Dreaming of simplification.
There was no need for the ram to make his call for restoration of "old, established" usages and rights. Even if, when one read it carefully, that was largely the way the American Declaration of Independence was couched.
That was the path to a continuing nightmare. The more he thought about it, the surer he became.
Thomas Jefferson's logic was not the same as that of Thomas Paine. Jefferson had tried to graft natural rights onto the tree trunk of precedent.
Paine had not. As he put it, "He who takes nature for his guide, is not easily beaten out of his argument . . ."
Simplify.
Alexander the Great had solved the Gordian knot by cutting it.
Why couldn't the farmers of Franconia do the same? Get rid of these thickets of traditional claims and cross-claims? Draw a line and start over? No more one-half of a village under one customary law, the other half under a second and different set, which let the lords constantly dispute over whose law applied to which lands and which tenants. Much less having the lordship fragmented into a dozen or more fractions, and the only recourse the farmers had some city lawyer whose main goal was to maximize the profits for the shareholders, the Ganerben.
His mind wandered to his next pamphlet. Benefits for the current lessor. No more disputes over the possible dower rights of the lessor's grandfather's cousin's widow's second husband.
Benefits for the current lessee. No more lawsuits over whether or not a century-past transfer from one party to another had been properly carried out and recorded. No more allegations that a lease for three lives had already expired because some lawyer's clerk had searched the church books and found that the father of the current holder had begotten an older son who was recorded as having been born and died on the same day. Since the long-dead priest had not specified that the child was stillborn, the pile of papers under the candlestick had been generated by the lessor's claim that the child had possibly breathed, and thus extinguished the third life on the lease when it died.
Somewhere. He had read it somewhere, in something published by the uptimers. He had no recollection where it had been or where he had read it. He would paraphrase the quotation from memory, as closely as he could. "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the minds of the living." "The past lies as a nightmare upon the present."
The second way was better. Shorter. Pithier.
The first version sounded too much like something that merino would say.
The Franconians' ram was Brillo.
Schulte finished his presentation.
Matthias indicated by a signal that he had gotten it all down in shorthand.
Ableidinger rose and escorted Schulte to the door.
He stood there for a moment, looking up at the ram banner waving from a flagpole at the edge of the village.
He wished he could go out and enjoy the breeze. He wished he could go out into the glorious long day of autumn sunlight. The days were already getting shorter. Soon they would be in the grim, glum, winter again.
But poor Matthias was obliged to stay in the office, transcribing everything that idiot Schulte had to say.
Not to mention that there was still the pile of papers weighted down by the telescope.
The young pastor Otto Schaeffer had left Frankenwinheim and taken a position in a parish under the patronage of one of the most intransigent imperial knights in Bayreuch. Fuchs von Bimbach, the name was. From that perch of safety, he was peppering Franconia with pamphlets asserting that Christianity required that believers who had been offended turn the other cheek and forgive seventy times seven.
So. Back to Common Sense.
But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.
Yet another pamphlet to write and send to Else Kronacher in Bamberg. He wouldn't even be violating his principle against personal recriminations in political controversy. Paine had been writing in another future, nearly a century and a half from now. He had never heard of Otto Schaeffer, so certainly could not have called him a coward and a sycophant.