ABSTRACT
The ups and downs in population can be guessed at for periods before European governments embarked on accurate counting of heads. Islands of serfdom and those traditional seignorial rights associated with it survived in France, Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe, as people have seen. Nevertheless the overall picture of the peasantry in the region was one in which the juridical status of unfreedom, of servitude, was rapidly disappearing. Faced with crisis the lords of Western Europe had in general chosen to abandon those seignorial rights affecting their demesne lands which people tended to lease or sell. East of the Elbe they chose to organize their estates as economic units. In north-east Germany Brandenburg, Holstein, Pomerania and Prussia the existence of flat arable land excellently suited for grain production offered a staple crop to the enterprising lord. The principal change which reconstruction brought in its train, apart from a rise in the peasants' social status, was specialized farming.
