The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag
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chase, a secret and often bloody war was carried on for centuries betwixt the foresters and poachers. As long as wolves continued to prowl about the villages, the irritated peasant dug holes round the margin of the wood which he covered with branches, and the bottom of them was studded with pointed stakes. He called them wolf-pits, but they were well known to the law as game-traps, and were forbidden under severe penalties. He ventured to let such portions of ground as were most exposed to be injured by game, to soldiers or cities, but that also was forbidden him; he endeavoured to defend his fields by hedges, and his hedges were broken down. In the Erzgebirge of Saxony the peasants, in the former century, had watched by their ripening corn; then huts were built on the fields, fires were lighted in the night, the watchers called out and beat the drum, and their dogs barked; but the game at last became accustomed to these alarms, and feared neither peasant nor dog. In Electoral Saxony, at the end of a former century, under a mild government, where a moderate tax might be paid as indemnity for damage to game, it was forbidden to erect fences for fields above a certain height, or to employ pointed stakes, that the game might not be injured, nor prevented seeking its support on the fields, till at last fourteen communities in the Hohnstein bailiwick in a state of exasperation combined for a general hunt, and frightened the game over the frontier. The logs which the sheep dogs wore round their necks were not sufficient to hinder them from hurting the hares, so they were held by cords on the fields. But the countrymen were bound, when the lord of the manor went to the chase, to go behind the nets and, as beaters, to swing the rattles. The coursing, moreover, spoilt his fields, as the riders with their greyhounds uprooted and trampled on the seed.
To these burdens, which were common to all, were added numerous local restrictions, of which only some of the more widely diffused will be here mentioned. The number of cattle that villeins were permitted to keep was frequently prescribed to them according to the extent of their holdings. A portion of the pasture land upon his holding before seed time, and of the produce after the harvest, belonged to the landowner. This right, to which pretensions had been already made in the middle ages, became a severe plague in the last century, when the noblemen began increasing their flocks of sheep. For they made demands on the peasants' fields generally, when fodder for cattle was failing: how, then, could the peasants maintain their own animals?
As early as 1617 it was held as a maxim in Silesia, that peasants must not keep sheep unless they possessed an old authorisation for it. The keeping of goats was altogether forbidden in many places. This old prohibition is one of the reasons why the poor in wide districts of Eastern Germany are deprived of these useful animals. Elector August of Saxony in 1560 denounced in his ordinances the pigeons of the peasants, and since that time they have been prohibited in other provincial ordinances. Other tyrannies were devised by the love of game. Shortly after the war it was held to be the duty of peasants to offer everything saleable, in the first instance, to the lord of the manor,--dung, wool, honey, and even eggs and poultry: if the authorities would not take his goods, he was bound to expose them for a fixed period in the nearest town; it was only then that the sale became free. But it was truly monstrous, when the authorities compelled their subjects to buy goods from the manorial property which they did not need. These barbarisms were quite common, at least in the East of Germany, after 1650, especially in Moravia, Bohemia, and Silesia. When the great proprietors drew their ponds and could not sell the fish, the villeins were obliged to take them, in proportion to their means, at a fixed rate. The same was the case with butter, cheese, corn, and cattle. This was the cause of so many of the country people in Bohemia becoming small traders, as they had to convey these goods into neighbouring countries, often to their own great loss.[27] In vain did the magistrates in Silesia in 1716 endeavour to check this abuse.[28]
We will only mention here the worst tyranny of all. The nobleman had seigneurial rights: he decreed through the justices, who were dependent on him, the punishments of police offences: fines, imprisonment, and corporal punishment. He was also in the habit of using the stick to the villeins when they were at work. Undoubtedly there was already in the sixteenth century, in the provincial ordinances, a humane provision, which prohibited the nobles from striking their villeins; but in the two following centuries this prohibition was little attended to. When Frederick the Great re-organized Silesia, he gave the peasants the right of making complaint to the government against severe bodily punishment! And this was considered a progress!
But other burdens also weighed upon the life of the peasant. For, beside the landowner, the territorial ruler also demanded his impost or contribution, a land-tax or poll-tax; he could impress the son of the peasant under his banner, and demand waggons and gear for relays in time of war. And again, above the territorial ruler, was the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, which claimed in those parts of Germany where the constitution of the circles was still in force, a quota for their exchequers.
The peasants, however, were not everywhere under the curse of bondage. In the old domain of the Ripuarian Franks, the provinces on the other side of the Rhine from Cleves to the Moselle, and the Grafschaft of Mark, Essen, Werden, and Berg, had already in the middle ages freed themselves from bondage: those who had not property as landowners were freemen with leases for life. In the rest of Germany, freedom had taken refuge in the southern and northern frontiers, on the coasts of the North Sea and among the Alps. East Friesland, the marsh lands on the coasts of the Weser and the Elbe up to Ditmarschen,--those almost unconquerable settlements of sturdy peasant communities,--have remained free from the most ancient times. In the south, the Tyrol and the neighbouring Alps, at least the greatest portion of them, were occupied by free country-people; in Upper Austria also the free peasantry were numerous; and in Steiermark the tenths, which was the chief tax paid to the landed proprietors, was less oppressive than soccage was elsewhere. Wherever the arable land was scarce, and the mountain pastures afforded sustenance to the inhabitants, the legal condition of the lower orders was better. On the other hand, in the countries of old Saxony from the time of the Carlovingians, with the exception of a few free peasant holdings, a severe state of bondage had been developed. The Brunswickers, the dwellers on the Church lands of Bremen and Verden, were in the most favourable condition, those of Hildesheim and the Grafschaft of Hoya in the worst. In the bishopric of Münster the soccage service of villeins was generally changed into a moderate money payment; the only thing that pressed heavily on them was the compulsory leading, and the necessity of buying exemption from their burdens. On the other hand, the right of the landed proprietor over the inheritance of villeins existed to the greatest extent. As late as the year 1800 the country-people, who--exceptionally--desired to save money, endeavoured to preserve their property to their heirs, by fictitious transactions with the citizens; consequently more than a fourth portion of the Münster land remained uncultivated. A similar condition, in a somewhat milder form, existed in the bishopric of Osnabruck. Among the races of the interior, Hessians, Thuringians, Bavarians, Suabians, and Allemanni, the number of free peasants was continually decreasing during the whole of the middle ages: it was only in Upper Bavaria that they still formed a powerful part of the population. In Thuringia also the number of freemen was not inconsiderable. There the rule of the princes over the serf peasantry was lenient.
Far worse, except in a large part of Holstein, was the condition of all the countries east of the Elbe,--in fact wherever Germans colonized Sclave countries, that is almost half present Germany; but worst of all was the life of the villeins in Bohemia and Moravia, in Pomerania and Mecklenberg: in the last province villeinage is not yet abolished. It was in these countries that villeinage became more oppressive after the Thirty Years' War; only the free peasants, and the "Erb-und Gerichtsscholtiseien," as they were still called in memory of the circumstances of the old Germanization, formed themselves into a pauper aristocracy.
In the last century it might easily be perceived, from the agriculture and the prosperity of the villagers, whether they were freemen or serfs; and even now we may sometimes still discover, from the intelligence and personal appearance of the present race, what was the condition of their fathers. The peasants on the Lower Rhine, the Westphalian inhabitants of the marshes, the East Frieslanders, the Upper Austrians and Upper Bavarians, attained a certain degree of prosperity soon after the war; on the other hand, the remaining Bavarians, about the year 1700, complained that the third portion of their fields lay waste, and we learn of Bohemia in 1730 that the fourth part of the ground which had been under culture before the Thirty Years' War was overgrown with wood. The value of land