Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/357

 AGRICULTURAL LIFE 345 the people can use, so that a large quantity of rye and barley was exported to Scotland, Holland, and Brabant, and much hops and barley to Norway and Sweden. Many a burgher shipped yearly 10,000 bushels of corn. They raise a great many horses of different breeds, cattle, sheep, swine, and bees, which they also export. The grass lands are very extensive. Honey, bacon, butter, wool, leather, and lard were exported with much profit. Woodcock, partridges, rabbits, swans, bustards, wild geese and ducks were in profu- sion, but owing to the game laws they could be used only as much as the princes and nobles allowed. As for the other game, whoever wished hunted it. Fishing was excellent.' 1 The great agricultural prosperity which prevailed in most parts of Germany placed the peasantry of the Middle Ages in a position with which their condition in later times forms a sad contrast. Kantzow writes : ' In Pomerania the peasants are rich, their wearing apparel is mostly of English or other costly material, such as the nobility and citizens in easy circumstances wore in former times.' The peasants of Altenburg were so well oft they wore caps of bearskin, coral necklaces, to which were hung pieces of gold, and silk ribbons, which were then very expensive. Eolewinck puts the following words in the mouth of the nobility: 'There is more lent out now to one 1 Kantzow, ii. 421, 424, 427. In writing of the fertility of the soil in Sangerhausen, Spangenberg says in his Chronicle, ended in 1554, ' We write of the time before the poor were impoverished by intolerable taxes. They lived well because so much attention was paid to agriculture, cattle-breed- ing, fishing, game, and to the manufacture of beer and wine.' (Buder, Niitzliche Sammlung verschiedener Schriften, p. 297. Frankfurt, 1735.)