Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/332

 320 HISTORY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE judge of the district, who shall repair to the house of the tenant and mortgage only what is sufficient to pay the outstanding debts. The agent shall remain outside, and not go into the house.' Should the judge find enough in the house to meet the debt, he handed it over the fence to the bailiff, but if not he begged the latter to have patience ' until God stretched forth His hand to the poor man.' All these ordinances, so minutely framed, clearly prove that ' the poor man,' personally free, still belonged to the estate, was not without protection, and that his position with regard to his landlord was anything but degrading. This ownership of the tenant secured him his living, and in most cases made the home an inherit- ance from father to son. Where the tenant gave personal service he was looked upon as belonging to the household of the landlord. There was great variety in the characteristics of the rural settlements. The villages in the mountainous districts in a large portion of the Tyrol, in Upper and Lower Austria, in Styria, in Carinthia, in the Bavarian Highlands, and in the moorlands of the North and Baltic Seas, were nothing more than scattered groups of farms, seignorial manors. The peasants of Pomerania and Lower Bavaria dwelt on isolated farms ; those of the Ehenish Provinces lived on closely grouped farms, and those of the western forest lands dwelt in small villages or hamlets. In the hill country and high plains of the South, as well as in the North German ' flats,' there were large compact villages. In Westphalia there were peasant tenements, manor houses, and villages side by side with one another. The peasants of Pomerania and Lower