The Towns, harried and plundered to skin and bone, were glad to see a Statthalter, and did homage to him with all their heart. But the Baronage or Squirearchy of the country were of another mind. These, in the late anarchies, had set up for a kind of kings in their own right: they had their feuds; made war, made peace, levied tolls, transit-dues; lived much at their own discretion in these solitary countries;—rushing out from their stone towers ("walls fourteen feet thick"), to seize any herd of "six hundred swine". any convoy of Lubeck or Hamburg merchant-goods, that had not contented them in passing.
