For them the Peasants' War was the inevitable break with a long economic past, now intolerable and hopeless.

There is some evidence to show that the number of serfs was increasing.

This process, by menacing the freedom of the others, united all in the resolve to stop the gradual enslavement of their class, to reckon with those who benefited by it.
How little now there was in the ideals of the last and most terrible of the peasant risings may be seen by a study of the programs of reform put forward from time to time during the preceding century.

There is nothing in the manifestos of 1525 that may not be found in the pamphlets of the fifteenth century.

The grievances are the same, and the hope of a completely renovated and communized society is the same.
One of the most influential of these socialistic pamphlets was the so-called _Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund_, written by an Augsburg clergyman about 1438, first printed in 1476, and reprinted a number of times before the end of the century.