1912] on the Effects of the Thirty Years'' War. 375 



Wallenf^teiii offers many nota])le instances of the insight of the 

 imaginarion into historical truth, knew this when in his picture of 

 the War the peasant is the figure to whom the attention of the spec- 

 tator is first directed. With the peasant there was no question of 

 buying oflF the inroads of the soldiery by power or by payment ; it 

 is we who have to pay for everything ' with the skin off our own 

 bones.' Among the agricultural districts of Germany, we have pre- 

 cise governmental information as to part of the rustic population of 

 the Mark Bradenburg ; a year or two after the close of the War, their 

 settlements were in number less than half of what they had been at 

 its commencement, and there was at least one county which had lost 

 all its villages but four. This example is attested beyond cavil ; 

 but the story was much the same in the midlands — in Thuringia 

 and in Hesse, and again in the south-west, though here the natural 

 fertility of the soil made a speedy resuscitation of village life and 

 activity at least possible where labour could be obtained, instead 

 of, as farther north, leaving wide stretches of land to remain 

 uncultivated for many a long year — the prey of weeds and water, 

 till they turned into all but hopeless morass. How could the dis- 

 heartened remnant, without capital of any sort, least of all the beasts 

 of the field which the War had driven away, restore the face of the 

 land to the semblance of what it had been ? What inducement was 

 there to produce more than this crop yielded by the impoverished 

 soil, when such scant purchases as could be collected would pay only 

 half the old price for either wheat or rye ? Even in those districts 

 favoured by nature like the Palatinate or AVurtemberg, or blessed 

 with a capable ruler like the Elector Charles Lewis, whose heart was 

 set upon recalling both landlords and peasants to the land whither 

 he had himself returned with the Peace, labour was almost impossible 

 to obtain, agricultural wages having risen to four or five times their 

 former height ; and the peasant had long to manage as he could 

 without labourers— in other words, to limit his production to what 

 was necessary for the bare subsistence of himself and his family. 

 During this cruel war, the peasant, even if he remained in his cottage 

 on the soil, instead of being hounded out of it or burnt down with 

 it, had not merely to toil at the desperate task of making a livelihood 

 out of his imperilled land. Besides the taxes and dues imposed 

 upon him by native or foreign governments, he was subjected to 

 personal services (Fro?ien) which so far from being extinguished by 

 the War, frequently rose to an unprecedented height during its 

 course, in some places to such a height as to convert the position of 

 the free peasant into that of serfdom, while elsewhere they became 

 so intolerable as to empty the land of its peasantry. Moreover, in 

 times of unrestrained violence and licensed illegality, the instances were 

 numerous of the actual expulsion of peasants from the lands which 

 they held by the landlords, in order that these might possess them- 

 selves directly of the vacated holdings. This is the notorious prac- 



