extremely, according to the period and the district.
Under Frederick II. it was reduced in Silesia to one ducat per head.
But this was an unusually favourable rate for the villein. In Ruegen, at
a still later date, the emancipation was left to the valuation of the
proprietor; it could even be refused: a fine-looking youth had there to
pay full a hundred and fifty, and a pretty girl fifty or sixty,
thalers.

But the peasant was employed in other ways by the landed proprietor. He
was bound to aid, with his hands and teams, in the cultivation of the
estate; he was also bound to act as messenger. Whoever wished to go to
the town had first to ask the bailiff and lord of the manor whether
they had any orders. No householder could, except in special cases,
remain a night out of the village without the previous sanction of the
magistrate of the place. He was obliged to furnish a night watch of two
men for the nobleman's mansion. He had, when a child of the lord of the
manor was to be married, to bring a contribution of corn, small cattle,
honey, wax, and linen to the castle; finally, he had almost everywhere
to carry to his lord his rent-hens and eggs, the old symbol of his
dependence for house and farm.

But what was still more repugnant to the German peasant than many
greater burdens, was the landlord's right of chase over his fields. The
fearful tyranny with which the right of chase was practised by the
German princes in the middle ages, was renewed after the Thirty Years'
War. The peasant was forbidden to carry a gun, and poachers were shot
down. Where the cultivated ground bordered on the larger woods, or
where the lord of the manor held the supreme right of 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 t