Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ... Wat Tyler, the leader of the English insurgents, was assassinated by the Mayor of London in the presence of the young King Eichard II (1381), and his movement collapsed. The communist side of the Hussite movement was a part of the same system of disturbance. A little earlier than the English outbreak had occurred the French "Jacquerie" (1358), in which the French peasants had risen, burnt chateaux, and devastated the countryside. A century later the same urgency was to sweep Germany into a series of bloody Peasant Wars. These began late in the fifteenth century. Economic and religious disturbance mingled in the case of Germany even more plainly than in England. One conspicuous phase of these German troubles was the Anabaptist outbreak. The sect of the Anabaptists appeared in Wittenberg in 1521 under three "prophets," and broke out into insurrection in 1525. Between 1532 and 1535 the insurgents held the town of Minister in Westphalia, and did their utmost to realize their ideals of a religious communism. They were besieged by the Bishop of Miinster, and under the distresses of the siege a sort of insanity ran rife in the town; cannibalism is said to have occurred, and a certain John of Leyden seized power, proclaimed himself the successor of King David, and followed that monarch's evil example by practising polygamy. After the surrender of .the city the victorious bishop had the Anabaptist leaders tortured very horribly and executed in the market-place, their mutilated bodies being hung in cages from a church tower to witness to all the world that decency and order were now restored in Miinster. . . . These upheavals of the common labouring men of the Western European countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were more serious...
