COUNTRY AND TOWN AT THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES For the complete understanding of the events which follow it must be borne in mind that the early sixteenth century represents the end of a distinct historical period; and, as we have pointed out in the Introduction, the expiring effort, half-conscious and half-unconscious, of the people to revert to the conditions of an earlier age.

Nor can the significance be properly gauged unless a clear conception is obtained of the differences between country and town life at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

From the earliest periods of the Middle Ages of which we have any historical record, the _Markgenossenschaft_, or primitive village community of the Germanic race, was overlaid by a territorial domination, imposed upon it either directly by conquest or voluntarily accepted for the sake of the protection indispensable in that rude period.

The conflict of these two elements, the mark organization and the territorial lordship, constitutes the marrow of the social history of the Middle Ages.
In the earliest times the pressure of the overlord, whoever he might be, seems to have been comparatively slight, but its inevitable tendency was for the territorial power to extend itself at the expense of the rural community.

It was thus that in the tenth and eleventh centuries the feudal oppression had become thoroughly settled, and had reached its greatest intensity all over Europe.