nly 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,