The happiest time of Ellenbog’s life began in the summer of 1522, when after ten years’ service he was allowed by the Abbot to resign his Stewardship.  His accounts were audited satisfactorily, and he was discharged, to what seemed to him a riotous banquet of leisure.  ’In the quiet of my cell,’ he wrote to his brother, ’I read, I write, I meditate, I pray, I paint, I carve’.  His interest in astronomy was resumed, and he set himself to make dials for pocket use, on metal rings or on round wooden sticks.  The latter he turned for himself upon a lathe; and for this work John sent him a present of boxwood, juniper, and plane.  By the New Year of 1523 he had made two sundials; one which showed the time on five sides at once, he sent to John at Wurtzen, the other to Barbara at Heppach.  His cell looked South, and thus he could study the movements of the moon and the planets, and note the southing of the stars.  He could turn his skill to profit, too, and exchange his dials for pictures of the saints.

In 1525 his peace was broken by the Peasants’ Revolt, which swept like a hurricane over South Germany.  Hostility to religion was not one of its moving causes, but the monks were vulnerable, and had always been considered fair game, especially by local nobles whom in the plenitude of their power they had not troubled to conciliate.  The peasants of the Rhine valley had not forgotten the burning of Limburg, near Spires, by William of Hesse in 1504.  The abbey church had scarcely a rival in Germany, and the flames burned for twelve days.  With such an example, and with their prey unresisting, the peasants were not likely to stay their hands.  At Freiburg they brought to his death Gregory Reisch, the learned Carthusian Prior of St. Johannisberg, the friend of Maximilian.  Ellenbog enumerates four monasteries burned in his neighbourhood during the outbreak—­three by the peasants incensed against their landlords, and one by a noble who bore it a grudge.  When the first attack came in April, Ellenbog was staying at the monastery of St. George, at Isny, about twenty miles away.  The peasants there destroyed everything belonging to the monks that they could find outside the walls, and threatened dire treatment when they should force their way in; but mercifully the walls were strong, and held out.

Ottobeuren was less fortunate.  Being in the country, it had to rely upon itself, and so fell an easy prey.  The buildings were defaced, the windows broken, the stoves and ovens wrecked, and all the ironwork carried off.  Scarcely a door remained on its hinges, and the furniture of the rooms disappeared.  The church was violated, its pictures soiled, and its statues smashed; Christ’s wounds should be wounds indeed, hard voices cried, as axe and hammer rung over their pitiless work.  The library was emptied of its books.  Walls and roofs and floors were all that the monks found when they ventured back.  Ellenbog, however, fared better than many.  A friendly brother