ly imitated the example by bagging peasant estates, that had
lost their owners, by ejecting free as well as serf peasants from house
and home, and enriching themselves with the goods of these. To this
particular end, the miscarried peasant revolts of the sixteenth century
furnished the best pretext. After the first attempts had succeeded,
never after were reasons wanting to proceed further in equally violent
style. With the aid of all manner of chicaneries, vexations and
twistings of the law--whereto the in-the-meantime naturalized Roman law
lent a convenient handle--the peasants were bought out at the lowest
prices, or they were driven from their property in order to round up the
estates of noblemen. Whole villages, the peasant homes of as much as
half a province, were in this way wiped out. Thus--so as to give a few
illustrations--out of 12,543 peasant homestead appanages of knightly
houses, which Mecklenburg still possessed at the time of the Thirty
Years' War, there were, in 1848, only 1,213 left. In Pommerania, since
1628, not less than 12,000 peasant homesteads disappeared. The change in
peasant economy, that took place in the course of the seventeenth
century, was a further incentive for the expropriation of the peasant
homesteads, especially to turn the last rests of the commons into the
property of the nobility. The system of rotation of crops was
introduced. It provided for a rotation in cultivation within given
spaces of time. Corn lands were periodically turned into meadows. This
favored the raising of cattle, and made possible the reduction of the
number of farm-hands. The crowd of beggars and tramps grew ever larger,
and thus one decree followed close upon the heels of another to reduce,
by the application of the severest punishments, the number of beggars
and vagabonds.

In the cities matters lay no better than in the country districts.
Before then, women were active in very many trades in the capacity of
working women as well as of employers. There were, for instance, female
furriers in Frankfurt and in the cities of Sleswig; bakers, in the
cities of the middle Rhine; embroiderers of coats of arms and
beltmakers, in Cologne and Strassburg; strap-cutters, in Bremen;
clothing-cutters in Frankfurt; tanners in Nuerenberg; gold spinners and
beaters in Cologne.[55] Women were now crowded back. The abandonment of
the pompous Roman Catholic worship alone, due to the Protestantizing of
a large portion of Germany,