d 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 Ruegen 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
years, on the farm. To serve in other places it was necessary to have a
permit, which must be bought. Even those who had already served
elsewhere had once a year--frequently about Christmas--to present
themselves to the lord of the manor for choice. If the child of a
villein entered into a trade or any other occupation, a sum had to be
paid to the authorities for a letter of permission. It was considered a
mitigation of the old remains of feudalism, when it was decided that
the daughters of peasants might marry on to other properties without
indemnifying their lord. But then the new lord had to greet the other
in a friendly letter in acknowledgment of this emancipation.[26] The
price which the villein had to give for the emancipation of himself and
his family varied