The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag

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СКАЧАТЬ mind was not rendered more docile by disbanded soldiers having settled themselves on the ruins of the old village huts. The peasant lads and servants bore themselves like knights, wearing jack-boots, caps faced with marten's fur, hats with double bands, and coats of fine cloth; they carried rifles and long-handled axes when they came together in the cities, or assembled on Sundays. At one time perhaps these had been useful against robbers and wild beasts; but it had become far more dangerous to the nobles and their bailiffs, and still more insupportable to their villeins,--it was always rigorously forbidden.^[19] The settlement of disbanded soldiers, who brought their prize money into the village, was welcome; but whoever had once worn a soldier's dress revolted against the heavy burdens of the bondsman. It was, therefore, established that whoever had served under a banner became free from personal servitude; only those who had been camp-followers continued as bondsmen. The inhabitants of the different States had been interspersed during the war; subjects had wilfully changed their dwellings, and established themselves on other territories, with or without the permission of the new lords of the manor. This was insupportable, and a right was given to the landed proprietor to fetch them back; and if the new lord of the manor thought it his interest to protect them, and refused to give them up, force might be used to recover them. Thus the noblemen rode with their attendants into a district to catch such of their villeins as had escaped without pass-tickets.^[20]--The opposition of the people must have been violent, for the ordinances even in the provinces, where villeinage was most strict--as, for example, in Silesia--were obliged to recognise that the villeins were free people, and not slaves. But this remained a theoretical proposition, and was seldom attended to in the following century. The depopulation of the country, and the deficiency in servants and labourers, was very injurious to the landowner. All the villagers were forbidden to let rooms to single men or women; all such lodgers were to be taken before the magistracy, and put into prison in case they should refuse domestic service, even if they maintained themselves by any other occupation--such as labouring for the peasant for daily hire, or carrying on business with money or corn.^[21] Through a whole generation we find, in the ordinances of the territorial lords, bitter complaints against the malicious and wilful menials who would not yield to their hard conditions, nor be content with the pay assigned by law. It was forbidden to individual proprietors to give more than the tax established by the provincial States. Nevertheless, the conditions of service shortly after the war are sometimes better than they were a hundred years later; in 1652 menials in Silesia had meat twice in the week; but in our century there are provinces where they get it only three times in the year.^[22] The daily pay also was higher immediately after the war than in the following century.

      Thus was an iron yoke again bound slowly round the necks of the undisciplined country people, closer and harder than before the war. During the war small villages, and still more the single farms, which had been so favorable to the independence of the peasants, had vanished from the face of the earth; in the Palatinate, for example, and on the hills of Franconia, they had been numerous, and even in the present day their names cling to the soil. The village huts concentrated themselves in the neighbourhood of the manor house, and control over the weak community was easier when under the eye of the lord or his bailiff. What was the course of their life in the time of our fathers will be distinctly seen when one examines more closely the nature of their service. A cursory glance at it will appear to the youth of the present generation like a peep into a strange and fearful world. The conditions under which the German country people suffered were undoubtedly various. Special customs existed, not only in the provinces, but in almost every community. If the names by which the different services and imposts were designated were arranged they would form an unpleasant vocabulary.^[23] But, notwithstanding the difference in the names and extent of these burdens, there was an unanimity throughout the whole of Europe on the main points, which is, perhaps, more difficult to explain than the deviations.

      The tenths were the oldest tax upon the countryman--the tenth sheaf, the tenth portion of slaughtered beasts, and even a tenth of wine, vegetables and fruit. It was probably older in Western Germany than Christianity, but the early church of the middle ages cunningly claimed it on the authority of scripture. It did not, however, succeed in retaining it only for itself; it was obliged to share it with the rulers, and often with the noble landed proprietors. At last it was paid by the agricultural peasant, either as a tax to the ruler or to his landlord, and besides as the priest's tithe to his church. However low his harvest yield might be valued, the tenth sheaf was far more than the tenth share of his clear produce.

      But the countryman had, in the first place, to render service to the landed proprietor, both with his hands and with his team; in the greatest part of Germany, in the middle ages, three days a week,--thus he gave half of the working time of his life. Whoever was bound to keep beasts of burden on his property was obliged to perform soccage, in the working hours, with the agricultural implements and tools till sunset; the poorer people had to do the same with hand labour--nay, according to the obligations of their tenure, with two, four, or more hands, and even the days were appointed by the landlords: they were well off if during such labour they received food. These obligations of ancient times were, in many cases, increased after the war by the encroachments of the masters--chiefly in Eastern Germany. These soccage days were arbitrarily divided into half or even quarter days, and thereby the hindrance to the countryman and the disorder to his own farm were considerably increased. The number of the days was also increased. Such was the case even in the century which we, with just feelings of pride, call the humane. In the year 1790, just when Goethe's "Torquato Tasso" made its first appearance in the refined court of Saxony, the peasants of Meissen rose against the landowners, because they had so immoderately increased the service that their villeins seldom had a day free for their own work.^[24] Again in 1799, when Schiller's "Wallenstein" was exciting the enthusiasm of the warlike nobility of Berlin, Frederick William III. was obliged to issue a cabinet order, enjoining on his nobility not to lay claim to the soccage of the peasants more than three days in the week, and to treat their people with equity.

      The second burden on the villeins was the tax on change of property by death or transfer; the heriot and fine on alienation. The best horse and the best ox were once the price which the heir of a property had to pay to the landowner for his fief. This tax was long ago changed into money. But though in the sixteenth century, even in countries where the peasant was heavily oppressed, the provincial ordinances allowed that peasant's property might be bought and sold, and that the lord of the peasant who sold could take no deduction upon it,^[25] yet in the same province in 1617, before the Thirty Years' War, it was established that landlords might compel their villeins against their will to sell their property, and that in case no purchaser should be found they themselves might buy it at two-thirds of the tax. It was under Frederick the Great that the inheritance and rights of property of villeins were first secured to them in most of the provinces of the kingdom of Prussia. This ordinance helped to put an end to a burden on the country people which threatened to depopulate the country. For in the former century, after the landowners had resolved to increase the revenue of their estates, they found it advantageous to rid themselves of some of their villeins, whose holdings they attached to their own property. The poor people, thus driven from their homes, fell into misery; and the burdens became quite unbearable to the remaining villeins, for they were expected by the landed proprietor to cultivate those former holdings, whose possessors had hitherto by their labour assisted in the cultivation of the whole estate. This system of ejection had become particularly bad in the east of Germany. When Frederick II. conquered Silesia there were many thousand farms without occupiers; the huts lay in ruins, and the fields were in the hands of the landed proprietors. All the separate homesteads had to be reformed and reoccupied, furnished with cattle and implements, and given up to the farmer as his own heritable property. In Rügen this grievance occasioned a rising of the peasantry, in the youth of Ernst Moritz Arndt; soldiers were sent thither, and the rioters were put in prison; the peasants endeavoured to revenge themselves for this by laying in wait for and slaying individual noblemen. In the same way in Electoral Saxony as late as 1790 this grievance occasioned a revolt.

      The children also of villeins were subject to compulsory service. If they were capable of work they were brought before the authorities, and, if these demanded it, had to serve some time, frequently three СКАЧАТЬ