Eternal God, whither shall the widows and poor children go forth to seek it ?" Referring to the Lutheran campaign against friars and poor scholars, beggars, and pilgrims, the writer observes: "Think ye now that because of God's anger for the sake of one beggar, ye must even for a season bear with twenty, thirty, nay, still more ?" The courts of arbitration, which were established in various districts to adjudicate on the relations between lords and villeins, were naturally not given to favour the latter, whilst the fact that large numbers of deeds and charters had been burnt or otherwise destroyed in the course of the insurrection left open an extensive field for the imposition of fresh burdens.

The record of the proceedings of one of the most important of these courts--that of the Swabian League's jurisdiction, which sat at Memmingen--in the dispute between the prince-abbot of Kempten and his villeins is given in full in Baumann's _Akten_, pp.

329-46.

Here, however, the peasants did not come off so badly as in some other places.

Meanwhile, all the other evils of the time, the monopolies of the merchant-princes of the cities and of the trading-syndicates, the dearness of living, the scarcity of money, etc., did not abate, but rather increased from year to year.