The fields were highly cultivated, and fine grained white wheat was sown in the winter fields. Woad was still zealously cultivated with great advantage in the north of the Rennstiegs. Although even before the war the foreign indigo competed with the indigenous dye, the yearly gain from the woad in Thuringia could be computed at three tons of gold; this was principally in the territory of Erfurt and the Dukedom of Gotha; besides this, anise and saffron produced much money; the cultivation of the teazel also was formerly indigenous, and the wild turnips, and (by the Rhine) the rape seed were sowed in the fellows. Flax was carefully prepared by steeping it in water, and the coloured flowers of the poppies, and the waving panicle of the millet, raised themselves in the corn-fields. But on the declivities of warmer situations in Thuringia and Franconia there were everywhere vineyards, and this old cultivation, which has now almost disappeared in those countries, must in favourable years have produced a very drinkable wine, as now on the lower range of the Waldgebirge; for the wine of particular years is noted in the chronicles as most excellent. Hops also were assiduously cultivated and made good beer. Everywhere they grew fodder, and spurry and horse-beans. The meadows, highly prized, and generally fenced in, were more carefully handled than two hundred years later; the mole-heaps were scattered, and the introduction and maintenance of drains and watercourses was general. Erfurt was already the centre of the great seed traffic, of garden cultivation, also of flowers and fine orchards. On the whole, when we compare one time with the other, the agriculture of 1618 was not inferior to that of 1818. It must be confessed in other respects also, our century has but restored what was lost in 1618.