THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN TOWN From what has been said the reader may form for himself an idea of the intellectual and social life of the German town of the period.

The wealthy patrician class, whose mainstay politically was the _Rath_, gave the social tone to the whole.

In spite of the sharp and sometimes brutal fashion in which class distinctions asserted themselves then, as throughout the Middle Ages, there was none of that aloofness between class and class which characterizes the bourgeois society of the present day.

Each town, were it great or small, was a little world in itself, so that every citizen knew every other citizen more or less.

The schools attached to its ecclesiastical institutions were practically free of access to all the children whose parents could find the means to maintain them during their studies; and consequently the intellectual differences between the different classes were by no means necessarily proportionate to the difference in social position.
So far as culture and material prosperity were concerned, the towns of Bavaria and Franconia, Munich, Augsburg, Regensburg, and perhaps, above all, Nuernberg, represented the high-water mark of mediaeval civilization as regards town life.