These "hollow devils" did not express the character of every one who shut himself up in them, but they were typical of a ruling class, who wished to make the world believe that at a push they were all capable of atrocities such as those committed by the bastard of Vauru, who, commanding for the Dauphin at Meaux, had an elm near the moat of that city on which were always swinging from eighty to a hundred corpses, mostly insurgent peasants.
III.
At the very time that Savonarola began to withstand Lorenzo d'Medici, telling him that the Lord spares no one, and has no fear of the princes of the earth, the first drops of the coming storm fell in Germany. The opening act of the great rising of the German peasants occurred in 1491, at Kempten, in Suabia. Two years later their famous league of the Bundschuh was formed. The adoption of a peasant's shoe as their cognisance was a stroke of genius, full of humour and the most touching truth. The confederate peasants held nocturnal meetings on the summit of the Hungersberg, one of the highest mountains in the Vosges. In 1502, the Bundschuh appeared in the See of Spire, where seven thousand peasants rose, declaring that they wished to be as free as the Swiss. Both these risings failed through treachery, and their leaders were executed.
In a short time the insurrection broke out again at Lehn, not far from Freiburg in Bavaria. Its leader selected emissaries among the wandering mendicants, who induced the peasants of Elsass, of the Mark of Baden, of the Black Forest, and of a great part of Suabia, to declare for the Bundschuh. They held their meetings in the valley of the Kinzig, an affluent of the Rhine in Wiirtemburg, and issued a manifesto in which their complaints and their demands touching the woods, pasture-lands, hunting-grounds, and fisheries were clearly stated. However, they too were put down, and their leaders, with the exception of the chief, who escaped, suffered death.
It was in the realm of the dissolute Duke Ulrich of Wurtemburg that the next revolutionary society was formed. The con-
