Minden-Ravensberg and the County of Mark, the return to their old connection with Prussia was celebrated. In Siegerland, acceptance of Prussian rule was eased by the fact that Protestantism was the main religion. Catholic areas, like the former prince-bishoprics of Münster and Paderborn and the Duchy of Westphalia, were particularly sceptical of the new lords. The Catholic nobility, which had played a leading role in the old prince-bishoprics, were mostly hostile. Twenty years after the province's establishment, Jacob Venedey called the Rhenanians and Westphalians ("have-to-be-Prussians"). In practice, the incorporation of the region into the Prussian state faced a number of problems. Firstly, the administrative unification was opposed by the mediatised houses (). These nobles, who had ruled small principalities of their own before the Napoleonic Wars, retained special privileges of their own well into the nineteenth century. They maintained a certain amount of control or oversight over schools and churches. The second major problem for unification was the question of the redemption of manorial rights by the peasants within the context of peasant liberation. Although a law was passed in 1820 that allowed for redemption through monetary rents, there were also numerous individual regulations and regional peculiarities. Redemption remained controversial until 1848 and prompted significant conflicts in the provincial Landtags in the period before 1848, since these bodies were dominated by the landed nobility. The uncertainties surrounding land ownership were a cause of rural uprisings at the beginning of the Revolutions of 1848. In the longer term, the fear that the peasants would be expelled from their land by great estates was not fulfilled. Instead, the two western provinces of Prussia remained the areas with the lowest numbers of large estates. One thing that initially contributed to the acceptance of Prussia was the policy of reform which aimed at the establishment of a "civic order". This involved the creation of a predictable system of administration and justice, rights of self-administration for communities, the emancipation of the Jews, and the liberation of the economy from guilds. The educated bourgeois class (the ), both Protestant and Catholic, recognised that the Prussian government was the prime motor of change. In the longer term, the combination of such different territories into a single province had consequences for identity and self-perception. Throughout the 19th century, there always remained a consciousness of the old territories' pasts, but alongside this a Westphalian self-perception also developed (fostered by