1634: The Ram Rebellion: Section Thirty One

“Last time, it was a work shoe”

Franconia, Late October, 1633

    “What’s with the sheep?” Scott Blackwell asked. The NUS’s military administrator for Franconia was frowning down at the village below them. He and Johnnie F. Haun had paused their horses on the crest of a hill, just above a village somewhere out in the back of beyond. Scott had no idea where he was. In spite of his compass, he was utterly lost and quite sure that he would never be able to find his way out of this complex of hills and hollows by himself.

    But he was sure he had been to this village before. There was a really odd church tower to confirm his memory. And there had not, last spring, been a huge banner with the head of a sheep on it blowing in the wind from a tall pole where the road ran into the central square.

    Johnnie F. had been moving along with his usual complete sense of orientation. Now he looked over and said patiently, “It’s a ram.”

    “What’s the difference?” Scott asked.

    “Look at the horns. It’s male.”

    “It wasn’t here when I went around the villages with you last spring.” Scott was sure of that.

    “None of them were.”

    “None of what?”

    “The rams-head banners. From here on up toward the border, you’ll see a lot of them.”

    Scott might not be able to tell a sheep from a ram, but, unlike Johnnie F., he could spot possible flash-points that might require the attention of the military police from a very long distance indeed.

    “Nobody reported on these?”

    “Well, the guys on ‘hearts and minds’ have noticed them. They’ve told me that they’re all around. Not just here in Wuerzburg. Over in Bamberg, too. Actually, they’re thicker over there. Not very many in Fulda. But they’ve showed up really gradually, and nobody’s been making a fuss about them. They’re just there, on the poles. Nobody’s brought them up in conversation.”

    Scott sighed. “Do me a favor, will you? Try to find out why the sheep are up there on those poles.”

    As soon as he got back to Wuerzburg, Scott had a long talk with Saunders Wendell. This was one of those things that the UMWA needed to know about.

    Wuerzburg, November, 1633

    Johnnie F. brought back a broadside. He had collected it in a remote village at the utter backside of anywhere, up in the Fraenkischer Schweiz.

    "Isn’t that," Scott asked rather cautiously, "on the letterhead of the Grantville League of Women Voters?"

    "It was that letterhead. Once upon a time. Now it is more." Meyfarth leaned over the table. "See, here at the top. There is your Grantville paper. The head of the ram and the slogan:

    “’Better to be hung

    For a sheep than for a lamb.’”

    "That’s your League of Women Voters motto. Then, here, the German version. It’s pretty much the same:

    “’Soll man mich denn erhaengen,

    So fuer ein’ Schaf’, nicht fuer ein Lamm.’

    “But,” Meyfarth continued, “they have added two new lines:

    “’Doch Du, brav’ deutscher Bauer,

    Wie ein Bock zerbrich den Damm.’

    “That is, oh, let me think a minute-something like:

    “’But you, sturdy German farmer,

    Break down the dam like a ram.’

    "This broadside then has a paragraph that explains it. About how these women challenged your government about horse manure in the streets and won. And that the son of the courageous ewe, the leader of the protest, is now the chief justice of the NUS Supreme Court."

    "Oh. Nice." Anita grinned at her private vision of the redoubtable Veleda Riddle sprouting a nice crinkled white fleece on her cheeks and neck to match the carefully tended white curls on the top of her head..

    "Then, here," Meyfarth continued, picking up a different broadside that Stewart Hawker had sent over from Bamberg. "This one has the lines not quite the same. I think that means that they aren’t all coming from one source. There must be different versions springing up in many markets and villages. The first two lines are the same, but the second two are different.

    “Und Du, gut’ deutscher Bauer,

    sei nun der Bock, der brave Ram.’

    "That is, more or less...

    "But you, good German farmer,

    Now be the buck, the valiant ram.’”

    “Look, Herr Meyfarth,” Johnnie F. interrupted. “Up there, if I’m following you, you translated “brave’” as ‘sturdy.’ Here, I think, you translated it as ‘valiant.’”

    Meyfarth, who had been leaning over the table, stood up straight, once more silently thanking God that he was a poet as well as a pastor and had a feel for languages. “It’s both, really, depending on where the author uses it. The German ‘brav’ isn’t quite like the English ‘brave’—which, I think, means, ‘not cowardly.’ It means really one who does not give in. One who stands his ground firmly. He persists. He endures much to defend that which he protects. Stubborn. Sometimes, even, ‘worthy.’ Or, maybe, more like in the language of English writers of this day. The ‘sturdy yeoman.’ Not—how would you say it?—not a flash in the pan.”

    He raised his hand and recited:

    “’By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

    Their flags to April’s breeze unfurl’d.

    ‘Twas there th’embattled farmers stood,

    And fired the shot heard ‘round the world.’

    “‘Brav” would work there, too. For ‘embattled.’ The farmers were standing their ground. That’s ‘embattled.’ But if they were not ‘brav,’ they would not have stood to fight. So it is implied in the word that the poet used.”

    “Okay,” Johnnie F. answered. “Got it. I think.”

    The sad state of twentieth-century public education was demonstrated by the fact that of all the NUS administrators in the room, only the seventeenth-century German had committed the “Concord Hymn” to memory. There were at least two up-timers who did not have the vaguest idea what Meyfarth had quoted, which did not keep them from nodding in solemn approval.

    "Then,” Meyfarth said, “another paragraph in German, with the story of your Brillo and how he overcame the Merino aristocrat."

    “Brillo,” David Petrini protested, “is not ours.”

    “He is a down-time ram, that is true. To some extent, that is the point. But you, you up-timers from Grantville, that is, have made him yours. So...”

    Meyfarth paused. “So he is ours. And he is theirs—he also belongs to the farmers of Franconia, now. This broadsheet-”

    Meyfarth pulled another from the stack in front of him. “-has instructions on how to make a Ram banner. With a German motto. Perhaps, from the ram’s story, it began as your English, ‘Don’t fence me in.’ But the German, somewhat, is different. ‘Mich nicht bedruecken.’ That is, ‘Don’t hold me down.’"

    “Is that the same as ‘Don’t tread on me?’” Johnnie F. asked.

    Meyfarth shook his head. “They’re using that on banners up around Suhl. ‘Tritt nicht auf mich,’ with a Schlange, a serpent. But it hasn’t become popular down here in Franconia proper.”

    Steve Salatto then asked the question that gladdened the heart of any Lutheran pastor. "What does this mean?"

    Meyfarth was delighted to explain. From the perspective of tradition, he produced a long lament on the topic of just how rare it was to find anyone at the bottom of the social pyramid who had a due appreciation of the fact that this was where he was properly placed in the Great Chain of Being and this is where he should be happy to remain, performing his duty in the station to which God had called him. He managed to bring in his observation that the Grantvillers, with rare exceptions among those who had up-time military experience, also appeared to have extraordinary difficulty in realizing that God created the world with a hierarchy, in which some give orders and others take them.

    "Fine," Scott Blackwell said, "but what’s with the sheep?"

    Johnnie F. groaned. “It’s a ram.”

    "It is the revolution that your Committees of Correspondence want. It is starting here in Franconia. With these broadsides. Under the banner of this ram. Not the ram for the children, with the little toys for sale. Even Franconian Catholic peasants, as benighted a group as exists within God’s creation, appear to have noticed that the people of Grantville do not care for hierarchies. Nor does this ram. Also, while Franconian farmers are certainly most hard-hearted and stubborn, they lack a certain élan when it comes to choosing their revolutionary symbols. No torches held high. No swords. No daggers. No chariots of fire. No rattlesnakes.”

    His mouth twitched into a smile. “They just have no flair. Last time, it was a work shoe.”

    “Last time?” David Petrini, the economic liaison, had majored in economics, not history.

    “During the Great Peasant Revolt,” Meyfarth answered.

    “I didn’t know you had any peasant revolts. I was sort of under the impression that European peasants just sat around being oppressed.” That was Saunders Wendell. The political training that the UMWA provided to its members had a rather pro-American chauvinistic tinge, to tell the truth.

    Meyfarth stared at him in utter bewilderment. “That was the one just over a hundred years ago. The big one. It was centered in Thuringia and Franconia—well, Swabia also, to some extent. The Bundschuh. Thousands of peasants gathered into armies. ‘Hordes,’ the rulers called them. Haufen. They put down the revolt with no pity. But there have been many since then. Many smaller ones. Some quite large, such as the ones in Switzerland and Austria. Do you think the farmers you meet every day are mostly not serfs now because of the goodness of their lords’ hearts? They have been so obnoxious during the past century that most lords decided it was just easier to let them lease the fields for rent rather than try to compel the labor services that are required to cultivate a large demesne. It is to the north and east, now, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, that the nobles have been trying to force the farmers back into servitude, so they can farm the lands the way that the Americans did the ‘plantations’ before your Civil War.”

    Meyfarth paused. “It will be very interesting to see how the King of Sweden handles this in Mecklenburg and the two Pomeranias, since he has made himself duke in all three.” He turned back to Petrini. “How come Herr Wendell has not seen this? You have been studying the tax structure as it affects the farmers. I have seen the reports.”

    Petrini, the economic liaison, sighed. “Yeah, I’ve been trying to get some kind of a general picture. Figure that taxes, to the government, whoever it is, run a man about eight per cent of the value of the harvest. Then the tithes or other church taxes, about the same or a little more—maybe up to twelve per cent if the landlord is a church or abbey or something of the sort. Most of those are paid in kind—in grain or woad or flax or whatever he’s growing. The tax people insist on that, because it cushions them quite a bit from inflation. Plus local taxes. Figure about seventy percent of the harvest left for the farmer, after tax. But he’s got to set aside at least twenty per cent for the next year’s seed and running expenses. That’s in an average year. In a bad harvest, the set-aside takes a much bigger chunk of the whole. So figure that maybe the farmer gets fifty percent of his cash-crop production to market. I’m not figuring in the stuff like a vegetable garden that they grow and use for themselves, even though they do have to turn in the ‘small tithes’ on that. Those are so variable that it would be hopeless to try to track them without a mainframe and an army of data input clerks.”

    Johnnie F. nodded. He hadn’t been collecting statistics, but from the seat of his pants as an ag extension agent, fifty percent sounded about right. “But...”

    Petrini continued. “Oh, I know. Out of that fifty per cent, he’s still got to pay his rent to the landlord. Whoever the landlord is. I know that Grantvillers tend to have nobles on the brain, so to speak, but one thing that’s clear to me now is that an awful lot of the landlords are merchants and other fairly rich people in the towns who have picked up rural real estate as an investment. In a lot of places, more than half of the farmers aren’t renting from nobles who have estates. They’re renting from a cloth manufacturer or a lawyer who has bought up the Lehen. Well, he has to pay rent unless the terms of his contract are for a percentage of the harvest in kind and not cash. In that case, it’s already gone before he gets his crop to market. That’s not the same everywhere, either, not always even from one household to another in the same village. Sometimes, out of a dozen households, five will be sharecropping the rent and the others paying cash.”

    Petrini leaned forward, his face intent. “Either way, the farmers don’t end up with a lot of margin for capital improvements like buying a new team or other equipment. That’s going to be a big roadblock to introducing mechanization, even without Brandschatzungen leaving the villages burned or the forced contributions for the armies. Something’s going to have to give.”

    Scott Blackwell interrupted. “That’s long-range, guys. This is immediate. What are we going to do about the sheep?”

    The staff meeting meandered to an inconclusive ending. Steve finally suggested that everybody go home and sleep on it. For his own part, Meyfarth gave him and Saunders Wendell a long tutorial about peasant revolts during and after supper. Partly the where and when of the most recent ones. “Recent” being defined in Meyfarth’s mind, apparently, as the past half-century or so. “Current affairs” extended as far back as he himself actually remembered as a kid. For Meyfarth, born in 1590, “history” began some time before the great famine of 1594-1597, which had been followed by the big plague epidemic of 1597-1598.

    Meyfarth spent more of his time, though, talking about the ways that things interconnected. How the workers in the towns often supported the peasants—that, in fact, a lot of the ‘peasant’ leaders were often townspeople from guilds like the fishers or coopers who had a lot to do with the farmers. Or village school teachers. How villagers who worked in the towns—and a lot of them did, when they were young, as maids and seasonal laborers, for years before they went home to settle down—contributed to dissatisfaction in the towns themselves. After two hours, revolts in Naples spun dizzyingly in Steve’s mind around revolts in Croatia and France, Lithuania and the Ukraine, but above all in Austria. Everywhere in Austria, it appeared, there were or recently had been, masses of unhappy farmers—Upper Austria, Lower Austria, the Steiermark, Carinthia. The last big one had been five years before Grantville was dumped down into the middle of the Thirty Years War.

    Meyfarth remembered that one clearly, since the news-sheets and pamphlets had covered it extensively. Ferdinand II had pawned Lower Austria to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. He’d had to, to pay him back for military aid against the Bohemian Protestants. Maximilian had come down with a hard hand. The revolt had involved a mix of anti-clericalism, protests against death duties, objections to foreigners who had been brought in to occupy lands vacated by expelled Protestants, and protests against the excesses of Bavarian soldiers quartered upon the people. It wasn’t a few farmers shaking pitchforks; there had been about thirty thousand men under arms. Meyfarth started quoting poetry from the Austrian revolt. It wasn’t any better poetry than the Brillo rhymes, but it sure did skewer tyranny, graft, corruption, and oppression of the individual conscience. The message was pretty clear: the lords would flee and the peasants would rule in their place.

    Meyfarth gestured for emphasis. “We call each of these a Bauernkrieg—a peasant ‘war’ and not a ‘protest’. They besieged several towns, including the provincial capital of Linz, and waged campaigns against the Bavarian occupying army. It involved sailors on the Danube barges; several local nobles allied themselves with the peasants; so did some Lutheran clergy. Its leader, Stefan Fadinger, was killed, but he is well on his way to becoming a ‘folk hero’ just as you say of the Brillo ram. The last time I heard someone sing the whole “Fadingerlied,” it had fifty-seven verses. By the end, when Duke Maximilian and Ferdinand II managed to put it down, more than twelve thousand farmers had been killed.”

    Meyfarth paused. Then he suggested cautiously. “Perhaps, if the up-timers are not familiar with this... Just in case it has not occurred to Don Francisco Nasi to bring it to the attention of the prime minister...”

    Meyfarth’s hesitancy was a constant irritant to Saunders Wendell. He spit out, “Get to the point, man.”

    “Ah. Well.” Meyfarth continued. “This is one of the reasons that Ferdinand II may not be able to throw his full forces against Wallenstein. You do realize that? If he strips Austria of troops, there will be another uprising among the farmers, as large as that of 1626. That is not a hypothesis. That is just the truth. If the Austrian farmers think that they have even a hope of support from the King of Sweden and the USE, they will revolt again.” He looked up at the ceiling of Wuerzburg’s episcopal palace, with its elaborate, gilded, plaster moldings. “Franconia could put as many peasants into the field as Lower Austria, you know.”

    Somewhere, maybe in a Monty Python movie, Steve had once heard the line, “The peasants are revolting.” It was supposed to be a funny pun, in the movie. According to Meyfarth, it was the literal truth, a lot of the time. Mama Salatto’s little boy Stevie had not signed up for a major in public administration expecting to deal with enough revolting peasants to constitute a major army by the standards of the seventeenth century. Dissatisfied civic associations were about his speed. He had spent his pre-Ring of Fire days helping people establish Neighborhood Watch associations in the Baltimore suburbs. If he hadn’t given in to Anita’s plea to attend her folks’ fortieth wedding anniversary party in Grantville, he would still be establishing Neighborhood Watch associations in the suburbs of Baltimore. And he would be a happy man.

    He sipped at his wine. Then he asked, “Do you know what the epitaph of a successful civil servant is?”

    Meyfarth made his face carefully noncommittal. “No.”

    “He never did anything that got his name in the paper.”

    Saunders Wendell guffawed.

    Steve said, “Don’t laugh. If we manage things right, maybe the damned sheep banners won’t make the news at all, except locally. If they make a really big splash in the national news, that means that we failed to manage things right. If your name gets in the paper, you’ve screwed up. The bigger the headlines, the bigger the screw-up.”

    On that thought, he went to bed.

    Dave Stannard, who had been supervising the NUS’ voter registration project in Franconia since the fall of 1632, had a word with Steve on the way into staff meeting next morning. So Steve recognized him first.

    “I think that Johnnie F. is right. We should do this. It’s been hanging fire too long.” Dave waved at the letter from Arnold Bellamy, which was back on the table, carefully quarantined in the middle where it couldn’t seem to be claiming any one administrator as its patron. “We use the voter registration lists. We’ve got those. It won’t take the Amtmaenner an hour to cross out anyone who has died and add on anyone who has turned eighteen since last summer. Then we blitz them.”

    “Why bother blitzing?” Anita asked.

    “Because we’ve left it too long,” Dave answered, “so we’ve made ourselves a problem. We should have started earlier, like the commissioners did in Coburg. If we had, a few teams could have handled it and we’d have been done by now. Or close to done. Leaving it this late, unless we do it all at once, we’ll get into bad weather and have to stop. Then the folks in Unterpicklesdorf will start complaining that we valued the folks in Oberrelishhausen more than them, because we took the oaths of all the Relishes before the bad weather and left the Pickles unsworn for a whole season. No point in letting people manufacture grievances. God knows, they have enough real ones that we need to deal with.”

    Everyone at the table nodded. The Swedes had pretty well devastated this region during their campaign in 1631.

    Dave continued, “As Dad always said, ‘People don’t need an important issue to fight about. They’ll take anything available and inflate it to the size they need.’ So just do it all at once. Every single one of us, in Bamberg, in Fulda, here in Wuerzburg. Out into the Aemter and take the oaths. Before the Pickles get their feelings hurt.”

    He grinned. It was a remarkably predatory grin. Dave was another Masaniello cousin from the out-of-town crew who had been at Vince and Carla’s wedding anniversary. He’d been a Baltimore County child welfare officer before the Ring of Fire; his father Archie had been a fire department battalion chief. Dave had cut his teeth on Baltimore local politics. “Consider it a pre-emptive strike on the ‘moan and groan’ contingent. And invite the guys in the villages who aren’t eligible to take the oath to the ceremony. Feed them dinner, too. Let ‘em hear all the great speeches about citizenship and patriotism.”

    “All of us?” Steve asked.

    “Yeah, all. I mean the army privates and the copy clerks. The ground is frozen, but we haven’t had a lot of snow yet. The roads are passable. If we start tomorrow, we can get it done before Christmas.”

    There was consensus.

    “I suggest,” Dave added, “that you radio Fulda and Bamberg tonight, as soon as we get a window of opportunity, and tell them to do it the same way and the same time. Total stand-down for the ordinary routine; everybody out into the field.”

    “I suggest,” Meyfarth interjected in a very soft voice, “that you use the auditor team as well as the permanent staff. I have determined that they are not contractors, but are indeed employees of the NUS. Or of whatever you are going to call it, now. Then your permanent staff will not complain that you have given the auditors special privileges or exempted them from an onerous duty. As you said about not giving people the chance to manufacture grievances...”