villeinage was most strict--as, for example, in Silesia--were obliged to recognise that the villeins were free people, and not slaves. But this remained a theoretical proposition, and was seldom attended to in the following century. The depopulation of the country, and the deficiency in servants and labourers, was very injurious to the landowner. All the villagers were forbidden to let rooms to single men or women; all such lodgers were to be taken before the magistracy, and put into prison in case they should refuse domestic service, even if they maintained themselves by any other occupation--such as labouring for the peasant for daily hire, or carrying on business with money or corn.[21] Through a whole generation we find, in the ordinances of the territorial lords, bitter complaints against the malicious and wilful menials who would not yield to their hard conditions, nor be content with the pay assigned by law. It was forbidden to individual proprietors to give more than the tax established by the provincial States. Nevertheless, the conditions of service shortly after the war are sometimes better than they were a hundred years later; in 1652 menials in Silesia had meat twice in the week; but in our century there are provinces where they get it only three times in the year.[22] The daily pay also was higher immediately after the war than in the following century. Thus was an iron yoke again bound slowly round the necks of the undisciplined country people, closer and harder than before the war. During the war small villages, and still more the single farms, which had been so favorable to the independence of the peasants, had vanished from the face of the earth; in the Palatinate, for example, and on the hills of Franconia, they had been numerous, and even in the present day their names cling to the soil. The village huts concentrated themselves in the neighbourhood of the manor house, and control over the weak community was easier when under the eye of the lord or his bailiff. What was the course of their life in the time of our fathers will be distinctly seen when one examines more closely the nature of their service. A cursory glance at it will appear to the youth of the present generation like a peep into a strange and fearful world. The conditions under which the German country people suffered were undoubtedly various. Special customs existed, not only in the provinces, but in almost every community. If the names by which the different services and imposts were designated were arranged they would form an unpleasant vocabulary.[23] But, notwithstanding the difference in the names and extent of these burdens, there was an unanimity throughout the whole of Europe on the main points, which is, perhaps, more difficult to explain than the deviations.