It was only after this hope had been abandoned that they definitely took sides with the Papal authority.
The opening of the sixteenth century thus presents to us mediaeval society, social, political, and religious, in Germany as elsewhere, "run to seed." The feudal organization was outwardly intact; the peasant, free and bond, formed the foundation; above him came the knighthood or inferior nobility; parallel with them was the _Ehrbarkeit_ of the less important towns, holding from mediate lordship; above these towns came the free cities, which held immediately from the empire, organized into three bodies, a governing Council in which the _Ehrbarkeit_ usually predominated, where they did not entirely compose it, a Common Council composed of the masters of the various guilds, and the General Council of the free citizens.
Those journeymen, whose condition was fixed from their being outside the guild-organizations, usually had guilds of their own.

Above the free cities in the social pyramid stood the Princes of the empire, lay and ecclesiastic, with the Electoral College, or the seven Electoral Princes, forming their head.

These constituted the feudal "estates" of the empire.

Then came the "King of the Romans"; and, as the apex of the whole, the Pope in one function and the Emperor in another, crowned the edifice.

The supremacy, not merely of the Pope but of the complementary temporal head of the mediaeval polity, the Emperor, was acknowledged in a shadowy way, even in countries such as France and England, which had no direct practical connection with the empire.
For, as the spiritual power was also temporal, so the temporal political power had, like everything else in the Middle Ages, a quasi-religious significance.
The minds of men in speculative matters, in theology, in philosophy, and in jurisprudence, were outgrowing the old doctrines, at least in their old forms.