Changes in Property. 43 



various methods of exercising the seignorage. Especially 

 after the Thirty Years' War ownerless tracts falling 

 under this right were plentiful. In addition, wherever 

 waste lands grew up to wood, they were claimed by the 

 princes : 



"Wenn das Holz dem Bitter reicht an den Sporn 

 Hat der Bauer sein Eeeht verlom." 



Some additions came from the secularization of church 

 and cloister property, and others by the slices which the 

 princes as Obermarker secured from the Mark forests by 

 various artifices. 



It is these properties, which in Prussia were turned 

 over to the State by the King in 1713, and by other 

 princes, not untU the 19th century. 



The same means which the princes employed, were 

 used by the landed gentry to increase their holdings es- 

 pecially at the expense of the Mark from which in their 

 capacity of Obermarker they secured slices by force or 

 intrigue. 



The peasants' forest property — ^the Mark forest— had 

 by the 19th century been almost entirely dismembered, 

 part having come into the hands of the princes, part 

 having been divided among the Marker and part having 

 become corporation forest in the modem sense. 



Partition had become desirable when the restrictions 

 of use which were ordered for the good of the forest be- 

 came unendurable imder the rigid rule of appointed 

 officials, but the expected improvement in management 

 which was looked for from partition and private owner- 

 ship was never realized. 



After the Thirty Years' Wax the free cities were im- 

 poverished and their autonomy undermined by Eoman 



