38 THE GREEN RISING 



vated land was caused to lie waste. The flocks and 

 herds on the farms were greatly reduced and there 

 was little market for agricultural produce. 



The Peace of Westphalia brought some relief to 

 this situation. In Alsace, Lorraine, Baden, Suabia, 

 Franconia, Thuringia, Hesse, and the Palatine 

 where the peasantry had been so completely op- 

 pressed by the landlords in previous centuries, com- 

 parative freedom was now secured and a fair degree 

 of prosperity was restored. Lands that had been 

 left fallow because of war conditions were now 

 brought back into cultivation and yielded abundant 

 crops. War conditions had completely changed the 

 financial status of the landlords. 



The situation was entirely different from that of 

 France during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies, as there was no absentee landlord situation. 

 It was more like the English landlord situation dur- 

 ing this period in which the large landowner was 

 interested in farming and was endeavoring to regain 

 his power and influence by monopolizing and dis- 

 tributing the produce of the farm. The situation 

 differed from that of England in that no effort was 

 made to adopt the policy of enclosures and deprive 

 the landless man of the privilege of tilling the soil. 



Agrarianism in Other Parts of Europe 



Practically no country of western Europe was free 

 from its agrarian problems. Land tenure policies 

 developed class consciousness on the part of the 



