Consequently, the position of the peasant rapidly changed for the worse; and although at the outbreak of the movement not absolutely _in extremis_, according to our notions, yet it was so bad comparatively to his previous condition and that less than half a century before, and tended as evidently to become more intolerable, that discontent became everywhere rife, and only awaited the torch of the new doctrines to set it ablaze.

The whole course of the movement shows a peasantry, not downtrodden and starved but proud and robust, driven to take up arms not so much by misery and despair as by the deliberate will to maintain the advantages which were rapidly slipping away from them.
Serfdom was not by any means universal.

Many free peasant villages were to be found scattered amongst the manors of the territorial lords, though it was but too evidently the settled policy of the latter at this time to sweep everything into their net, and to compel such peasant communes to accept a feudal overlordship.

Nor were they at all scrupulous in the means adopted for attaining their ends.

The ecclesiastical foundations, as before said, were especially expert in forging documents for the purpose of proving that these free villages were lapsed feudatories of their own.