he 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 offe