HISTOBY OF THE HOP. 7 



estates where hop-growing was afterwards abandoned, a 

 retrogression principally due to the ravages of the Thirty 

 Years' War, which conflict and its results shattered this 

 industry and all others. G. Freytag states that "for more 

 than a hundred years after the war the farmers simply 

 vegetated, penned up Hke their own flocks, watched by the 

 priests as by a shepherd, kept in order by the terrors of 

 Cerberus, and annually shorn by the landlords — a long 

 period of monotonous existence". During this lamentable 

 epoch the cultivation of hops was kept up in only four 

 places in all Bohemia, viz., Auscha, Saaz, Falkenau and 

 Klattau. 



Old records at Auscha inform us that regulations on the 

 subject of hop-growing already existed in 1568 ; and also 

 that the price of a " strike " of hops was 12 Prague 

 groschen = 3 florins 30 kreuzer (about 6s. 8d.). 



No documents are available to show what were the 

 earlier conditions of the hop industry in the Saaz district, 

 all the records having been destroyed in the fire of 1768. 



A memorial erected at Falkenau in honour of a citizen, 

 Andreas Hainzel, who died on 24th April, 1673, credits that 

 worthy with being the first to grow hops there ; and that 

 hop cultivation was practised in Klattau in the sixteenth 

 century is vouched for by a poem of David Crinitus, wherein 

 the hop trade is mentioned. 



A highly important influence on the development and 

 firm estabhshment of the hop industry in Bohemia was 

 produced by the beneficent agrarian changes proposed and 

 carried out during the reign of the Emperor Joseph II. 

 By the abolition of serfdom (1781) this monarch, who was 

 second to none as a friend of agriculture, completed a work 

 which remains inscribed in letters of gold in the history of 

 Austrian agriculture and the hearts of his subjects ; and this 

 act naturally cut deeply into the conditions of agricultural 



