Some thoughts on Nature and the German Peasants’ War

Detail from 1525 edition of The Twelve Articles

by Martin Empson

Martin Empson is the author of The Time of the Harvest Has Come! Revolution, Reformation and the German Peasants’ War, published this year by Bookmarks Publications, marking the 500th anniversary of the rebellion.

One of the remarkable aspects to those studying the German Peasants’ War, the great revolutionary movement that swept central Germany in 1524 and 1525, is that the movement’s demands have been recorded in great detail. Most famously there are the demands collated in the “Twelve Articles,” written in the German town of Memmingen by delegates from the peasants’ armies in March 1525. Countless other such documents exist.

In their demands, the revolutionary peasants articulated their opposition to serfdom, exploitation and oppression. But because wealth in feudal society was based on land ownership, the peasants had to address another fundamental aspect of their exploitation – the relationship of society to the natural world. Some of this is reflected in demands about rents and access to land. But more explicitly the peasantry often raised demands that highlighted their relationship to nature, and how they thought they should use nature. Two of the Twelve Articles make this explicit:

“It has been the custom heretofore, that no poor man should be allowed to catch venison or wild fowl or fish in flowing water, which seems to us quite unseemly and unbrotherly as well as selfish and not agreeable to the word of God. In some places the authorities preserve the game to our great annoyance and loss, recklessly permitting the unreasoning animals to destroy to no purpose our crops which God suffers to grow for the use of man, and yet we must remain quiet.”

The Article continues:

“When God created man he gave him dominion over all the animals, over the birds of the air and over the fish in the water. Accordingly, it is our desire if a man holds possession of waters that he should prove from satisfactory documents that his right has been unwittingly acquired by purchase… but whosoever cannot produce such evidence should surrender his claim with good grace.”

The Fifth Articles develops this theme:

“We are aggrieved in the manner of wood-cutting, for the noble folk have appropriated all the woods to themselves alone…. It is our opinion in regard to wood which has fallen into the hands of a lord whether spiritual or temporal, that unless it was duly purchased it should revert again to the community. It should, moreover, be free to every member of the community to help himself to such fire-sood as he needs in his home.”

Again the question of private ownership of natural resources is not challenged wholesale, but rather its unjust ownership:

“If the forest, although unfairly appropriated in the first instance, was later duly sold let the matter be adjusted in a friendly spirit and according to the Scriptures.”

The Tenth Article opposes the enclosure (privatization) of land and resources:

“We are aggrieved by the appropriation by individuals of meadows and fields which at one time belonged to a community. These we will take again into our own hands.”

It wasn’t just in the Twelve Articles that these, and similar demands were made. In the sixty-two articles of the peasants of Stühlingen, an area where the revolt had first begun in the summer of 1524, the peasants raised a number of complaints specific to how they were allowed, or restricted, in their use of natural resources:

Article 14: “The domain forest and other woods have been removed from our use, contrary to ancient tradition.”

Article 16: “We have many freehold estates and meadows through which running water flows; this we have hitherto used as we required for milling or to water the meadows, as well as the waters which are common to all; but in recent years our lords have taken these waters from us and will not allow us to use them; instead they rent them out to fishermen who then do considerable damage to our holdings.”

Article 28: “We are prohibited from clearing and burning stubble and weeds on pastures and meadows in the spring, contrary to common custom.”

In their 42nd article, the Stühlingen peasantry complained that the lords could place fences to create game reserves on their land. But the peasantry could not clear these without punishment and the game destroys their crops.

Hundreds of similar examples can be found in dozens of other rebel documents. Land, water, natural resources, wild animals and fallen wood, had become a site for the class struggle as the landowning classes were enclosing, privatising and controlling nature in their interests. This process had been ongoing and often meant the destruction or dismantling of customary rights that the peasants had relied on for centuries.

This process is not unexpected. Similar events were taking place across Europe. It reflected changes in the feudal economy, which saw elements of feudal society increasingly seeing private enterprise as being a way of maximising their wealth. The beginnings of capitalism in this sense were sowing the seeds of a great revolt, because there was a contradiction between the economic interests of the feudal ruling classes and the way that peasants wanted to use nature for their communities.

In her recent account of the rebellion Lyndal Roper places the demands over use of nature at the heart of the revolt. She writes, “for the peasants, the land was a working environment, for the lord’s it was a locale of pleasure-and a resource to be exploited for profit.” She says the peasantry “wanted decisions to be made collectively and to manage natural resources in a way that would respect the environment, which God had created.” Later she says that “peasant grievances centred on ecology, creation itself.” Other economic changes were also having their impacts. As Roper notes, mining was polluting rivers. The demand for fuel for the growing number of small scale industrial processes was having an impact on forests.

This was a world where nature existed for the use of humans, who sat above, and separate from the flora and fauna below them. A good example of this thinking is given by Keith Thomas, who quotes a 17th century poem:

The pheasant, partridge and the lark
Flew to thy house, as to the Ark.
The willing ox of himself came
Home to the slaughter, with the lamb;
And every beast did thither bring
Himself to be an offering.

Thomas is specifically talking about Tudor and Stuart England, but his ideas are relevant for Germany in the 16th century. Theology taught that nature had been provided by God for the use of humanity. Every plant and animal had its particular role. In 1653, Henry More could write that animals only lived “till we shall have need to eat them.” As Thomas continues: “Contemporary theology thus provided the moral underpinnings for that ascendancy of man over nature which had by the early modern period become the accepted goal of human endeavour. The dominant religious tradition had no truck with that ‘veneration’ of nature which many Eastern religions still retained.”

The peasant struggle for control over nature and its resources has to be understood in this ideological context. Roper argues this was not “conservationist in the modern sense because it held that the environment was there for human beings to use.” But it could, she says, lead to an understanding that the environment had to be protected, for the good of the community, not individual profit.

On the other hand, the ruling class was moving in the other direction. Their approach to nature, as something to be utilised for profit, also fitted into the dominant ideological approach. It is the beginning of an understanding of nature that would see, as capitalist economic relations developed further and eventually overcame the old order, a situation where nature was merely part of the production process.

As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, with the arrival of capitalism, “For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.”

That said, we should be careful not to entirely reject the peasants’ approach to nature. Their vision of a post-revolutionary landscape of democratic peasant rural communes, where the feudal lords’ power had been destroyed and village communities were in a position to manage their own relationship with nature in the interest of the collective is closer to a modern socialist vision of a post-capitalist society.

The problem was, as Friedrich Engels pointed out in his own account of the German Peasants’ War, that the economic basis for such a communal society did not yet exist. The peasants lacked the ability to defeat the feudal lords in the countryside and the towns were not yet centers of potential working class power. Nonetheless, by framing their desire to utilise the natural world, and its resources, in the interests of everyone, through the smashing of serfdom and the defeat of feudalism, the German peasants of 1525 remain inspirational.

The question today, just as it was for the peasants of 1525, was one of power. Who had the power to control nature’s resources and how could that power be taken from them for the benefit of humanity?

Later thinkers and activists like Karl Marx would fully develop a critique of capitalism’s relationship with nature, and the way that nature was embedded into the process of capital accumulation, they could build on the insights and revolutionary activity of figures like Michael Gaismair who dreamed, and fought, for a world where the land and labour could be organised so that the poorest could “be provided not only with food and drink, but with clothes and all necessities” and “the land will become healthier” through the rational management of marshes and bogs.

Or Thomas Münzter, who was incited to insurrection by “the assumption of our lords and princes that all creatures are their property. The fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the face of the Earth.”