workers. Overall Neuveville appears to have thrived under the changed arrangements, and by the end of the fifteenth century it is thought that the population was on a rising trend which would persist through the middle years of the sixteenth century, with the population peaking at 435 in 1562 according to one estimate, comfortably ahead of the levels seen in the twentieth century. The first half of the sixteenth century was not an unbroken period of growth however. Digot relates that the century opened with a year that combined famine, as torrential rains destroyed the harvest of 1500, with a particularly deadly outbreak of plague, causing the population to slump. Duke Anthony, the Duke of Lorraine who succeeded his father in 1508 is remembered as a benevolent ruler. The duchy was not spared the plague which returned in 1522 and exercised a savage impact on the population at least until 1531 when, responding to the please of the wretched citizenry, the Duke agreed to a halving of the tax level. Conditions seem to have improved through the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s. The final four decades of the sixteenth century are known to anglophone historians of western Europe for the French Wars of Religion. Lorraine was not yet part of France, but the duchy was nevertheless badly affected by fighting involving German Protestants from the east and Calvinist forces from closer to home. In 1572 we again find the citizens of La Neuveville appealing for a tax exemption because of acute hunger ("à cause de la disette"). The French wars of religion are generally reckoned to have ended in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes, but by that date, for La Neuveville, other problems were more pressing. Plague returned to Lorraine in 1585 and La Neuveville seems to have been particularly badly affected. A census record in 1593 indicated significant population levels in several surrounding villages without mentioning the village at all. A record from 1596 indicates that La Neuveville itself contained sixteen and a half taxable households which according to a subsequent extrapolation implies a population level of approximately 120, or less than a third of the level from just 34 years earlier. The population barely recovered during the next hundred years: poor harvests and plague continued to feature especially during the first half of the sixteenth century. Surviving records from the period 1652 to 1661 indicate no more than