enormous. One of the most interesting of these findings is the startling discovery that the rural population of Europe in the Middle Ages was probably more nomadic and less sedentary than the lower classes of society today. These displacements of population were not upon the gigantic scale of the German migrations in the fifth century or the Norse and Hungarian invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. Nevertheless they were mass movements of large dimension-waves of popular migration sometimes succeeding one another through a series of years, which were primarily motived by desire for improvement of material condition and powerfully affected by economic distress and the pressure of social forces. The Frankish colonization of the Spanish March in the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious is an example of such a movement; more important and more typical is the history of the eastward expansion of the German people under the Saxon, Franconian, and Hohenstaufen rulers, and their colonization of Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Silesia.3

In this pioneer labor Dutch and Flemish immigrants from the Low Countries played no unimportant part The emigration of the peasantry of modern Holland and Belgium in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and their settlement in numerous scattered colonies in Lower Germany was due to the simultaneous operation of expulsive forces at home and the attraction which a new land presented.

Mediaeval Belgium shared with Lombardy the honor of being the most densely populated region of Western Europe. The heart

This the late Achille Luchaire, Social France at the Time of Philip Augustus (English trans.), 404-6, clearly demonstrated. Cf. Powicke's review of the French original in English Historical Review, XXV, 565. The conclusion amply confirmed the previous researches of Lamprecht, Etudes sur l'état économique de la France (French trans. by Marignan), 138–39, 222-23; Flach, Les origines de l'ancienne France, II, livre iii, prem. partie. For Germany the last half of Lamprecht, Deutsche Gesch., Vol. III, to mention no other work, shows the same thing.

* See Imbart de la Tour, "Les Colonies agricoles et l'occupation des terres désertes à l'époque carolingienne," in his Questions d'Histoire, 31-68.

3 See my article, "German East Colonization," Proceedings of American Historical Association, 1916, and another, "The German Church and the Conversion of the Baltic Slavs," American Journal of Theology, XX (1916), 203–30, 372-89.

of the Frankish monarchy had been here, and the intimate association between the Merovingian and Carolingian sovereigns and the church had resulted in the founding of many monasteries in the land. Nowhere else in Europe perhaps were they more thickly clustered, with their ample lands and their thousands of serfs exploiting the rich glebe farms, Here were the great historic abbeys of St. Vaast in Arras, St. Bavon in Ghent, St. Martin in Utrecht, St. Géry and St. Sepulchre in Cambrai, St. Laurence and St. Lambert in Liège, and of St. Omer, St. Quentin, St. Bertin, and St. Riquier, formed of clustered communities of artisans, craftsmen, and petty tradesmen dwelling in separate "quarters" around the monastery walls, with the scattered villages of servile husbandmen on the abbey lands stretching roundabout,' and in the eleventh and twelfth centuries grown into more or less independent towns. Besides these great abbeys there were many others, Corbie, Lobbes, St. Trond Nivelles, Andennes, Calmont, St. Hubert, Stavelot, Fosses, Alden-Eyck, Brogne, etc.

What these great monasteries did on a large scale in clearing forests and draining moor and swamp lands those among the peasantry who were free did in less degree. For, as lay and ecclesiastical feudalism expanded, throwing its coils over the persons and lands of the free peasantry, rather than submit to servile conditions and bondage to the glebe they found refuge in remoter parts of the wide waste of moor and fen, exactly as the population of the uplands fled to the forest, and there established their tiny villages, and by ditching and diking and draining redeemed a few acres of soil from the reluctant grasp of the sluggish waters. Cubes of turf served for building blocks for their cottages, and peat was their fuel.3

But in the course of time, as in the uplands the feudality appropriated the forests and reduced the free forest villages to serfdom, so in the Low Countries the feudal nobles gradually penetrated into the remote fen regions and extended their seigneurial

I See Flach, op. cit., II, livre iii, c. 7; Blanchard, La Flandre, 153-69; and my article in Journal of Political Economy (November, 1915), 872-73.

sway over the free marsh villages. With the spread of the feudal and manorial régime came the evils of private war, which neither the truce of God nor the civil power (for the civil power was that of the lords themselves) was able to suppress, in addition to which the burden of heavy and vexatious manorial exactions was imposed upon the peasantry. From this condition of things emigration was the readiest form of relief.

Furthermore the lot of the peasant was made worse by the vicious commercial policy of some of the nobles, whose heavy taxation upon production, distribution, and consumption in the form of numberless tonlieux, péages, and maltotes impoverished the peasants and discouraged or even ruined enterprise. The bishop of Munster, for example, closed to the Frisians their market of the Ems, whither they had been accustomed to bring their cattle for barter. No other market was open to them because the Danes and the merchants of Bremen and Hamburg demanded money, a commodity which was very scarce in Friesland. As a consequence the Frisian cattle, practically the sole resource of the country, became diseased from inbreeding, and starvation ensued.2

Industrial coercion, again, was a factor in provoking emigration, for nowhere in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the development of industry and town population greater than in Belgium. If the burghers secured freedom of work and measurable political rights they stayed; if coercion succeeded they sought to migrate. What development had industry attained and in how far was it emancipated from the influence of agriculture and a rural environment and become urban? Levasseur has shown that a change had supervened in the relations between agriculture and industry by the beginning of the twelfth century.3 It goes without saying that this change was intimately connected with the emancipation of the servile classes and the birth of

'The history of this swamp reclamation and forest clearing in mediaeval Belgium has been the subject of various studies: Blanchard, chaps. xi-xiii; Duvivier, "Hospites: défrichements en Europe et spécialement dans nos contrées aux XI, XII, et XIIIe siècles," Révue d'histoire et d'archéologie, Vol. I; Van de Putte, "Esquisse sur la mise en culture de la Flandre occidentale," Ann. de la soc. d'émulation de Bruges, Vol. III.

'Curschmann, Hungersnöte im Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1900), 23.

3 Histoire des classes ouvrières (1st ed.), I, 173 f.; cf. 320-21, and Lamprecht, L'état économique de France, 241-47.

the burgher class in the towns. There is no need to enter here into consideration of this complex and thorny question. But the tendency to freedom of industry and the formation of industrial combinations like the guilds, as everyone knows, were bitterly resented by the nobility, who tried to maintain the serfdom of industry quite as much as the serfdom of agriculture.1

An additional factor which induced migration in the Middle Ages, perhaps the most general of all influences, was famine. The occurrence of famine was not always due to adverse weather conditions. It is true that a hard winter which killed the peasant's seed corn in the cellars, or a drought, or a prolonged wet season was often terribly destructive of the crops. But aside from these physical phenomena famine was often engendered, at least locally, by other causes, such as feudal war, exhaustive taxation both of production and distribution, in addition to which the rudimentary system of agriculture prevailing, with crude farming implements and ignorance of the use of fertilizers, must be taken into account.

Since Lamprecht deplored the absence of any monograph upon the history of mediaeval famine, the gap has been filled, at least for Germany and the Low Countries, by Curschmann's admirable book. He has shown that in Belgium famine occurred four times in the eleventh century, nine times in the twelfth, and twice in the thirteenth. There is most certainly a connection between these hunger conditions-there was a three years' famine in 1144-47— and the huge emigration which took place from Belgium in the twelfth century.3 Under stress of such privation no feudal lord

1 Levasseur, I, 167; Guérard, Polyptique d'Irminon, I, 471 f., 717 f., 729 f.

2 See n. 2, p. 162, and compare the reviews in Revue Historique, English Historical Review, Historische Zeitschrift, and Vierteljahrschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, all of which eulogize the book as a very valuable work.

3 Curschmann, 40 and 140-41. He compares it, 8, with the great drought in Europe in 1847 and its effect upon emigration, particularly from Germany and Ireland. In the latter country the potato crop had also failed the year before. The effect of these "hard times" in provoking popular discontent and so promoting the revolution of 1848 has not yet been studied. Over-population and under-production are sometimes the positive and the negative way of saying the same thing, and over-population in the Middle Ages was a very prevalent cause of migration. See for Belgium, Blanchard, 485-88; Curschmann, 199; Pirenne, Histoire de Bélgique, I, 135-40; for Germany, Püschel, Anwachsen der deutschen Städte in der Zeit der mittelalterlichen kolonial Bewegung, 13-15; Wendt, Die Germanisierung der Länder östlich der Elbe, II, 17-18. I have given some details in the two articles of mine cited in n. 3, p. 160.

1

could have been able to retain his tenantry. Propter caristiam colono fugiente, plurimi vici deserti remansere, reads a chronicle. The cattle were slaughtered for lack of fodder and to furnish food. When they were consumed nothing but flight remained as a recourse. It is impossible to avoid this conclusion, even if one is not always able to establish a direct nexus between any given famine and any given migration. The simultaneousness of the two events was not accidental.

When the Friesland or Flemish peasant betook himself to the refuge of the marshes in order to escape from feudal oppression he found only a precarious freedom even there. For he lived ever in peril of the sea. The low coast, the many deep tidal estuaries, the flat plains across which the Rhine, the Vaal, the Meuse, the Scheldt, and their affluents meandered, and which often overflowed their low banks in time of freshet, the salt marshes, the swampsall these conditions exposed the population to floods which were sometimes terrible in their devastation. Inundation was a power

* In the middle of the first century A.D. Pliny, the Elder, who had seen service in the Roman province of Lower Germany, described the condition of the Frisians in terms which are applicable to them a thousand years later. He says: "In this region the wretched natives, occupying either the tops of hills or artificial mounds of turf raised out of the reach of the highest tides, build their small huts, which look like sailing vessels when the water covers the land, and like wrecks when it has retired. For fuel they use a kind of turf [i.e., peat] dug by hand and dried rather in the wind than in the sun, and with this earth they cook their food and warm their bodies. Their only drink is rain-water collected in ditches under the eaves." There is an ancient study of inundations in Flanders in the Séances de l'Académie ... de Bélgique, I (1777), 63 f. Blanchard, chaps. ix-xi, is very interesting, as is also Curschmann, who gives extracts from the sources. Montagu Burrows, Cinque Ports, chap. xi, deals with tidal and storm effects of the English Channel on the south coast of England. The year 1405-6 wrought terrible havoc along all the North Sea coast. It was perhaps the greatest storm in history, for it practically raged, with brief intermissions, over the whole of Europe from November, 1405, to April, 1406. Bruges, the greatest commercial emporium of the north, was ruined by it, for the sea overwhelmed the great tide gates at the mouth of the Zwin, regarded even in Dante's time as an engineering wonder, and so filled the harbor of Bruges with sand that nothing but the lightest draft vessels could enter. At the same time this great storm cleared a huge island of sand out of the mouth of the Scheldt and opened Antwerp, which hitherto had been a mere fishing village, to trade, and so it succeeded Bruges in commercial history. Popular opinion associated this mighty storm with the death of Tamerlane, who died February 19, 1405, but the news was not known in Western Europe until March, 1406. Wylie, History of the Reign of Henry IV, II, 470-75, has gathered a mass of data regarding its effects in England. The winter 1407-8 was the "Great Winter"— -one of the most famous known.