40 THE GREEN RISING 



therefore was to enlarge its area whenever possible, 

 and to exact from his tenants forced labour to the 

 utmost limit." 21 



In the Balkan Peninsula the customary tenants 

 of the land lived in abject poverty through most 

 of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. 

 In Roumania the landlords gained increasing power, 

 and the independence of the peasants correspond- 

 ingly decreased after the wars of the late sixteenth 

 century. In the eighteenth century both the land- 

 lords and the peasants were oppressed by the gov- 

 ernment. The agrarian revolutions of 1763, 1765, 

 and 1821 were strikingly different from revolutions 

 in other countries, in that both landlords and peas- 

 ants united their forces to resist the arbitrary power 

 of the ruling class. Roumania, like France, went 

 through a period of absentee landlordism in the 

 nineteenth century and the peasants were left on 

 the estates to live in wretchedness and misery. 

 Agricultural practices were unusually crude and 

 the ignorance of the peasant farmer became prover- 

 bial. The more enterprising peasants emigrated 

 to the more prosperous countries of Transylvania, 

 Bulgaria, and Serbia. Servile tenure of land re- 

 mained the predominant land tenure policy until 

 very recent times. But gradually in every country 

 of western Europe the peasant class acquired free- 

 dom of action and a better social status. 



The feudal system served a great purpose in its 



31 The Making of Rural Europe, Chap. V, p. 83. 



