tumultus rusticorum," pp. 157-172; Hans-
Ju rgen Goertz, Pfaffenhass und gross Geschrei: Die reformatorischen Bewegungen in 
Deutschland, 1517-1529 (Munich, 1987). 
203 
Paul Freedman 
German territories where feudal dues were the principal source of revenues 
for petty secular and ecclesiastical l and lo rds : We inga r t en (1432) , 
Schlussenried (1438), Weissenau (1448), Staufen (1466), Salem (1468), St. 
Peter (1500), Habsburg lands ofTriberg (1500), Ochsenhausen (1501-1502), 
Berchtesgaden (1506), Rufach (1514), Solothurn (1513-1515).82The conflicts 
between 1442 and 1517 that go under the name of the "Bundschuh" upris-
ings also concerned servitude.83 Freedom of movement, inheritance taxes, 
and the right to impose new seigneurial levies f igured in the revolt of 
Appenzell against the monastery of Saint Gall at the opening of the fifteenth 
century, an example of a successful radical result stemming from what was 
perceived as a defence of Old Law (resistance to the monastery's right to 
change its exactions.)84 
Seigneurial economic pressure on tenants increased, especially in 
Swabia and the Upper Rhine, during the fifteenth century aided by a reim-
position of servile status, resisted in many cases but with limited effect.85 The 
abbey of Kempten in Upper Swabia attempted to degrade its free tenants 
(Muntleute) to the level of those paying tributes in acknowledgment of lord-
ship (Freizinser), and to reduce the latter in turn to the level of serfs 
(.Eigenleute) ,86 The peasants were able to obtain a hearing at the imperial 
8 2 Peter Blickle, "Peasant Revolts in the German Empire in the Late Middle Ages," Social 
History 4 (1979), p. 232. 
8 3 Their demands are in Quellen zur Geschichte des deutschen Bauernkrieges, ed. Günther 
Franz (Munich, 1963), no. 12, pp. 59-61 (Schliengen, diocese of Constance); no. 13, 
pp. 61-62 (Hegau); no. 15, pp. 67-70 (Schlettstadt/Selestat, Alsace); no. 16, pp. 70-76 
(Untergrombach, diocese of Speyer); no. 17, pp. 76-79 (Freiburg im Breisgau); no. 
18, pp. 79-81 (Upper Rhine). 
8 4 Blickle, "Peasant Revolts," pp. 230-231; Walter Schläpfer , "Die Appenze l l e r 
Freiheitskriege," in Appenzeller Geschichte 1 (Appenzell, 1964; repr. 1976), pp. 123-225. 
8 5 Claudia Ulbrich, Leibherreschaft am Oberrhein im Spätmittelalter (Göttingen, 1979); Walter 
Müller, Entwicklung und Spätformen der Leibeigenschaft am Beispiel der Heiratsbeschränkungen: 
DieEhegenossame im alemannisch-schweizerischen Raum (Sigmaringen, 1974); Peter Blickle, 
"Agrarkrise und Leibeigenschaft im spätmittelalterlichen deutschen Südwesten," in 
Studien zur geschichtlichen Bedeutung des deutschen Bauernstandes, ed. Blickle (Stuttgart, 
1989; article originally publ. 1975), pp. 19-35; Werner Rösener, "Zur Sozial-
ökonomischen Lage der bäuerlichen Bevölkerung im Spätmittelalter", in Bauerliche 
Sachkultur des Spätmittelalters, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-
Hist. Kl., S i tzungsber ich te 439 (Vienna , 1984), pp . 9-47; R e n a t e Blickle, 
"Leibeigenschaft: Versuch über Zeitgenossenschaft im Wissenschaft und Wirklichkeit, 
durchgeführt am Beispiel Altbayerns", in Gutsherrschaft als soziales Modell: Vergleichende 
Betrachtungen zur Funktionsweise frühneuzeitlicher Agrargesellschaften, ed. Jan Peters 
(Munich, 1995), pp. 53-79. 
8 6 On fifteenth-century struggles between Kempten and its tenants, see Franz, Der deutsche 
Bauernkrieg, pp. 11-13. 
204 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
court in Ulm in 1423 but were defeated when the abbot produced a forged 
charter of Charlemagne purporting to define Freizinser as the equivalent of 
Eigenleute. The peasants appealed successfully to Pope Martin V. Here again, 
as with the tenants of Darnell and Over in England or the syndicates of 
remences in Catalonia, the peasants' willingness and ability to argue their case 
through direct but official forms of resistance is striking. 
The struggle at Kempton was renewed in 1460 over marriage and death 
taxes and labor obligations claimed by the abbot. A rebellion in 1491 was 
defeated and 1,200 Freizinser were degraded to servitude. Complaints were 
renewed in January 1525 when a register of no less than 335 complaints 
(representing 1,220 individuals) was drawn up, centering around arbitrary 
fines and imprisonment, restrictions on marriage and on movement off the 
abbey's lands.87 The Kempten peasants participated in the general revolt 
later in 1525, but it should be obvious that they were not suddenly inspired 
by external ideological stimuli.88 
Throughout Germany in 1525 many sorts of long-standing grievances 
came together, from objections to war levies to violation of fixed rents, but 
the most common issue across the widest territory was serfdom. In an analysis 
of 54 grievance lists from Upper Swabia (consisting of 550 individual griev-
ances) , Peter Blickle found that 90% denounced servitude and frequently 
demands for its abolition were among the principle articles in petitions. 
Serfdom, Blickle concludes, was the single most important grievance.89 
Moreover, this was not merely a negotiating strategy but a crucial demand. 
Of 20 such texts concerning ecclesiastical jurisdictions in Upper Swabia, 15 
(18 articles) call for the abolition of serfdom. Only one envisions its dimi-
nution.90 Serfdom was the key to other more economic grievances over taxes, 
exactions or control over hunting, fishing and the collecting of wood. The 
arbitrary control of the lord and his ability to change the conditions of ten-
ure at will were the essence of servitude as control over the local environ-
ment and security in perpetuating what were seen as hallowed customs was 
the essence of freedom. While the greatest concentration of complaints over 
servitude comes from southwestern Germany, it was also important in re-
8 7 "Die Kemptener Leibeigenschaftsrodel," ed. Peter Blickle and Heribert Besch, 
Zeitschriftfür bayerische Landesgeschichte 42 (1979), pp. 567-629. 
8 8 Greivancs presented by Kempten tenants during the revolt are edited in Franz, Quellen, 
no. 27 (pp. 128-129). 
8 9 Blickle, The Revolution of1525, pp. 26-27, 202-205. 
9 0 André Holenstein, "Äbte und Bauern: Vom Regiment der Klöster im Spätmittelalter," 
in Politische Kultur im Oberschwaben, ed. Peter Blickle (Tübingen, 1993), p. 264. 
205 
Paul Freedman 
volts in the diocese of Augsburg, Alsace, and the archepiscopal principality 
of Salzburg.91 
The peasants of Stühlingen in the Black Forest, where the first revolts 
began, described their opposition to servitude in these terms: 
"We are by right barn free and it is no fault of ours or of our forefathers that we 
have been subjected to serfdom, yet our lords wish to have and to keep us as their 
own property, and consider that we should perform everything that they ask, as 
though we were born serfs; and it may come in time to pass that they will also sell 
us. It is our plea that you adjudge that we should be released from serfdom, and. 
no one else be forced into it, in luhich case we will perform for our lords what lue are 
obliged to perform of old, excepting this burden 
Here the idea that servitude is punishment for some past or present 
transgression is rejected and it is the fact of unfreedom, not the payment of 
seigneurial dues that is at issue. The other articles of the grievance list deal 
with specific exactions, but they follow from the ability of the lords to treat 
servile tenants with greater harshness and arbitrariness. 
The peasants of Stühlingen were not attacking servitude as such but 
rather denying their particular liability. Their justification for revolt thus 
combines divine law (the injustice of servitude) with custom (their exemp-
tion from servile impositions). While firmly rooted in local history, the 
Stühlingen grievances, like those of other communities, were intelligible to 
peasants throughout Germany and facilitated the spread of revolt. 
One finds broader complaints against the very nature of servitude based 
on its arbitrariness. To hold another in subjugation violates Scripture and 
the unity of all in Christ, for example at Embrach (near Zürich) and in rural 
lands subject to the imperial city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber.93 
Human freedom was defended against servitude without specifically 
invoking Christian doctrine at Altbirlingen (part of the Baltringen alliance), 
Wiedergeltingen, Rheinfelden, and Mühlhausen (in Hegau) ,9 4Other griev-
ances against serfdom were framed in a more religious language, that only 
9 1 Franz, Quellen, no. 70 (p. 239), no. 94 (pp. 305-309), no. 112 (p. 343); Quellen zur 
Geschichte des Bauernkriegs in Deutschtirol 1525, ed. Hermann Wopfner (Innsbruck, 1908), 
pp. 46, 61, 134-135; Albert Hollaender, "Die vierundzwanzig Artikel gemeiner 
Landschaft Salzburg, 1525", Mitteilungen der gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde 71 
(1931), pp. 65-88 (especially p. 83). 
9 2 Franz, Quellen, no. 25 (pp. 121-122). 
9 3 Embrach: Walter Müller, "Wurzeln und Bedeutung des grundsätzlichen Widerstandes 
gegen die Leibeigenschaft im Bauernkrieg 1525," Schriften des Vereins für Geschichte des 
Bodensees und seiner Umgebung 93 (1975), p. 12; Rothenburg: Franz, Quellen, no. 101 
(p. 329). 
9 4 Franz, Quellen, no. 23 (pp. 97-98); Günther Franz, Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg, vol. 2 
Aktenband (Munich and Berlin, 1935; repr. Darmstadt, 1968), pp. 149, 164, 180. 
206 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
God can licitly own a person; He alone is really Lord. Peasants of the Gemeinde 
of Attenweiler (Baltringen) complained against the abbey of Weingarten that 
they were: 
. . . burdened with servitude for they wish to have no other lord but Almighty God 
lone who has created us. For we believe Holy Scripture, which is not to be obscured, 
that no lord should possess others (kain Aigenmensch haben soll), for God is the 
true Lord. 
In the region of Schaffhausen (now part of Switzerland) villagers com-
plained that Scipture prohibited anyone other than God Himself from pos-
sessing "Aigenleute",96 
Justifications for open resistance and the self-awareness of the peasants 
were obviously forwarded by Reformation but not completely dependent 
on it. The scale of the Peasants' Revolt of 1525 in contrast to earlier local 
movements or the Bundschuh campaigns may be due as much to the ad-
vances in inexpens ive p r in t i ng and the pro l i fe ra t ion of pamphle ts 
(Flugschriften) as to the Reform itself, although the stimulus to reading and 
disputation can hardly be separated from the impetus given by the religious 
upheaval itself.97 The language of resistance and the context of its demands 
remained oriented toward the local community (the Gemeinde) even as in-
surrection became generalized throughout territories beyond individual 
lordships.98 Above all, there is a theological, moral and legal background 
to the peasants' demands in 1525 that antedates the Reformation. Peter 
Bierbrauer has argued that the Reformation did not by itself inspire a Godly 
Law peasant argument in contrast to earlier Old Law local challenges.99 The 
9 5 Franz, Quellen, no. 34b (p. 153): Die seint beschwert mit der Lübaigenschaft, wann sie 
wellent kain andern Her haben, dann anlain Gott den Allmechtigen, wann der hat 
uns erschaffen. Wann mir vermeinden auch, das die gotlich Geschrift, das nit auswisse, 
das kain Hern kain Aigenmensch haben soll, wann Gott ist der recht Her. 
9 6 Franz, Quellen, no. 87 (p. 263). 
9 7 A recent study of the complicated problem of literacy and the Reformation is Bob Scribner, 
"Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print in the Early German Reformation," in Heresy and Literacy, 
1000-1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 255-278. 
9 8 The importance of strong local communities in furthering the revolt has been 
emphasized by Peter Blickle, Gemeindereformation. 
9 9 Peter Bierbrauer, "Das Göttliche Recht und die naturrechtliche Tradition," in Bauer, 
Reich und Reformation: Festshcrift für Günther Franz zum 80. Geburtstag am 23. Mai 1982, 
ed. Peter Blickle (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 210-234. Also important in noting the 
precedents to the Peasants' War antedating the Reformation are Brecht, "Der 
theologische Hintergrund", pp. 174-208; Müller, "Wurzeln und Bedeutung", pp. 1-
41; Herbert Grundmann, "Freiheit als religiöses, politisches und persönliches Postulat 
im Mittelalter", Historische Zeitschrift im (1957), pp. 49-53; Hartmut Boockmann, "Zu 
den geistigen und religiösen Vorausetzungen des Bauernkrieges", in Bauernskriegs-
Studien, ed. Bernd Moeller (Gütersloh, 1975), pp. 9-27. 
207 
Paul Freedman 
real separation was between two types of Christian natural law, relative and 
absolute; capable of modification (hence legitimating servitude) or inflex-
ible (in which case arbitrary lordship and holding Christian as serfs could 
not be licit). Controversies over how much divine and natural law might be 
modified by circumstance, the Fall, human necessity, or sin antedated the 
Reformation. 
For example, the third of the fundamenta l "Twelve Articles of the 
Swabian Peasants" (March, 1525) denounces serfdom in terms similar to 
what we have seen: 
Third, it has until now been the custom for the lords to own us as their property. 
This is deplorable, for Christ redeemed us and bought us all with his precious 
blood, the lowliest shepherd as well as the greatest lord, xvith no exceptions. Thus 
the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free.100 
The text is accompanied by marginal citations to the Bible (Isaiah 53:1; 
I Peter 1; I Corinthians 7; Romans 13; Wisdom 6; I Peter 2). But, as Walter 
Miiller has suggested, the language invoking Christ's sufferings that purchased 
human freedom is more closely derived from the German vernacular law 
books (the Sachsenspiegel and Schiuabenspiegel notably) , a long with the 
Reformatio Sigismundi and Erasmus.101 Bierbrauer points to the Schwaben-
spiegelas especially influential, not only because it was widely circulated and 
accessible in South Germany, but because of its specific formulations. Com-
paring the south-German lawbook to the articles of the peasants of Apfingen 
(part of the Baltringen group, dating from February of 1525) and the Twelve 
Articles, Bierbrauer notes two key reworked SchiuabempiegelpZLSsages: 1) that 
nowhere in Scripture does it say that one man can own another; 2) that God 
created man after His image and saved him with His sufferings. In addition, 
the Apf ingen d e m a n d s repea t the con t ex t fo r the passages in the 
Schiuabenspiegel (and its source, the Sachsenspiegel), to render to Caesar the 
things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's (Mark 12:17).102 
The "Twelve Articles" and the complaints of the Apfingen Gemeinde recall 
venerable themes in discourse about equality in servitude, now in a more 
urgent key. Without in any way minimizing specific socio-economic pressures 
100 p r a n Z j Quellen, no. 43 (p. 176): Züm dritten ist der Brauch bisher gewesen, das man 
für ir aigen Leüt gehalten haben, wölchs zu erbarmen ist, angesehen das uns Christus 
all mit seinem kostparlichen Plutvergüssen erlösst und erkauft hat, den Hirten 
gleich als wol als den Höchsten, kain ausgenommen. Darumb erfindt sich mit der 
Geschrift, das wir frei seien un wollen sein. The translation is from Blickle, Revolution 
of1525, p. 197. 
1 0 1 See the table assembled on p. 29 of Müller, "Wurzeln und Bedeutung." 
1 0 2 Bierbrauer, "Das Göttliche Recht", table, p. 226. 
208 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
or the ideological impact of the Reformation, it can be argued that medi-
eval concepts of justice played a role in the German Peasant War, as with 
those large-scale insurrections that preceded it. Such notions as the ultimate 
equality of humanity, Christ's sacrifice to release humanity from bondage, 
the obligation placed upon humanity to labor, and the mutuality of social 
orders could be brought from the realm of speculation and seemingly re-
mote or self-serving arguments in defense of society as it had been imag-
ined for centuries, and made to serve rather more revolutionary aims which 
therefore did not depend entirely on a radical new way of looking at the 
world. In this sense Luther was correct, not that the peasants ignorantly 
mistook his teachings concerning Christian liberty, but that they applied them 
in a more immediate way, along with the disquisitions of others who com-
mented on the breakdown of mutuality and the difficulty of explaining the 
servitude of Christians. 
Conclusion 
The conceptual means of resistance is not only a product of the 
delegitimation of authority, but also what Barrington Moore refers to as "the 
creation of standards of condemnation for explaining and judging current 
sufferings," and "a new diagnosis and remedy for existing forms of suffer-
ing."103 That the diagnosis need not be completely new is essentially what I 
have been arguing. I have tried to show a substratum of resistance to arbi-
trary lordship that anticipated the great conflicts of the late Middle Ages 
rather than viewing those conflicts exclusively as the immediate product of 
particular circumstances. I would also observe that in this era of great po-
litical and economic instability, indirect and direct means of resistance were 
related. The transition from one to the other depended more on perceived 
opportunity and expectation than the degree of oppression. Finally the evi-
dence from the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries suggests that local 
disputes were not so conceptually different from larger conflicts (or at least 
there is some connection between them) and that peasants did not require 
an outside stimulus from towns or religious reformers in order to mobi-
lize. 
In classic models of peasant insurrection there is little that stands be-
tween meek acceptance of a dominant ideology and revolutionary activity 
born of a sudden collapse of that ideology's inevitability and legitimacy. 
1 0 3 Ibid., p. 87. 
209 
Paul Freedman 
Rather than the sudden frenzy of an essentially subjugated population, or 
the reflection of an apocalyptic irrationality, medieval uprisings should be 
seen as more planned, opportunistic and even optimistic (if in most instances 
wrongly so). 
The origins of rebellion ceases therefore to be a search for a sudden 
shift from acceptance of hierarchical legitimacy to revolutionary sentiment, 
but rather a more continuous change from everyday evasion to public chal-
lenge; indirect resistance by other means. The standards of condemnation 
are key aspects in the construction of a revolt, but those standards develop 
only secondarily out of religious upheaval, the export of subversive ideolo-
gies from the towns, or an internal collapse of the state. They are produced 
by ideological appropriation and reorientation in the direction of imme-
diacy. 
Not every peasant war involved the same set of justifications for rebel-
lion. In England original equality was a way of attacking the servile condi-
tion of peasants and what was regarded as the unjust lordship that it made 
possible. For Catalonia it was argued that servitude violated divine and 
natural law, in at least one case using the words of Gregory the Great's well-
known passage on Christ's sacrifice that liberated all humanity.104 For Hun-
gary the justification for revolt was linked to accusation of betrayal of mutu-
ality and functional orders. The nobility should be eliminated, having failed 
to defend the faith and the kingdom. For Germany both equality at Crea-
tion and the meaning of Christ's sacrifice were deployed. 
What all these wars share (and this is true for many of the smaller con-
flicts mentioned here only in passing), is the importance of serfdom as a 
major grievance of the rebellious peasantry. Servile status was either among 
the direct causes of the conflict in the eyes of chroniclers and the peasants 
themselves, or provided the point of argumentation against more concrete 
conditions of lordship perceived as unjust, from restrictions on common 
lands to the imposition of taxes to attempts to reimpose requirements such 
as residence or death-duties that had fallen into desuetude. This is because 
servitude was the point of material and symbolic conflict over human dig-
nity, a practical means as well as symbol of degradation. 
1 0 4 Gregory I, Registrum epistolorum, Corpus Christianorum 140 (Tournholt, 1982), 6:12, 
p. 380: "Cum redemptor noster totius condi tor creaturae ad hoc propit iatus 
humanam voluit carnem assumere, ut divinitas suae gratia, disrupto, quo tenebamur 
capti vinculo servitutis, pristinae nos restitueret libertati." For its use, see Paul 
Freedman, "The German and Catalan Peasant Revolts," American Historical Review 
98 (1993), pp. 47-51. 
210 
Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe 
Servitude was important, and in attacking it peasants made use of a 
vocabulary comprehensible to their masters. What they were saying was not 
unthinkable across the divide of class or order and did not derive entirely 
from an autonomous or completely hidden peasant way of reasoning about 
the world. Peasant resistance did entail a set of everday evasions, but the 
extent of the late medieval rebellions and a certain degree of (perhaps in-
direct) success were due to the ability of the dominant elements of society 
to comprehend and be intimidated by their subordinates. 
211