Old rights of pasture were being curtailed, and others, notably those of hunting and fishing, had in most manors been completely filched away.
It is noticeable, however, that although the immediate causes of the peasant rising were the new burdens which had been laid upon the common people during the last few years, once the spirit of discontent was aroused it extended also in many cases to the traditional feudal dues to which, until then, the peasant had submitted with little murmuring, and an attempt was made by the country-side to reconquer the ancient complete freedom of which a dim remembrance had been handed down to them.
The condition of the peasant up to the beginning of the sixteenth century--that is to say, up to the time when it began to so rapidly change for the worse--may be gathered from what we are told by contemporary writers, such as Wimpfeling, Sebastian Brandt, Wittenweiler, the satires in the _Nuernberger Fastnachtspielen_, and numberless other sources, as also from the sumptuary laws of the end of the fifteenth century.

All these indicate an ease and profuseness of living which little accord with our notions of the word "peasant".
Wimpfeling writes: "The peasants in our district and in many parts of Germany have become, through their riches, stiff-necked and ease-loving.

I know peasants who at the weddings of their sons or daughters, or the baptism of their children, make so much display that a house and field might be bought therewith, and a small vineyard to boot.

Through their riches, they are oftentimes spendthrift in food and in vestments, and they drink wines of price." A chronicler relates of the Austrian peasants, under the date of 1478, that "they wore better garments and drank better wine than their lords"; and a sumptuary law passed at the Reichstag held at Lindau, in 1497, provides that the common peasant man and the labourer in the towns or in the field "shall neither make nor wear cloth that costs more than half a gulden the ell, neither shall they wear gold, pearls, velvet, silk, nor embroidered clothes, nor shall they permit their wives or their children to wear such." Respecting the food of the peasant, it is stated that he ate his full in flesh of every kind, in fish, in bread, in fruit, drinking wine often to excess.

The Swabian, Heinrich Mueller, writes in the year 1550, nearly two generations after the change had begun to take place: "In the memory of my father, who was a peasant man, the peasant did eat much better than now.