Siedlungsgeschichtliche Forschungen in den nördlichen deutschen Mittelgebirgsregionen

The Northern German hilly landscapes and Hessen do belong to the areas with the highest concentrations of deserted medieval villages and a remarkable richness of various relicts of the historical cultural landscape in all of Europe. Quite the same is true for the favorite agricultural areas within the surroundings. The percentage of deserted villages and hamlets often is considerably higher than the total number of still surviving medieval settlements. The latter as well as the deserted villages in the area of special investigation in this article were both mostly founded in the 8th/9th centuries presumably in a rather short time within two or three generations in a period of a rapid increase of population as well as economical development and innovations. Later on there seem to have occurred two centuries of at least partial stagnations and even crisis or shrinkage of settlements, density of population and economy which caused some retreat in the settlement and cultural landscape at least in some places and regions investigated. Probably there did not happen usually migrations over wide areas outside Northwestern Europe and the coastal areas mostly threatened by the Viking raids and later in southern parts of Central Europe by the Magyars, but in general the dynamics developed in smaller regions. Generally the settlement locations in the investigated areas have been stable on the same place from an early period onwards. This stability of location may go back even to the centuries about A. D. or to the migration period in some rare cases of central places, but normally it is definitely so from the Carolingian period onwards. This seems to be a remarkable difference to usual opinions of “migrating” unstable locations of early settlements. The fact may be caused by the natural resources in hilly landscapes that differ in many ways from that in the Northern German lowlands as well as a result of the integration of Saxony in the Frankish Empire and the establishment of the special highly developed system of early medieval “Grundherrschaft”. The research about abandoned settlements and graveyards of the first millennium A. D. for its own is not sufficient at all for research. Only together with the analysis of deserted medieval villages and of persisting historical settlements it allows deeper insights and hypothetical reconstructions of the development of the cultural landscape. In the 9th century a dense network of settlements was fully established and this even included places in the higher parts of the forests near to the “Altsiedelland”. Single farmsteads were not existent any more if so they did really form a considerable part of the early medieval settlement landscape in these regions, what does not seem very probable to me. Although it has to be stressed that we urgently do need much more large scale research projects and not only field walking and rescue excavations. Beside the numerous hamlets we do know a considerable number of medium sized settlements and also some large central rural places but mostly only from fieldwork by surface finds. Fortified places and castles have been up to the 11th century much rarer than in the borderlands to the Slavonic areas in the eastern parts of Germany. Because of the much less frequent use the fortifications do mostly not include much settlement structures and finds and lack populated suburbs. A great deal of new impulses and innovations caused a colonization of up to then not or only extensively used or populated areas in the rural countryside, particularly in wetlands, but also in woodlands and the founding of new settlements in the course of the 12th and 13th centuries. Most of the ridge and furrow as well as terrasse acres preserved in forests and meadows probably go back to these periods and even to the Late Middle ages than to earlier times. But definitely there is an urgent need on more scientific research on this as on merely all items of the cultural landscape in the German “Altsiedelland”. Also the inner structure of settlements must have undergone radical changes then. But these processes going together presumably with the formation of new parishes and chapel communities as well as the establishment of the privileged “Dorfgemeinde” can mostly only be reconstructed by rare written sources of rather late age and excavations which reveal structures like new churches or boundaries of villages than merely by fieldwork without this information. In the Hessian and Northern German hilly landscapes fortified rural settlements do not seem to have been usual before c. 1100/1150, but fortified or at least protected churchyards with accompanying small houses near the outer wall, fence or ditch seem to have been quite common. A special feature of chapels in Southern Lower Saxony in the period from 1200–1400 are tower chapels built with stones, they seem to be the response of smaller settlement communities to the challenge by the very frequent feudal raids of this time. The further growth of older settlements seems to be most likely, but it is hardly ever to be demonstrated merely by surface finds which form our only information in most cases. Whereas some traditional handicrafts like weaving and metal-working now began to shift to the large number of new markets and towns founded as mercantile new central places of the rapidly developing economy some others were established in the woodlands. To these belong the much more intensified prospection and exploitation of all kinds of natural resources particularly wood, minerals/ores and earth connected with a large scale and also long distance trade on the routes of new developing Hanseatic merchants and towns. In the region under special research the production of glass, stoneware, charcoals, sandstone and wood seem to have been of special importance. There are some early desertions or shifting of settlement nuclei in the Carolingian period and particularly around 1200/1250 in special circumstances for example when new markets and towns where founded by strong magnates, but generally the settlement structure within the cultural landscape had been rather stable and mostly remarkably expanding in the high middle-ages. The number of villages now reached its peak within the whole millennium and very probably this was also true for the population density of the whole middle ages or sometimes well into the post-medieval and preindustrial periods. Several symptoms of crisis are evident as early as the last third of the 13th century when some towns were partly deserted. On the whole the highly developed system of economy and exploitation of the rural landscape and also the more or less devastated woodlands began to collapse quite rapidly in the first half of the 14th century. The exact dating of the sometimes long during process is very difficult and there is still an urgent need of deeper research in case studies. The crucial period of desertions seems to be the 14th century, but some places or single farms and churches persisted still in the middle of the 15th century. Generally there is no doubt that most medieval settlements, either early or founded rather late did vanish. Most deserted villages were small or medium sized and had no church or castle, but also some big villages, markets and towns were abandoned. My impression is that also the still existing villages were mostly much less populated in the Late Middle ages than in the High Middle ages although some people joint the bigger and safer rural communities and towns with better chances for agricultural or other income and more personal freedom and life quality. But quite the same seems to be true for the bulk of markets and smaller towns. Particularly in those areas where bigger parts of the medieval cultural landscape came to be situated in the periphery of post medieval communities or within forests there is despite later fundamental devastation with modern forest economy since 1800 onwards still a wide range of vestiges of the fascinating medieval cultural landscape waiting for preservation and research.