Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen

The second chapter begins with a popular medieval folk tale about a young man named Hänsel, whose stepmother wants to force him out of his natal home but whose father allows him to stay while Hänsel works as a cowherd. One day, Hänsel meets an elderly man with whom he shares his food. In exchange, the man grants Hänsel three wishes. One of Hänsel’s wishes is that when his stepmother “looks angrily at me so, she will let loose a mighty fart that will ring throughout the house” (16). This wish leads to an embarrassing set of circumstances for the wicked stepmother, who is shamed in front of a corrupt friar with whom she is having a clandestine affair. Though the friar threatens Hänsel with violence, the young cowherd plays his pipe—and, in fulfillment of another wish given by the mysterious old man, this causes the friar to dance uncontrollably among thorny shrubs. When Hänsel and the friar return to the house, his stepmother and the friar complain about what he has done. Guests tie the friar to a post in the middle of the room while the young man pipes: “Everybody danced wildly, including the stepmother. And every time she looked at the boy, she let loose a loud, cracking fart” (18). The entire neighborhood erupts into wild dancing, including the bedridden, who strip naked in the street. The friar drags Hänsel before the local church court where he plays his pipe in the courtroom with similar results. The judge begs him to stop playing, but Hänsel agrees only on the condition that he be freed and protected from his stepmother and the evil friar. Thus concludes the indelicate tale that exemplifies the medieval belief in an enchanted world of “fantasy justice.” Such scenarios were likewise performed throughout the liturgical calendar during festivals like Carnival, the period preceding the more solemn season of Lent.

Extant sources indicate that, like the young man in the folk tale, Behem was a drummer and/or piper. Both instruments were associated with low social status. The drum was “a despised instrument in polite society” and was “associated with mimes and minstrels who performed racy songs in taverns” (20). Behem thus likely performed during festivals, including Carnival. Since Carnival came right before Lent, the period leading up to Easter’s celebration, it “was a time of indulgence, music, dancing, and roaring, reverberating, uncontrollable laughter” (21) that stood in stark opposition to Lent’s somber tone. Though Carnival was an established festival, it was an opportunity for folk culture to ridicule elites. Consequently, when Behem’s critics called him “the Drummer,” they did so deliberately to associate him with the crude and sinful Carnival “that glorified fools […]” (21). For instance, festivities centered the figure of a “braying ass” that symbolized humanity’s stupidity and included the mocking “Feast of the Ass,” in which its body parts were distributed among groups of people. The ears, symbolizing human folly, went to the college of cardinals, and the feces to the peasantry. Carnival provided meaningful commentary on the reality of peasants’ lives and offered biting criticism of the clergy. Exploited peasants exercised authority through these ritualized festivities and thereby created a momentary equality. As the festivities ended, medieval people occupied “liminal time,” an anthropological term that refers to a period when regular time pauses “and people cross over the boundary or passageway […] into a timeless state, to emerge later renewed” (24). Carnival concluded on Shrove Tuesday when peasants throughout German lands lit bonfires consecrated by the clergy. The fires’ smoke signaled whether the coming harvest season would be profitable, and young people jumped over the flames “to ensure fertility” (26). The fires symbolized the renewal that came at the end of this liminal time.

Though Carnival created a celebratory atmosphere, it stoked friction and anxiety in the elites, who wondered if this suspended, liminal time would truly end or result in social upheaval and violence. When social ills abounded, “the language and imagery of Carnival may continue into normal time and explode into the language of revolt […]. The bonfires did not burn out” (26). This precise scenario occurred in 1476 when the harsh winter plagued German peasants and the elites continued to enrich themselves through the taxes and dues from the poor.

The Lenten season is Carnival’s antithesis. Instead of drunken revelry and crude jokes, Lent called medieval Christians to embrace simplicity and reject luxuries to overcome evil. German mendicant friars and priests published collections of sermons for Lent that encouraged “the faithful to renounce the flesh and turn their backs on the world” (29). Because impoverishment was the status quo for Europe’s peasants, Lent’s emphatic rejection of worldliness “dignified and enshrined poverty” (29). In the lives of the peasants and the words of the friars, one encounters “the powerful social myths that drove” Behem’s adherents to come to Niklashausen (29).

Anthropologists argue peasant existence is defined by a “culture of poverty” (29). This characterization holds that because elites have “trapped” peasants in a life of laborious struggle, the peasantry “enclose themselves in mental prisons of limited expectations and devastating fatalism” (30). Uncertainty still typifies peasant life across the world and throughout history. The nobility possessed land and controlled peasant labor and production—an arrangement the law supported. Peasants were small farmers, herders, or craftspeople working for a wage, but their labor was always subject to elite demands. These conditions, Wunderli asserts, gave German peasants a perspective that made Behem’s sermons attractive.

While peasants had significant “material needs” of their own, their primary financial responsibilities were to their overlords. These obligations included rents, dues, tithes, and various taxes. Elites collected this wealth regardless of the harvest’s output and often via physical violence. Peasants needed to generate enough income to support their households, often in the form of crop surplus. Likewise, that surplus also needed to cover any necessary tools or their repair and provide for the following harvest cycle. Peasants also had communal obligations to fulfill, both religious and social. These obligations included “religious donations” and engagement in ceremonies, like births, marriages, and death. Peasants were therefore pulled in multiple directions and often barely survived.

Resource scarcity also fostered distrust among peasants. If one peasant or family flaunted gains, others concluded that their neighbors’ success came at their expense. Though some upward mobility existed for the peasants who survived the Black Death in the mid-1300s, due to the massive population drop, by the mid-1400s Europe’s population rebounded. This growth increased competition for resources and led to lower classes’ social discontent. To counter local hostility, peasants who had some economic success tried not to flaunt it and instead publicly performed the “culture of poverty.” Peasants were largely conservative and resistant to change because, while change may have improved the conditions of their lives, it came with significant risk. Accordingly, the peasantry constructed mental barriers around their lives and communities to keep change—and possible disaster—at bay. They were trapped socially, economically, politically, and mentally in their own peasant world of poverty (34).

A sermon from the late medieval theologian Jacques de Vitry shows how Church authorities saw the peasants. Their lives of toil served as lifetime penance: an act demonstrating contrition.

De Vitry’s sermon speaks to medieval Christianity’s promotion of a “cult of poverty,” which reached new heights in the late Middle Ages. Monastics, for example, took vows of poverty when they entered their orders. Since most medieval people were poor, this cult of poverty offered “great communal value: it justified the poor in their labor and want, that is, it lifted from the poor (theoretically, at least) the stigma of their poverty” (36). Bonfires of “vanities” became one of the most popular expressions of dedication to this cult. When people burned their possessions, it “gave more superiority” to the peasantry while also liberating those of some means “from the suspicions of their neighbors” (36).

During the late Middle Ages, the mendicant friars, hermits, and lay orders like the Beguines and Beghards highlighted and promoted apostolic poverty. The mendicants operated in urban centers where they publicly performed impoverishment. Behem was familiar with these traveling friars and was also acquainted with a lay Beghard who lived as a hermit and mystic near Niklashausen. The friars’ public sermons united the Church’s cult of poverty with the peasant culture of poverty. Their preaching had entertainment value, and they told stories that spoke to the experiences of commoners and attracted throngs of people. Local bishops, however, had to approve such public preaching. Behem followed in the footsteps of these friars and may have been inspired by them, particularly John Capistrano. Yet Behem did not receive official approval to preach, because he was a commoner who was not a cleric. Capistrano encouraged bonfires of the vanities throughout German lands via his public sermons, and Behem followed him some years later. Though the bishop gave Behem no license to preach, that fact was irrelevant to the shepherd and the pilgrims whom he inspired. The Virgin gave Behem the right to preach, and her message came directly from God. As Lent concluded, German peasants lit bonfires of regeneration again. A new day dawned with Lent’s conclusion at Easter.