114-28), poured from the press during these years, all with the refrain that things had gone on long enough, that the common man, be he peasant or townsman, could no longer bear it.

But even more than the revolutionary literature were the wandering preachers effective in working up the agitation which culminated in the Peasants' War of 1525.

The latter comprised men of all classes, from the impoverished knight, the poor priest, the escaped monk, or the travelling scholar, to the peasant, the mercenary soldier out of employment, the poor handicraftsman, of even the beggar.

Learned and simple, they wandered about from place to place, in the market place of the town, in the common field of the village, from one territory to another, preaching the gospel of discontent.
Their harangues were, as a rule, as much political as religious, and the ground tone of them all was the social or economic misery of the time, and the urgency of immediate action to bring about a change.

As in the literature, so in the discourses, Biblical phrases designed to give force to the new teaching abounded.