But what was still more repugnant to the German peasant than many greater burdens, was the landlord's right of chase over his fields. The fearful tyranny with which the right of chase was practised by the German princes in the middle ages, was renewed after the Thirty Years' War. The peasant was forbidden to carry a gun, and poachers were shot down. Where the cultivated ground bordered on the larger woods, or where the lord of the manor held the supreme right of chase, a secret and often bloody war was carried on for centuries betwixt the foresters and poachers. As long as wolves continued to prowl about the villages, the irritated peasant dug holes round the margin of the wood which he covered with branches, and the bottom of them was studded with pointed stakes. He called them wolf-pits, but they were well known to the law as game-traps, and were forbidden under severe penalties. He ventured to let such portions of ground as were most exposed to be injured by game, to soldiers or cities, but that also was forbidden him; he endeavoured to defend his fields by hedges, and his hedges were broken down. In the Erzgebirge of Saxony the peasants, in the former century, had watched by their ripening corn; then huts were built on the fields, fires were lighted in the night, the watchers called out and beat the drum, and their dogs barked; but the game at last became accustomed to these alarms, and feared neither peasant nor dog. In Electoral Saxony, at the end of a former century, under a mild government, where a moderate tax might be paid as indemnity for damage to game, it was forbidden to erect fences for fields above a certain height, or to employ pointed stakes, that the game might not be injured, nor prevented seeking its support on the fields, till at last fourteen communities in the Hohnstein bailiwick in a state of exasperation combined for a general hunt, and frightened the game over the frontier. The logs which the sheep dogs wore round their necks were not sufficient to hinder them from hurting the hares, so they were held by cords on the fields. But the countrymen were bound, when the lord of the manor went to the chase, to go behind the nets and, as beaters, to swing the rattles. The coursing, moreover, spoilt his fields, as the riders with their greyhounds uprooted and trampled on the seed.