of England against Luther was a bonfire of the heretic's works in London and another at Ghent.
The censorship of the press was never more ludicrously ineffective to stop a revolution. In spite of it the number of books issued from German printing-presses in 1523 was more than twelve times as great as the number issued ten years before, and of these four-fifths were devoted to the cause of the Reformation. It was only with great difficulty that printers could be induced to publish works in defence of the Catholic Church, and they had often to be repaid for the loss in which the limited circulation of such books involved them. On the other hand Luther's own writings, violent satires like the Karsthans and Neukarsfhans, and Hans Sachs' Wittenbergische Nachtigall, enjoyed an immense popularity. The effervescence of the national mind evoked a literature vigorous but rude in form and coarse in expression, the common burden of which was invective against the Church, and especially the monastic orders; and this indigenous literature stirred to passion the mass of the lower middle classes which the alien and esoteric ideals of the Humanists had failed to touch. The pencil was scarcely less effective than the pen; Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach were almost as zealous champions of the new ideas as Luther and Hütten, and probably few pictures have had a greater popular influence than Dürer's portrayal of St John taking precedence of St Peter, and of St Paul as the protector of the Gospel. An English nobleman travelling in Germany in 1523 was amazed by the number of "abominable pictures" ridiculing the friars, though he sent to his King some similar specimens satirising Murner, on whom Henry had bestowed a hundred pounds for his attack on Luther and for his translation of Henry's own book.
The motive of all this literature was as yet practical rather than doctrinal, to eradicate the abuses of the ecclesiastical organisation rather than to establish any fresh dogmatic system; and the revolutionary tendencies were strongest in the middle classes, which dominated the town life in Germany. Though supported by the knights the Reformation was in the main a bourgeois movement; it was the religious aspect of the advent of the middle classes. They had already emancipated themselves from the medieval feudal system, and they had long been fretting against the trammels which the Church imposed upon their individual and corporate autonomy. Clerical immunities from municipal taxation, episcopal jurisdiction over otherwise free towns produced a never-ceasing source of irritation. To these commercial classes Eberlin of Günzburg's assertions that the papal Curia cost Germany three hundred thousand crowns a year, and that the friars extracted another million, were irresistible arguments for the elimination of papal control over the German Church and for the dissolution of the friars' Orders. This predisposition to attack the Church was reinforced by the lingering
