THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN AGRARIAN HISTORY 231 



increasing the rent, and the lessee was, as early as the sixteenth 

 century, granted a hereditary right in the farm. 



This was the first and at the same time the most vigorous 

 agrarian policy in Germany. No later measure of the third epoch 

 has surpassed it. 



But the state went still farther in curtailing the freedom of 

 disposal of lord and lessee in regard to leasehold : it made, at 

 the end of the seventeenth century, the closed, indivisible farm a 

 legal institution, and exercised over it the legal functions of the 

 manor. Thus, at the end of the eighteenth century, the private 

 lord had become the merest rent collector. 



While thus in Northwestern Germany the system of villication 

 was broken up in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the 

 newer manorial system and leasehold took its place, it remained 

 undisturbed in its older form in most of the regions of Southern, 

 Southwestern, and Rhenish Germany, and became after the thir- 

 teenth century the settled policy. The serf was made the tribu- 

 tary owner. The lord does not succeed in increasing the economic 

 yield to the level of the property resulting from the dissolution of 

 the villication in Lower Saxony : on the contrary, the manorial 

 system gradually vanishes ; it crumbles away of its own accord. 

 On the other hand, the right of judicature, severed in principle 

 from it, attains here greater significance, and grows in some 

 instances into the sovereignty of a small territorial estate. Patri- 

 monial jurisdiction and barony are for these regions the charac- 

 teristic forms of government. With this right of judicature was 

 frequently, but by no means always, coupled personal or heredi- 

 tary bondage, which consequently appears here later detached 

 from the manor. The peasants are in bondage down to the 

 eighteenth century ; but this bondage gradually loses its signifi- 

 cance, the serf being bound merely to make sundry contributions, 

 although it must be said these are sometimes onerous, as, for 

 example, the mortuary. On his personal and social position it 

 had ceased to have any effect. 



In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, things were 

 different. The Peasants' War was caused mainly by the numer- 

 ous personal contributions which the peasants were obliged to 



