Davidson traced it to the Catholic Church’s welfare system known as “feast days”. Today we refer to the “feast of St. Anthony” but don’t connect it with a feast in terms of food. In the medieval period, it was an actual feast. There were nearly 100 feast days per year, and those under feudalism who had money (lords) were required to put on a feast almost every three days for those who didn’t (serfs and vagabonds, whom we refer to today as "bums”). The middle class participated in feast days, but that middle class was small and lacked the kind of money possessed by the lords. It wasn’t easy for the middle class of that period. The key to this was the Catholic principle that to be saved, one must have faith and perform good works. Those feast days constituted the good works for most lay Catholics.
The Black Death depopulated Europe and ended feudalism. Serfs walked off the land they had been bound to for generations. Some went into the towns and cities, started their own businesses and joined the middle class. They inundated the medieval guild system, causing it to collapse in some areas of Europe. But some serfs took on the life of vagabonds, sitting in the town squares, calling “Alms! Alms for the poor!” to every passerby.,
Put yourself in the position of a draper, a curtain maker, in a city in northern Europe. You or your ancestor left the land to which he had been bound, went into the city and built a business. You beat the guild system. You have a hard life working, but you have come to see work as something good in and of itself. Not for you is this life “a vale of tears” in preparation for Heaven. It’s the place you work to earn a living. But every three days you have to put on a feast for those bums who sit in the town square begging, and that grates on you. The Catholic price of salvation is getting a little too high.
A good example encapsulates the problem. One day you go into the town square to hire some casual labor to move large boxes of cloth around. You approach one bum and tell him you’ll pay him one silver crown for a day’s work. The bum turns you down.
“I just offered you money for some work.”
“Work? Work?! I am but a poor sparrow living on the grains removed from cow dung. This is my place, according to Holy Mother Church. Your place is to feed me every three days, according to Holy Mother Church. By faith and good works you will be saved, I will be happy to take your money, good sir, but work for it? Excuse me, sir, I see a rich man entering the square. Alms! Alms for the poor!”
You walk away from that bum ready to support anyone who can make these people work.
Along comes Luther. Unlike Tyndale, Wycliffe and Hus, he has come along after Europe has been changed by the Black Death. He has also come along when primitive capitalism is replacing feudalism. Luther says that by faith alone you will be saved.
If you are a member of the rising, but financially harassed, middle class, and you hear this message, it resonates. In my best John Wayne impersonation, you respond, “Father Luther, if that means I don’t have to support those bums in the town square anymore, then pilgrim, call me a Lutheran!”
This is an approximation, but Davidson’s belief is that all societal, and even religious, change is based on following the money. He calls it “megapolitical change”, and economist Martin Armstrong has blazed new territory in connecting historical change to capital flows.
I agree wholeheartedly!