From all this confusion arising from local economic policy there was only one way out: the transference of authority in the most important of these matters from the towns to the territorial government, and the creation of a system of compromise which should pay regard to the opposed interests, bring about an adjustment on the basis of existing conditions, and yet, while necessarily and naturally striving after a certain self-sufficiency of the land in relation to the outside world, should also strive after a greater freedom of economic movement within it.
In the Prussian lands of the Teutonic Order it was recognised as a fundamental principle as early as 1433-34, that in future no Prussian town should obstruct another in the export of corn.(13*)In Brandenburg, likewise, the squirearchy (Ritterschaft) obtained for themselves the right of freely exporting their produce from the country as a general thing, and for the peasants, at least, a freedom of choice as to which town in the electorate, near or far, they should take their produce to.(14*) The much-disputed question whether foreign dealers should be permitted to go about buying and selling was differently settled from time to time in different assemblies - according as the towns or the squires happened to be the stronger; but at any rate they came to resolutions which, whether they threw open the country or closed it, bound the whole of it equally.(15*) The keen opposition of the agrarian interests to the old town policy, the advocacy by the agrarian party of free peddling, of a reform of "guest-right"(Gastrecht) and of the law as to markets and forestalling, led in Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Prussia, - partly in consequence of the strength of the squirearchy, partly in consequence of the increase of traffic and of general prosperity, - to a more considerable limitation of town privileges before the Thirty Years' War than was the case for some time after it: for the frightful economic retrogression which the war caused, seemed to call for the systematic employment of every possible means for encouraging the industrial life of the towns. But every success of the squirearchy in securing parliamentary resolutions or governmental ordinances meant a freer traffic in the country and greater liberality towards strangers. The fundamental principles which had governed legal relations between town and country remained, indeed, unchanged. Thus the belief in the hurtfulness of forestalling, - which did nothing, it was thought, but send up prices, - passed over almost intact from the town statutes into the law of the land. Nevertheless, it was an essential change that a regulation that in 1400 rested on a confused congeries of local regulations, customs, privileges, and alliances, became, about 1600, a law of the land (Landrecht) which encompassed, with tolerable uniformity, the whole territory.
Associated with the transformation described above was the loss of their staple privileges by all the small towns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They had employed them against competing towns in their neighbourhood regardless of the fact that they belonged to the same territory. As early as 1450Frederick II complained that, in contempt of his authority, the men of Spandau demanded Niederlage from the burghers of Cologne and Berlin. The staple privileges of Spandau, as well as those of Oderberg, Landsberg, Eberswald, Tangermunde, and Brandenburg, and even those of Berlin were, by 1600, evaded or abolished.
Oderberg, in 1634, formally surrendered the right of demanding Niederlage, in return for a grant by the elector of a court of lower jurisdiction.(16*) These were all signs of progress in the matter of internal freedom of trade. Only the right of Niederlage enjoyed by Frankfurt survived; and this was even enlarged: for, as its rivals were Stettin and Breslau and other trading towns outside the country, the electoral authorities thought it their duty to support it.(17*)Although in this matter territorial policy treated the greater centres of trade differently from the smaller, and regarded their interests as, in a measure, the interests of the whole country, in other directions the government of the prince had to oppose even these larger towns - as in the matter of import and export, prohibitive regulations, and the like. The greater and more important the town might be, the less possible was it to allow it to have an independent policy in these respects.
Though the efforts of Joachim I to secure freer passage into the houses of one town of the beer made in another had little success; though the burghers of Berlin, even in the first half of the eighteenth century, desperately resisted any further allowance of the competition of Bernau; though the government were unable to obtain equal rights in fairs for all the traders and craftsmen of other Brandenburg towns; nevertheless, it was quite distinctly recognised, even in the sixteenth century, that the decision whether grain, wool, woolfells, and other wares could be imported or exported belonged to the electoral government. In the neighbouring territories, on the contrary, especially in Pomerania and the archbishopric of Magdeburg, we see the governments waging a long contest over the question whether the chief towns, Stettin and Magdeburg, or the government of the country, or both together, had the right to prohibit trade in corn. Such a prohibition was issued by the town of Brunswick in the sixteenth century quite independently, and, indeed, very frequently.
In Pomerania the struggle was ended in 1534-5 by arbitration:
