Frau Else, Meyfarth explained, had taught the ram rebellion an object lesson in the importance of careful proof-reading. When the Twelve Points went to the printer, only the first half of the seventh point had been in the text. Frau Färber, however, had taken it to her friend. Being the widow of a printer, Frau Kronacher was currently locked in battle with the guild. She had two sons, Melchior and Otto, seventeen and fifteen, as well as the daughter; she wished to run the business using journeymen as employees until her sons became masters. The guild master insisted that she must marry her daughter off now, to a journeyman ready to become a master and take the shop over immediately, thus excluding the woman's sons for the lifetime of their brother-in-law. Oddly, the guild master had a third son who met the qualifications his father was demanding.
When the bales of broadsides came back from Frau Kronacher, they contained the second part of point seven. No one else—well, no one except Fräulein Martha, who had typeset the lines—had noticed until after they had been distributed.
"And thus," Meyfarth said a little ruefully, "with such great foresight and planning, our revolutions are made."
Würzburg, mid-February, 1634
"It's an odd batch of demands," Saunders Wendell said.
The administration had met to discuss the Twelve Points. Every broadside and brochure they had collected, inside Franconia and out, included them.
"And if you ignore the numbering," he continued, "they've included more than twelve different ones."
"For a down-time piece of writing, though," David Petrini said, "it's amazingly succinct."
They looked at the various versions. Most started with the standard Twelve Points. Some went on and on, to specify local grievances, although mostly those were ones that had been collected "out"—over in Bayreuth, down in Ansbach, in various villages belonging to Reichsritter and various independent Protestant lords who were exempt from the administration's control. Even some from Nürnberg's hinterland.
The subjects of the Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach had thought of sixty-three points, some of them very specific, involving the allotment of hay mowed in the upper meadows and the annual worth of the acorns consumed in the Freiherr's forests by his subjects' hogs. All of which they announced themselves quite willing to take all the way to the imperial supreme court for adjudication.
"Fox from Bimbo?" someone asked.
Everyone else pretended not to have heard. The general impression that they drew from the sixty three points was that the subjects of the Freiherr von Bimbach were not happy campers this Anno Domini 1634. However, he was Protestant, and out of their jurisdiction, having most of his estates as an enclave over to the east of Bamberg, surrounded by those of the margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth.
"The emphasis on education in Latin and access to secondary education. Are those really all that important to the farmers?" Estelle Colburn was frowning at her copy.
"It doesn't strike me as quite the ringing revolutionary cry of `to the barricades' with which Gretchen Richter has been trying to inspire the Committees of Correspondence," Anita agreed. "`Admit our sons to the civil service' doesn't have quite the same effect in grabbing the reader's attention as, `Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.'"
"But they do go into the civil service, if they can, Anita," her husband Steve pointed out. "I talked to Count Ludwig Guenther's chancellor before we came down here, way back. He's the son of a farmer from one of the count's villages. His father sent him to school because the pastor recommended it; he went into the count's service straight out of the University of Jena and climbed right up the ladder. That's not so unusual. Along with being a priest, it's just about the only path to social mobility around, for a farm family, given how the towns and the guild trades freeze them out."
"Gretchen's grandma, maybe," Maydene Utt said.
Everyone else at the table stared at her. This comment seemed to be coming out of left field.
Maydene persisted. "Ronnie Dreeson has students from Jena talking conversational Latin to the toddlers at the St. Veronica's schools. I think she's got pretty much the same idea."
"Thought I heard a few echoes of what you and Willa were doing last fall, in the tax stuff," David Petrini interjected.
All three of the auditors pointedly ignored him.
"Gretchen Richter isn't writing this stuff. I don't think that anyone involved with the Committees is writing this stuff," Johnnie F. said. "The CoCs really haven't spread much in Franconia, except in some of the industrial towns. There are Committees in Suhl and Schmalkalden and Schleusingen. The honest truth is, though, that they don't have much interest in the farmers. They're focusing on the cities—places where they can get hold of good-sized audiences all at once, not country villages where maybe they get a half-dozen or a dozen."