ometimes
bought fields and empty houses with the remainder of their booty, or
returned to their native villages. There was much marrying and
baptizing.

But the exhaustion of the people was still lamentably great. The arable
land, much of which had lain fallow, was sown without the necessary
manure; not a little remained overrun with wild underwood and weeds,
and long continued as osier land. The ruined districts were sometimes
bought by the neighbouring villages, and in some places two or three
small communities united themselves together.

For many years after the war, the appearance of the villages was most
comfortless; one may perceive that this was the case in Thuringia, from
the transactions with the Government. The householders of Siebleben and
some other communities round Gotha, had held, from the middle ages, the
right of having timber free from the wooded hills. In 1650, the
government demanded from them, for the exercise of this right, a small
tax upon oats: some of the communities excused themselves, as they were
too poor to be able to think of rebuilding their damaged houses. Ten
years after, the community of Siebleben had forty boys who paid small
school fees, and the yearly offering in the church amounted to more
than fourteen gulden. A portion of this offering was spent in alms to
strangers, and it is perceptible, from the carefully kept accounts,
what a stream of beggars of all kinds passed through the country;
disbanded soldiers, cripples, the sick and aged; amongst them were
lepers with certificates from their infirmaries, also exiles from
Bohemia and Hungary, who had left their homes on account of their
religion, banished noblemen from England, Ireland, and Poland, persons
collecting money for the ransom of their relatives from Turkish
imprisonment, travellers who had been plundered by highwaymen, and
others, such as a blind pastor from Denmark with five children; the
strangers came prepared with testimonials. The governments, however,
were unwearied in their efforts against harbouring such vagrants.

Much has been written concerning the devastation of the war; but the
great work is still wanting, that would concentrate the statistical
notices which have been preserved in all the different territories:
however enormous the labour may be, it must be undertaken, for it is
only from this irrefragable computation, that the full greatness of the
calamity can be understood. The details hitherto known sc