Review of Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University 2024

[sheenaghpugh]

What was so frightening to authorities—those whom Widman spoke for—was that these people took to the road to Niklashausen and did not ask anybody’s permission, not from their landlords to leave work, not from their priests to go on a pilgrimage. Social rank and obligations just seemed to dissolve.

And we’re back to revolutionary history, in particular the class struggle in mediaeval Germany. In 2024 I reviewed Andrew Drummond’s fascinating account of the life and times of Thomas Müntzer, a priest who fought alongside his flock in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525. Here, from 1476, is an earlier revolutionary, Hans Behem, or Böhm, who herded animals for a living (though so contradictory is the information about his life that we are not even sure if it was sheep, cattle or pigs) and who for recreation played the drum and wrote songs.

Both, after their death, were traduced by their enemies, but while Müntzer, a highly educated man, left us his own trenchant writings to correct the balance, Behem was illiterate. So we are left with the words of his opponents, and they differ wildly. Bishop Rudolph von Sherenberg of Würzburg, a contemporary, saw him as a dangerous opponent, shrewd and intelligent despite his lack of education. Later writers seem to have been determined to mock and belittle him, asserting that he was a noted fool whose words were dictated to him by a Franciscan friar – it is at this time that they begin to call him a swineherd rather than a shepherd, presumably with the symbolic implications of each in mind.

We do know, from the charges against him, some of what he preached to the peasants who flocked to his home valley of  Niklashausen.  In a time when land was held by a small number of nobles and churchmen, and peasants had few if any rights, he preached that “the waters and woods belonged to everybody; and that the rich should be stripped of their wealth “so that we all have enough” (so hetten wir glich all genugk); and that “the time will come when princes and lords must work for a daily wage” (eβ karnpt dar zu, daβ die fursten und hern noch umb eynen taglone mussen arbeitten)”. He also held the recent Church invention of Purgatory in contempt and did not believe priests had the power to excommunicate people.

Behem’s transformation, apparently sparked by visions of the Virgin Mary, took place just after the season of Karneval and Wunderli argues convincingly that this season, when the world briefly turned upside down and normal social conventions ceased to apply, may have been the trigger.

Like Drummond, Wunderli is writing a history with many lacunae. He is scrupulous in indicating when he is speculating rather than reporting known facts, but I could do without his attempt to reconstruct from fragments one of Behem’s actual sermons. He is honest about it being a reconstruction, but it still feels off-key, because though we may know the gist of what Behem said, we can only guess at his tone, his delivery, whatever it was that so impressed his listeners.

Nevertheless, this is an absorbing account of a turbulent time and its main characters come very alive: Sherenberg, himself a would-be reformer whose attempts were constantly frustrated; the mysterious Beghard Brother who accompanied Behem to execution; the pragmatic Count Johann of Wertheim, who, replying to Church requests to prevent pilgrims travelling through his lands to see where Behem had preached, said that “he was reluctant to ban the movement of pilgrims through his lands because of the revenues pilgrims brought in. At least the count held a consistent position: banning tourism is bad business.” And Hans himself, commonly called “the youth”, whose behaviour at the stake, albeit reported by one of his detractors, who did not see it, still rings oddly true: “When he was tied to the stake for burning, however, he sang certain songs or verses in a high voice about Our Lady, which he had composed in the German language. […] But as soon as he felt the flames, he cried out three times, with a weeping voice, ‘O, o, o’. He was then engulfed by the flames. His voice uttered nothing again.”