In The Ancien Régime, Taine wrote, "The people are like a man struggling through a pond. The water has already reached his mouth. If he encounters the slightest dip in the mud or the smallest ripple in the water, he loses his footing, sinks, and then suffocates."
The natural succession of a body of water roughly went like this: as the land rose, there was less and less active water in the pond. Floating plants and submerged plants first occupied the pond's edges, and their photosynthesis supplied oxygen for the fish.
After aquatic plants died, they settled at the bottom. The water became nutrient-rich, algae began to grow, and the fish and other aquatic creatures suffocated from lack of oxygen and sank to the bottom as well. The water grew shallower and shallower, forming a foul-smelling marsh.
Then emergent plants appeared. Water lilies, rushes, reeds, and the like grew along the banks, blocking up the silt and forming land.
Some plants, such as water banyans, absorbed great amounts of water, drying out the marsh and creating ground where wet woodland could grow.
If humans intervened at this point and continued pumping out the water, it would become true land, where crops such as wheat could be planted.
Reclaiming wasteland was an extremely arduous task, perhaps taking several generations. It was difficult to say whether Hogwarts's body of water had formed naturally or been man-made, because there were buildings resembling ruins at the bottom of the Black Lake. If this had once been a village, then later a dam had blocked the water, the villages upstream would have been submerged, while the reduced flow downstream would have formed a valley.
When life became truly unbearable and they did not wish to become bandits, peasants chose rebellion. But peasant uprisings in Europe