Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/466

 39^ Outlines of European Histo7y The monot- There was almost no opportunity to better one's condition, misery of the and life must have gone on for generation after generation in a Hver'^^^ weary routine. And the life was not merely monotonous, it was wretched. The food was coarse and there was little variety, as the peasants did not even take pains to raise fresh vegetables. The houses usually had but one room, which was ill-lighted by a single little window and had no chimney. The increased use of money in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which came with the awakening trade and industry, tended to break up the manor. The old habit of trading one thing for another without the intervention of money began to disappear. As time went on, neither the lord nor the serf was satisfied with the old system, which had answered well enough in the time of Charlemagne. The serfs, on the one hand, began to obtain money by the sale of their products in the markets of neighboring towns. They finally found it more profitable to pay the lord a certain sum instead of working for him, for they could then turn their whole attention to tbeir own farms. The landlords, on the other hand, found it to their advantage to accept money in place of the services of their tenants. With this money the landlord could hire laborers to cultivate his fields and could buy the luxuries which were brought to his notice as commerce increased. So it came about that the lords gradually gave up their control over the peasants, and there was no longer very much difference between the serf and the freeman who paid a regular rent for his land. A serf might also gain his lib- erty by running away from his manor to a town. If he remained undiscovered, or was unclaimed by his lord, for a year and a day, he became a freeman.^ 1 The slow extinction of serfdom in western Europe appears to have begun as early as the twelfth century. A very general emancipation had taken place in England and France during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though there were still some serfs in France when the Revolution came in 1789. Germany was far more backward in this respect. We find the peasants revolting against their hard lot in Luther's time (1524-1525), and it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the serfs were freed in Prussia.