ResoluteReader: Tom Scott - Freiburg and the Breisgau: Town-Country relations in the age of Reformation and Peasants' War

Friday, April 05, 2024

Tom Scott - Freiburg and the Breisgau: Town-Country relations in the age of Reformation and Peasants' War

Tom Scott was one of the great historians of German history in, as the subtitle to Freiburg and the Breisgau says, the age of Reformation and the Peasants' War. This book is what might be called a microhistory, studying the detailed interactions between the city of Freiburg and the towns and villages in its rural hinterland. It charts the rise and fall of the city, through the interactions with its surroundings and the struggles within the city itself.

What quickly becomes clear is that Freiburg's ruling class see the surrounding region as a place to strengthen their own wealth and power. It is a symbiotic relationship, but more of a parasitical one - with the villages and towns constantly striving against onerous taxes and obligations. Of course, this takes place within the exploitative fedual relationships between local rulers as well - and, naturally, the peasantry and lower classes everywhere come of worst. Within Freiburg different factions compete as well. In particular there's an ongoing struggle between nobles, merchants and guilds for power on the ruling council (the guilds "effectively seized control in the later half of the 15th century). Scott details these struggles through the 14th and 15th century in detail - its not for the faint hearted - and I was left amazed at the detailed knowledge he had of history through the archival material.

As the economy gradually began to change this impacted upon the nature of the town's leadership. As Scott says, "as the continuing disappearance of nobles and merchants more or less forced the guilds to assume greater responsiblity... By 1490 the thirty members of the full council comprised six nobles, and twelve guildmasters, and twelve additioanl councillors from the guilds". This, however, did not represent democratic government, but wealth.

The relationship between Freiburg and the Breisgau is characterised as by Scott as a conflict between city and hinterland. In fact Scott says that the relationship is better understood as that between a "civic lord bent upon extracting maximum economic and political advantage from its rural dependecies". This meant that in the rebellions of the peasantry that characterised the early 16th century, Freiburg found that the inhabitants of the Breisgau never rallied to the town, and indeed, he argues, they were entirely almost directly opposed. This "lasting disaffection" Scott argues, meant that the Peasant War in the region was experienced, not as class war, but as town against country.

When it comes to the Peasant War, and indeed the preceeding Bunschuh rebellions, Scott argues that the experience undermines Peter Blickle's thesis of the Peasant War being a "Revolution of the Common Man". Scott argues that the label "Revolution" doesn't fit, and that the Common Man thesis - the idea that the rebellion was an alliance of the commoners against the ruling class is undermined by the experience of Freiburg where the separation between town and country remained fixed.

I am not convinced by Scott's argument here. In many places there were significant allegiances made between town and country, and it does seem that Freiburg is a special case. Secondly I don't read Blickle's argument as one specific to relations between urban and non-urban areas. The variety of people making up the "Common Men" existed across Germany, and across the Breisgau. That's not to say there weren't differences - as Scott himself acknowledges - between the dynamics of revolution in town and country. As he says "of the Imperial Free Cities of Swabia and Franconia... not a single one entered voluntarily into an alliance with the peasants". But there were many places where peasant rebellion inspired urban rebellion too, and while the demands may have differed, they were, nonetheless demands that arose from rebellion. They represented the sectional interests of a particular group within the cities - who were striving for change as a result of the wider tensions created by the end of the feudal era and the rise of the capitalist. Which, incidently, is why its right to call events a revolution. Urban rebels might have risen up for different reason to the rebellious peasantry, but the conditions for revolt effected both groups - rural and urban.

Tom Scott's book however, by its focus on the detail of the interaction between Freiburg and the surroundings, gives plenty of insight into how complex a subject this is, and much material to grapple with while trying to develop a better understanding of the Peasants' War.