The change in peasant economy, that took place in the course of the seventeenth century, was a further incentive for the expropriation of the peasant homesteads, especially to turn the last rests of the commons into the property of the nobility. The system of rotation of crops was introduced. It provided for a rotation in cultivation within given spaces of time. Corn lands were periodically turned into meadows. This favored the raising of cattle, and made possible the reduction of the number of farm-hands. The crowd of beggars and tramps grew ever larger, and thus one decree followed close upon the heels of another to reduce, by the application of the severest punishments, the number of beggars and vagabonds. In the cities matters lay no better than in the country districts. Before then, women were active in very many trades in the capacity of working women as well as of employers. There were, for instance, female furriers in Frankfurt and in the cities of Sleswig; bakers, in the cities of the middle Rhine; embroiderers of coats of arms and beltmakers, in Cologne and Strassburg; strap-cutters, in Bremen; clothing-cutters in Frankfurt; tanners in Nuerenberg; gold spinners and beaters in Cologne.[55] Women were now crowded back. The abandonment of the pompous Roman Catholic worship alone, due to the Protestantizing of a large portion of Germany, either injured severely a number of trades, especially the artistic ones, or destroyed them altogether; and it was in just these trades that many working women were occupied. As, moreover, it ever happens when a social state of things is moving to its downfall, the wrongest methods are resorted to, and the evil is thereby aggravated. The sad economic condition of most of the German nations caused the decimated population to appear as _overpopulation_, and contributed greatly towards rendering a livelihood harder to earn, and towards prohibitions of marriage.