AGRICULTURE ON THE RHINE. 37 



teugis, or hereditary lease on fixed terms, was a point 

 easily ceded by lords who had no chance of asserting any 

 other title. The acquisition of such a standing in society 

 as actual indisputable possession of the soil conferred, 

 seems to have reconciled the peasants to the continuance 

 of many of the oppressive forms of feudal ages long after 

 the necessity for them had passed away. Thus the vil- 

 lage bond, with its distinctions of dress, modes of tillage, 

 and other habits, were preserved in Germany beyond the 

 period when the discomfort they occasioned had caused 

 them to be abolished in other countries. To this day every 

 village is distinguished by the colour to which the men 

 and women for the most part scrupulously adhere in dress, 

 by the hat of the males, and the prescribed rather than 

 the favourite hood of the women. To change the accus- 

 tomed attire and adopt the costume of the towns is syno- 

 nymous in Germany with a change of condition. The 

 peasant who does so becomes a " burgher j" or townsman, 

 as he enters on the career of a man of learning, as a 

 pastor, a lawyer, or an official character. No man in 

 office, whether a turnpike-keeper (who is here a servant 

 of the crown) or a bailiff, wears the peasant's dress, nor 

 is any innkeeper or shopman so attired. Even the vil- 

 lage Boniface assumes the frock-coat and short waistcoat 

 of the townsman, and drops the peasant's three-cornered 

 hat where that is customarily worn. His wife assumes 

 the simpler cap and bonnet of Paris or London, unless 

 custom has preserved a relic of the ancient burgher- 

 costume in the towns of the neighbourhood. In the 

 Rhenish district that we have traversed, the influence 

 of trade has undermined all those primitive distinctions, 

 and the peasant dresses as he pleases. In the Duchy of 



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