If, as Michelet says, the earlier medieval peasant was kept alive by his hope in the devil even under the worst injustices, we now approach an age in which he is sustained by hope in God. The gradual emancipation of the peasant in material things, which had gone on sporadically and irregularly since the thirteenth century, was accompanied by something like a correspondent spiritual emancipation. Although each separate county, and even each separate district, had followed its own line of development, there was unquestionably a great advance in freedom along the whole front. The few fairly exhaustive studies which have as yet been published show, with all their differences, a solid foundation of common ground. Almost everywhere, by 1500, the peasant was far better off than in 1200; and the few exceptions were due to the conscious and violent struggles of some reactionary lord. If the Kempten tenants suffered so severely during the last two generations before the Reformation, this was because their progress had alarmed the prince-abbots, who deliberately set themselves to rivet the old chains afresh, but were met with the resistance natural to men who had not only begun to taste freedom themselves, but were surrounded also by comparatively free neighbours. And they were no less free in mind, as compared with their ancestors of distant centuries.