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.” Or, “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.