The Hussite Movement in Bohemia [antikvár]

THE CRISIS OF FEUDAL SOCIETYFOURTEENTH-century feudal societythroughout almost the whole of Europe was agitated by increasingly violent revolutionary explosions. Within the feudal order new social forces were- becoming powerful, mainly the burgh-ers, whose support came from the development of craft production, trade and a money economy.Feudalism as a social order rested upon the bond-age of the toiling people to the feudal lord who, with the help of bailiffs and reeves, forced his serfs to labour for him. The servile population, by far the ma-jority, did not work on its own land but on that leased by the secular or ecclesiastical lords to whom it had to deliver a portion of the products of its labour. The feudal lords thus built up their economic and po-litical power, expressed in the strength and impregna-bility of their castles, on the money and labour rents of their serfs.From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on, how-ever, towns grew rapidly within the feudal social structure. The burghers, in relation to the serfs, enjoyed