"In the church there was preaching and singing conformable to the royal ordinance. After the service was completed, we went in the former order from the church to the Platz in front of the inn; there the men on one side, and the women on the other, in half-circles, closed in, forming a fine wide circle, and during their progress they sang, 'Now rejoice together, dear Christians.' When the circle was formed I gave thanks to all collectively, that they had not only, according to the proclamation of the high and mighty princely government, obediently observed this solemnity, but also had gone out at my desire, all together, noble and humble alike, to the gates, and had followed me in such beautiful order to church, &c., and I admonished them to attend again zealously the afternoon service. And truly, as I said that it would be well for every one to come from their houses to church in the afternoon, they did all reassemble as before in front of the inn; Peace and Justice also were there again in their dress, but Mars had disappeared. When I was informed of this, I went during the last peal of the bells with the scholars, the coadjutors, and the householders out by the back gate through the church lane to the church, when every one again, as before, followed me into the church. There we then sang, 'Now let us sing unto the Lord,' &c. From the church we returned in the same order, again singing, 'Praise the Lord, praise the Lord,' &c., to the above-mentioned place, where I again gave thanks both to strangers and townspeople, with heartfelt wishes for peace. And here the six groschen, rolls, and ripe apples were distributed among the children."
It is known that the great peace came very slowly, like the recovery from a mortal illness. The years from 1648 to 1650, from the conclusion of the peace to the celebration of the festival, were among the most grievous of that iron time; exorbitant war taxes were imposed, the armies of the different countries lay encamped in the provinces till they could be paid off, the oppression which they exercised on the unhappy inhabitants was so fearful, that a despairing cry arose from the people, which mingled itself with the wrangling of the negotiating parties. To this was added a plague of another kind; the whole country swarmed with a rabble that had no masters; bands of discharged soldiers with the camp followers, troops of beggars, and great hordes of robbers, roved about from one territory to another; they quartered themselves by force on those villages which were still inhabited, and established themselves in the deserted huts. The villagers also, provided with bad weapons and disused to labour, thought it sometimes more satisfactory to rob, than to till the fields, and made secret roving expeditions into the neighbouring territories, the Evangelical into the Catholic countries, and vice versâ. The foreign children of a lawless race, the gipsies, had increased in number and audacity; fantastically dressed, with heavily laden carts, stolen horses, and naked children, they encamped in great numbers round the stone trough of the village green: whenever the ruler was powerful and the officials active, the wild rovers were encountered with energy. The villagers of the dukedom of Gotha were still obliged, in 1649, to keep watch from the church towers, to guard the bridges and fords, and to give an alarm whenever they perceived any of these marching bands. A well-regulated system of police was the first sign of that new feeling of responsibility which the governments had acquired: every one who wished to settle down was encouraged to do so. Whoever was established, had to render an account of how much land he had cultivated, of the condition of his house and farm, and whether he had any cattle. New registers of the farms and inhabitants were prepared, new taxes on money and on natural products were imposed; and by the severe pressure of these, the villagers were compelled to labour. The villages were gradually reinhabited; many families who had fled to the towns during the war repaired their devastated farms; others returned from the mountains or foreign countries; disbanded soldiers and camp followers sometimes bought fields and empty houses with the remainder of their booty, or returned to their native villages. There was much marrying and baptizing.
But the exhaustion of the people was still lamentably great. The arable land, much of which had lain fallow, was sown without the necessary manure; not a little remained overrun with wild underwood and weeds, and long continued as osier land. The ruined districts were sometimes bought by the neighbouring villages, and in some places two or three small communities united themselves together.
For many years after the war, the appearance of the villages was most comfortless; one may perceive that this was the case in Thuringia, from the transactions with the Government. The householders of Siebleben and some other communities round Gotha, had held, from the middle ages, the right of having timber free from the wooded hills. In 1650, the government demanded from them, for the exercise of this right, a small tax upon oats: some of the communities excused themselves, as they were too poor to be able to think of rebuilding their damaged houses. Ten years after, the community of Siebleben had forty boys who paid small school fees, and the yearly offering in the church amounted to more than fourteen gulden. A portion of this offering was spent in alms to strangers, and it is perceptible, from the carefully kept accounts, what a stream of beggars of all kinds passed through the country; disbanded soldiers, cripples, the sick and aged; amongst them were lepers with certificates from their infirmaries, also exiles from Bohemia and Hungary, who had left their homes on account of their religion, banished noblemen from England, Ireland, and Poland, persons collecting money for the ransom of their relatives from Turkish imprisonment, travellers who had been plundered by highwaymen, and others, such as a blind pastor from Denmark with five children; the strangers came prepared with testimonials. The governments, however, were unwearied in their efforts against harbouring such vagrants.
Much has been written concerning the devastation of the war; but the great work is still wanting, that would concentrate the statistical notices which have been preserved in all the different territories: however enormous the labour may be, it must be undertaken, for it is only from this irrefragable computation, that the full greatness of the calamity can be understood. The details hitherto known scarcely amount to a probable valuation of the loss which Germany suffered in men, beasts of burden, and productive power. The following inferences only attempt to express the views of an individual, which a few examples will support.
The condition of the provinces of Thuringia and Franconia is not ill adapted for a comparison of the past with the present; neither of them were more afflicted by the visitation of war than other countries; the state of cultivation of both provinces, up to the present time, answers pretty accurately to the general average of German industry and agriculture: neither of them are on the whole rich: both were hilly countries, without large rivers, or any considerable coal strata, with low lands, of which only certain tracts were distinguished by especial fertility, and were up to modern times devoted to agriculture, garden culture, and small mining industry. Thus this portion of Germany had known no powerful stream of human enterprise or capital, nor, on the other hand, was it the theatre of the destructive wars of Louis XIV.'s time, and the rulers, especially the grandson of Frederic the Wise, were even in the worst times tolerably sparing of the national strength.
There have been preserved to us from these districts, amongst other things, accurate statistical notices of twenty communities, which once were in the Hennebergen domain; but now, with the exception of one that is Bavarian, belong to Saxe Meiningen. It is nowhere mentioned, and from their condition need not be concluded, that the devastation in them had been greater than in other portions of the province. The government in 1649 ordered an accurate report to be given of the number of inhabited houses, barns, and head of cattle that existed when the worst sufferings of the war began in 1634. According to the reports delivered by the magistrates of the places, there had perished in the twenty communities more than eighty-two per cent, of families, eighty-five per cent, of horses, more than eighty-three of goats, and eighty-two of cows, and more than sixty-three per cent. of houses. The remaining houses were described as in many places damaged and in ruins, the still surviving horses as lame and blind, and the fields and meadows as devastated and much overgrown with underwood; but the sheep were everywhere altogether destroyed.[[40]]
It is a bloody and terrible tale which these numbers tell us. More than four fifths of the population, far more than four fifths of their property were destroyed. And in what a condition was the remainder!
Precisely similar was the fate of the smaller provincial towns, as far as one can see from the preserved data. We will give only one example from the same province. The old church records of Ummerstadt, an agricultural town near Coburg, famed, from olden times, throughout the country for its good pottery, report as follows:--"Although in the year 1632 the whole country, as also the said little town, was very populous, so that it alone contained more than one hundred and fifty citizens, and up to eight hundred souls, yet from the ever-continuing war troubles, and the constant quartering of troops, the people became in such-wise enervated, that from great and incessant fear, a pestilence sent upon us by the all-powerful and righteous God, carried off as many as five hundred men in the years 1635 and 1636; on account of this lamentable and miserable condition of the time, no children were born into the world in the course of two years. Those whose lives were still prolonged by God Almighty, have from hunger, the dearness of the times, and the scarcity of precious bread, eaten and lived upon bran, oil-cakes, and linseed husks, and many also have died of it; many also have been dispersed over all countries, most of whom have never again seen their dear fatherland. In the year 1640, during the Saalfeldt encampment, Ummerstadt became a city of the dead or of shadows; for during eighteen weeks no man dared to appear therein, and all that remained was destroyed. Therefore the population became quite thin, and there were not more than a hundred souls forthcoming." In 1850 the place had eight hundred and ninety-three inhabitants.
Still more striking is another observation, which may be made from the tables of the Meiningen villages. It is only in our century that the number of men and cattle of all kinds has again reached the height which it had already attained in 1634. Nay, the number of houses was still in 1849 less than in 1634, although, there the inmates of the smallest village houses, even the poorest, still anxiously endeavour to preserve their own dwellings. It is true that there is a trifling increase of the number of inhabitants in 1849 over that in 1634; but even this increase is dubious when we consider that the number of inhabitants in 1634 had probably already experienced a diminution from sixteen years of war. Thus we are assuredly justified in concluding that two centuries were necessary, at least for this tract of Germany, to restore the population and productive power of the country to its former standard. These assumptions are supported by other observations. The agriculture of the country, before the Thirty years' war, nay even the relative proportion of the value of corn to that of silver, at a time when the export of corn was only exceptional, lead to the same conclusions.