The country was better cultivated than might have been expected from the rude implements employed; but then, far more than now, the fields were rarely divided by hedges. In Beauce, the traveler might journey for many a long mile through a fertile district, where the corn rippled in golden waves beneath the summer sun; but there was no plantation, scarcely a tree upon which to rest the weary eye. Few signs of life were visible from the highway: the peasants, for so many centuries the victims of foreign or domestic war, had wisely built their huts in the hollows and valleys, as far as possible removed from the routes of the brigands who composed the armies of those days.[164] Here and there a moated grange, or isolated farm-house, was visible, with its cluster of fruit-trees, a greener oasis in the surrounding plain; but it was enclosed with a high wall. The lot of the agricultural population--of farmers as well as of laborers--was a hard one. Serfage still existed in many places, and the ploughman or the hedger could no more wander in search of employment, or higher wages, than the low-roofed church in which he was christened, where he was married, and beneath whose shadow his weary limbs would rest at last. Rent was usually paid in kind or in service. If in kind, it was a certain share of the produce, which in Brittany was a twelfth.[165] But the great influx of gold and silver consequent upon the discovery of America was gradually introducing money rents, which, however, were so variable and uncertain, that no average appears possible. In Auvergne, in 1514, we find it as high as seven sols an acre, and in 1568 as low as four deniers and a measure (setier) of seigle. Although the feudal superior was gradually passing into the modern landlord, serfage was so tenacious of life that it existed more than two centuries longer. Only two years before the outbreak of the Revolution the serfs of twenty-three communities belonging to the abbey of Luxeul refused to be emancipated, choosing to remain as they were rather than pay the moderate fine required for their enfranchisement. A few months later the serfs of Trépot had consented to pay the sum demanded by their lord, when the Revolution came and freed them gratuitously.[166]