and of
England, were growing skilful and rich by the lessons and the industry of
the exiles to whom they afforded a home. There were villages and small
towns in the Spanish Netherlands that had been literally depopulated.
Large districts of country had gone to waste, and cane-brakes and squalid
morasses usurped the place of yellow harvest-fields. The fog, the wild
boar, and the wolf, infested the abandoned homes of the peasantry;
children could not walk in safety in the neighbourhood even of the larger
cities; wolves littered their young in the deserted farm-houses; two
hundred persons, in the winter of 1586-7, were devoured by wild beasts in
the outskirts of Ghent. Such of the remaining labourers and artizans as
had not been converted into soldiers, found their most profitable
employment as brigands, so that the portion of the population spared by
war and emigration was assisting the enemy in preying upon their native
country. Brandschatzung, burglary, highway-robbery, and murder, had
become the chief branches of industry among the working classes. Nobles
and wealthy burghers had been changed to paupers and mendicants. Many a
family of ancient lineage, and once of large possessions, could be seen
begging their bread, at the dusk of evening, in the streets of great
cities, where they had once exercised luxurious hospitality; and they
often begged in vain.

For while such was the forlorn aspect of the country--and the portrait,
faithfully sketched from many contemporary pictures, has not been
exaggerated in any of its dark details--a great famine smote the land
with its additional scourge. The whole population, soldiers and brigands,
Spaniards and Flemings, beggars and workmen, were in danger of perishing
together. Where the want of employment had been so great as to cause a
rapid depopulation, where the demand for labour had almost entirely
ceased, it was a necessary result, that during the process, prices should
be low, even in the presence of foreign soldiery, and despite the
inflamed' profits, which such capitalists as remained required, by way
not only of profit but insurance, in such troublous times. Accordingly,
for the last year or two, the price of rye at Antwerp and Brussels had
been one florin for the veertel (three bushels) of one hundred and twenty
pounds; that of wheat, about one-third of a florin more. Five pounds of
rye, therefore, were worth, one penny sterling, reckoning, as was then
usual, two shilling