1634: The Ram Rebellion: Section Twenty Five

A NIGHTMARE UPON THE PRESENT

July 1633: Near the Coburg border, Franconia

    Constantin Ableidinger looked up from the table at which he was working. The breeze was welcome, but strong enough to disturb the various piles of paper on which he was working. He had pressed almost every heavy item in the room into service as a paperweight. A small pewter plate, a candlestick, a small telescope.

    He had a housekeeper, too. She was glaring at him from behind his back. He could see her wavering reflection in the glass goblet of cold coffee that stood by his right hand. Undoubtedly, he had committed yet another infraction against her rigid housekeeping standards and she was planning to bring it to his attention. Respectfully, but without yielding.

    If he had been paying her wages, she would not be here any more. However, the ram was paying her wages. The ram had determined, some months ago, that his time was too valuable for him to spend it pulling up the featherbed.

    Or drinking in the Frankenwinheim tavern with Rudolph Vulpius.

    Or planting cabbages in his garden.

    His wife Sara had never complained that he was a slob. She had been agreeable and compliant, even when he walked in from the garden with his boots covered thickly in mud. Even on days when she had just swept the floor boards down with sand.

    Of course, his late wife’s pliancy had also led her to agree that he could bed her right there in the alley behind her father’s bakery in Jena. Which had led to his expulsion from the Faculty of Theology.

    And to his son, who was standing at the door in front of him. Who had, in this year and a half since the up-timers came to Franconia, stopped being a child. How had Matthias gotten to be fourteen? When would he have time to finish tutoring him so he could enter the university? Was that something else for which his own time was now “too valuable?”

    What university should he attend?

    “What is it, Matthias?” he asked aloud.

    “It’s Herr Schulte, again.”

    Ableidinger thought for the hundredth time that he had never properly appreciated Rudolph Vulpius. Heading a village council took a lot of work. That was obvious to anyone who had ever sat on a village council. But a teacher did not sit on the village council. He worked for it and for the consistory. For years, when he was teaching in Frankenwinheim, he had kept the council’s records, so he knew as an observer how much business the council did. Still, he had never understood how much maneuvering it took, before each meeting, to bring the contentious parties in a controversy to the point that when they came before the council, they were either willing to reach a solution between themselves or accept whatever solution the council proposed with reasonably good grace. He had never realized how hard it was to recruit “volunteers” for each of the necessary offices, from fire bucket patrol to bridge and ford inspector to vermin warden.

    He wished he had a suitable “volunteer” to listen to Schulte right now.

    Herr Schulte was in a feud. Not a formally declared feud, as had existed among the imperial knights long ago in the past, but a normal one, stemming from a brawl over property rights. The recently deceased duke of Saxe-Coburg had, some twenty years before, leased property that crossed the boundary line between Coburg and Franconia to a family of Protestant exiles who came from Austria by way of Bayreuth. The duke had done this because the son of the prior leaseholder, Schulte’s father, had abandoned the property, having found a more advantageous situation further south, in the Steigerwald part of Franconia.

    So it had remained. But in the awful winter of 1631-1632, Schulte and his family had been pushed out of the Steigerwald when the army of Gustavus Adolphus passed through. Like so many other farmers, he had been dislocated by the Thirty Years War. He was a refugee. So he had returned to his grandfather’s old village and was now suing the current leaseholder for return of his family’s “traditional” holding.

    Of course, one way to explain his actions would be to attribute them to avarice. The Bible itself said that the love of money was the root of all evil.

    But at least he had learned to distinguish between avarice and political power. Thomas Paine pointed out that,

    MANKIND being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance: the distinctions of rich and poor may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice. Oppression is often the CONSEQUENCE, but seldom or never the MEANS of riches; and tho' avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

    Constantin Ableidinger now knew more about lease grants than anyone except a territorial ruler or a lawyer ought to know. It was certainly more than he had ever wanted to know about them.

    Traditional.

    Schulte was, of course, appealing to the Franconian administration run by the up-timers from Grantville — or, more accurately, managed as far as principle went by the up-timers from Grantville and run on their behalf by a gaggle of German bureaucrats — for redress of his wrongs. Ultimately, if they did not settle it to his satisfaction, he would undoubtedly be appealing to the supreme court of the CPE, the Swede having occupied the city where the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire held its sessions and annexed its personnel. If that court did not satisfy him, he would, if he survived so long, appeal ultimately to Gustavus Adolphus in person as the symbolic "good ruler."

    What was the Swede likely to know about it?

    Nothing, of course. Der gesunde Menschenverstand. Schlichte Vernunft. Common sense. Thomas Paine, in the first American pamphlet Ableidinger had read, a year and a half ago now, had written:

    There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the World, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.

    Paine was as refreshing as cold spring water on a hot summer day.

    As Schulte talked, Ableidinger wondered idly if anyone in this famous Grantville had introduced the king of Sweden to Thomas Paine’s views on hereditary succession.

    To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.

    If not, perhaps he should send him a copy of Common Sense. It’s views on religious toleration were important.

    As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself, I fully and conscientiously believe that it is the will of the Almighty that there should be a diversity of religious opinions among us. It affords a larger field for our Christian kindness; were we all of one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and on this liberal principle I look on the various denominations among us to be like children of the same family, differing only in what is called their Christian names.

    But perhaps not. Paine had written other things. There was, for example, “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION.”

    Considering that Gustavus Adolphus was called “The Lion of the North” and what that would imply about the king, maybe he shouldn’t send him the pamphlet.

    A year and a half ago, he would have sent it.

    Today, he had to stop and think. He had responsibilities.

    Powerful people forgave some things more easily than others. They tended to find ridicule very hard to forgive.

    Prudence had to be among the more disgusting of the cardinal virtues.

    Perhaps the Swede’s officials would not be unduly influenced by Schulte’s appeal to tradition. Even in this matter, there was some comfort to be drawn from Thomas Paine, who had written: “ . . .a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

    He only wished that he had time.

    Not only in the matter of Herr Schulte’s claims.

    There was scarcely a farmer in Franconia against whom some claimant did not have some ghost of a reason to file a lawsuit.

    It was a situation that made men nervous. The majority of villagers were not primarily worried about the actions of their landlords, or even about the actions of their lords. With the war, landlords were happy to have tenants. Like a barren cow, untenanted farms did not provide milk — or rents, dues, and tithes. With the war, lords were happy to have their subjects within their own territories. Refugees, run into some safer jurisdiction, did not pay taxes.

    But an avaricious man, greedy for property, was very often willing to file a suit against the current lessee and the lessor, both.

    Claiming “tradition.”

    Tradition be damned. With any luck, the administrators sent by the thrice-damned king of Sweden might understand that also.

    A century before, in the Great Peasant War, der grosse Bauernkrieg, Germany’s farmers had based their demands upon tradition, upon a return to long-established ways of doing things.

    It had made sense, back then, when the landlords were trying to abolish the long established communal rights over pasture and woodlands. That was oversimplified. But in the Germanies, if one did not oversimplify, the forest definitely got lost in the thickets of individual trees. One reached the point that one could not find a general rule because there were so many thousand exceptions to it.

    Simplify, Thomas Paine had written. “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered; . . . .”

    The man had been a dreamer. Or, at least, simplicity was not to be found in Franconia. Not in this summer of 1633.

    Even the up-timers had learned that. They spent a lot of their time trying to understand land tenure. They spent even more of their time trying to adjudicate disputes among and between various claimants to property rights.

    Mostly near the larger cities, where they had their headquarters. Where their writ ran with some effectiveness.

    Up here, in a village near the border with Coburg, their writ had not yet made much impact. No villager in this region had ever seen any of the up-timers except the “Hearts and Minds” team. Who were, for them, the bringers of free newspapers and pamphlets. Newspapers, in particular, with Brillo stories.

    Which meant that both parties to the Schulte suit, rather than hiring expensive lawyers in Bamberg, had appealed to the ram to decide the issue.

    So Schulte’s appeal was on his table, under the pewter plate.

    And Herr Schulte was standing in the door of the room, expressing the opinion that Constantin Ableidinger could not reach an impartial judgment in the matter because he, like the other party to the suit, descended from Austrian exiles.

    Paine had covered a lot in that little pamphlet called Common Sense.

    In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

    Ableidinger tried to follow the same principle in everything he wrote. For now, he kept his face impassive while he listened to Schulte rant.

    Dreaming of simplification.

    There was no need for the ram to make his call for restoration of "old, established" usages and rights. Even if, when one read it carefully, that was largely the way the American Declaration of Independence was couched.

    That was the path to a continuing nightmare. The more he thought about it, the surer he became.

    Thomas Jefferson’s logic was not the same as that of Thomas Paine. Jefferson had tried to graft natural rights onto the tree trunk of precedent.

    Paine had not. As he put it, “He who takes nature for his guide, is not easily beaten out of his argument . . .”

    Simplify.

    Alexander the Great had solved the Gordian knot by cutting it.

    Why couldn’t the farmers of Franconia do the same? Get rid of these thickets of traditional claims and cross-claims? Draw a line and start over? No more one-half of a village under one customary law, the other half under a second and different set, which let the lords constantly dispute over whose law applied to which lands and which tenants. Much less having the lordship fragmented into a dozen or more fractions, and the only recourse the farmers had some city lawyer whose main goal was to maximize the profits for the shareholders, the Ganerben.

    His mind wandered to his next pamphlet. Benefits for the current lessor. No more disputes over the possible dower rights of the lessor’s grandfather’s cousin’s widow’s second husband.

    Benefits for the current lessee. No more lawsuits over whether or not a century-past transfer from one party to another had been properly carried out and recorded. No more allegations that a lease for three lives had already expired because some lawyer’s clerk had search the church books and found that the father of the current holder had begotten an older son who was recorded as having been born and died on the same day. Since the long-dead priest had not specified that the child was stillborn, the pile of papers under the candlestick had been generated by the lessor’s claim that the child had possibly breathed, and thus extinguished the third life on the lease when it died.

    Somewhere. He had read it somewhere, in something published by the up-timers. He had no recollection where it had been or where he had read it. He would paraphrase the quotation from memory, as closely as he could. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the minds of the living.” “The past lies as a nightmare upon the present.”

    The second way was better. Shorter. Pithier.

    The first version sounded too much like something that merino would say.

    The Franconians’ ram was Brillo.

    Schulte finished his presentation.

    Matthias indicated by a signal that he had gotten it all down in shorthand.

    Ableidinger rose and escorted Schulte to the door.

    He stood there for a moment, looking up at the ram banner waving from a flagpole at the edge of the village.

    He wished he could go out and enjoy the breeze. He wished he could go out into the glorious long day of autumn sunlight. The days were already getting shorter. Soon they would be in the grim, glum, winter again.

    But poor Matthias was obliged to stay in the office, transcribing everything that idiot Schulte had to say.

    Not to mention that there was still the pile of papers weighted down by the telescope.

    The young pastor Otto Schaeffer had left Frankenwinheim and taken a position in a parish under the patronage of one of the most intransigent imperial knights in Bayreuch. Fuchs von Bimbach, the name was. From that perch of safety, he was peppering Franconia with pamphlets asserting that Christianity required that believers who had been offended turn the other cheek and forgive seventy times seven.

    So. Back to Common Sense.

    But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

    Yet another pamphlet to write and send to Else Kronacher in Bamberg. He wouldn’t even be violating his principle against personal recriminations in political controversy. Paine had been writing in another future, nearly a century and a half from now. He had never heard of Otto Schaeffer, so certainly could not have called him a coward and a sycophant.

    Could he? No, of course not. It was just an academic quotation. Schaeffer couldn’t possibly take offense at the ram for including it.

    Else Kronacher. She was the only woman he could think of who was more intransigent than his housekeeper. She was writing pamphlets herself now. The ram had its ewe. Ewegenia, she used as her pseudonym. The last pamphlet she wrote, he thought, had been deliberately meant to tweak his own fondness for Paine. Frau Kronacher had started with a quotation from Common Sense in regard to kingship:

    But there is another and great distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.

    Else Kronacher did not care for the political implications of the statement that male and female were distinctions of nature.

    Perhaps he could get rid of his housekeeper by proposing to Frau Kronacher’s daughter Martha? He probably should remarry one of these days. The house would be very empty when Matthias left for the university.

    What university should the boy attend?

    He didn’t have time to think about that right now. He had a pamphlet to write. A speech to give. Or several of each.

    His time was too valuable now. So they said. Worse, they were right. Paine’s words belonged in Franconia this year:

    The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent — of at least one-eighth part of the habitable Globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.

    A different continent, but it was nonetheless true.

    So, for now, his time was too valuable for him to step out into the breeze. He turned back to the table and picked up his pen. Placing the first sheet of paper over one printed with heavy black lines to provide guidance in keeping the lines of his handwriting straight, he entered the heading.

    The Past Lies as a Nightmare upon the Present.

    At least, he still knew better than to think his efforts were indispensable. If he were not writing pamphlets, somebody else would write pamphlets. Not precisely the same ones, saying precisely the same things, but close enough.

    If he ever forgot that, the ram might as well be a king.