But the essentially personal relation with which the whole process started soon degenerated into one based on property.

The most primitive form of property--land--was at the outset what was termed _allodial_, at least among the conquering race, from every social group having the possession, under the trusteeship of his head man, of the land on which it settled.

Now, owing to the necessities of the time, owing to the need of protection, to violence, and to religious motives, it passed into the hands of the overlord, temporal or spiritual, as his possession; and the inhabitants, even in the case of populations which had not been actually conquered, became his vassals, villeins, or serfs, as the case might be.

The process by means of which this was accomplished was more or less gradual; indeed, the entire extinction of communal rights, whereby the notion of private ownership is fully realized, was not universally effected even in the West of Europe till within a measurable distance of our own time.[3] From the foregoing it will be understood that the oppression of the peasant, under the feudalism of the Middle Ages, and especially of the later Middle Ages, was viewed by him as an infringement of his rights.
During the period of time constituting mediaeval history, the peasant, though he often slumbered, yet often started up to a sudden consciousness of his position.

The memory of primitive communism was never quite extinguished, and the continual peasant-revolts of the Middle Ages, though immediately occasioned, probably, by some fresh invasion, by which it was sought to tear from the "common man" yet another shred of his surviving rights, always had in the background the ideal, vague though it may have been, of his ancient freedom.
Such, undoubtedly, was the meaning of the Jacquerie in France, with its wild and apparently senseless vengeance; of the Wat Tyler revolt in England, with its systematic attempt to envisage the vague tradition of the primitive village community in the legends of the current ecclesiastical creed; of the numerous revolts in Flanders and North Germany; to a large extent of the Hussite movement in Bohemia, under Ziska; of the rebellion led by George Doza in Hungary; and, as we shall see in the body of the present work, of the social movements of Reformation Germany, in which, with the partial exception of Ket's rebellion in England a few years later, we may consider them as virtually coming to an end.
For the movements in question were distinctly the last of their kind.
The civil wars of religion in France, and the great rebellion in England against Charles I, which also assumed a religious colouring, open a new era in popular revolts.