Quote Originally Posted by Imperator
@Watchman: Is German soil really much harder than, say Belgian or English to work? We know the Romans did fine there. (That's actually a serious question, I'm not using rhetorical questions or anything)
Far as I know the Celts pretty much made a point of nicking all the good farmland around there back in the day. (Or Celtic culture spread onto such regions, however that now went.) The British Celts and Belgae were AFAIK quite clearly noticeably more wealthy than the Germans on the average, which in turn suggests their lands were of the type that yielded good harvest with the tools and means of the time, which in turn the Romans had no technological problems making use of.

The Germans were left with the northern woodlands not nearly as well suited for agriculture, partly AFAIK just because lot of them were of the heavy clay-soil type the light plows of the period flat out didn't make much of an impression on. Ergo, sparse habitation and reliance on largely ecologically self-sufficient tribal levies as there simply wasn't enough of a surplus to maintain a specialist warrior class in the Celtic fashion.