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 Ritter reicht an den Sporn 
Hat der Bauer sein Recht verlorn.” 
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 until 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 modern sense. 
Partition had become desirable when the restrictions 
of use which were ordered for the good of the forest be- 
came unendurable under 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’ War the free cities were im- 
poverished and their autonomy undermined by Roman 
