Official constitution in the Duchy of Westphalia
The official constitution in the Duchy of Westphalia was a decisive instrument used by the Archbishops of Cologne to establish and secure their sovereignty in the Duchy of Westphalia . The beginnings can be traced back to the second half of the 13th century. This institution existed until the Duchy of Westphalia was taken over by Prussia and until the formation of districts after 1815. The unification of economic and military tasks in the person of the bailiff marked the beginning of the official constitution. An externally visible sign is the division of the Duchy of Westphalia into many offices, which, viewed individually, also formed their own, small territories .
Origin and meaning
The origins, formation and development of the offices in the Duchy of Westphalia were not uniform. In the early Cologne areas, the archbishopric manors formed one of the two germ cells for the emergence of the offices. Examples are Soest , Hovestadt and Menden . The manor or villication was an older institution for the administration of the archbishop's property. The administrator of a villication was Schulte . While they were initially hereditary according to feudal law, the Archbishop of Cologne tried with success since the beginning of the 13th century to limit this heredity and to use deductible officials instead.
The other nucleus of the offices consisted in the so-called Gografschaften . After the conquest of Saxony , the Franks introduced the Goe as the lowest administrative district. These had military and judicial functions. The right to call up those capable of weapons in a geographic area was associated with the go-to jurisdiction. Originally endowed only with lower judicial powers, the counts gradually acquired more and more high judicial rights. A decisive feature for this was the right to judge life and death, the blood jurisdiction. This was a right that originally only belonged to the sovereign. In this respect, the possession of this right is an important indicator of who was in control of an area.
Logically, the archbishops of Cologne claimed the installation of all counts in all of Westphalia from around 1300 onwards as an outflow of their ducal power, which they had held since the fall of Henry the Lion (1180). For the same reason, in 1338 Gottfried IV. Count von Arnsberg was enfeoffed by Ludwig IV. With three of his geographic areas in order to be able to reject the claims of the archbishop. As an expression of blood jurisdiction, the gographer should only be allowed to pass judgments if he had previously been provided with the sword by the duke.
In the Duchy of Westphalia there seems to have been a west-east divide in terms of the actual enforcement of blood jurisdiction. While the counts in the west acquired high judicial powers at an early stage, in the east they often only succeeded in doing so after 1500. The towns initially belonged to the districts of the Gogericht, but were then removed from them by archbishopric privileges in many places. So there were counters for cities and for the rural districts surrounding them.
The transition from the gografschaft to the administrative district can be determined when either the geographer has a bailiff or the gographer himself has been appointed bailiff. From this time on, the court revenues , the inclines , were considered official revenues.
Terms and titles
The chief administrator of an office was called "officiatus" or "bailiff". There are also the terms “Schulte” and “dapifer” or “Droste”, which were used with the same meaning as early as the 13th century. In the county of Arnsberg, the term Droste , which probably had more financial tasks here, almost completely disappeared around 1300 and was replaced by the "waiter". Towards the end of the 14th century it reappears and gradually asserts itself as the common name of the bailiff.
Legal position and duties
As an official of the sovereign, the bailiff was removable. As a result, he found himself in a much stronger dependency than a feudal man. As far as can be seen, the term of office seems to have been six to seven years, at least initially. However, offices have already been pledged. Then the term of office could be longer. Often the bailiffs came from regional noble families.
From around the second half of the 13th century, Droste was given the task of collecting and administering the archbishop's income in his area of responsibility. He was often based in an important castle, sometimes in a city. Archbishop's income could be stored more securely in fortified locations than anywhere else. In order to protect them, the bailiffs also became commanders of the castles. Later, their military tasks were extended to protect the country in their sphere of influence.
In addition to these tasks, the bailiff had to ensure the correctness of the weights and measures in his district and penalize any violations. Basically, the bailiffs had the tasks in their districts that the Marshal and later the Landdrost of Westphalia had to perform for the whole country. In his function as military commander-in-chief in his office, he had to call up the counts and their communities if the security of the office was in danger . But he was not allowed to start feuds on his own initiative. But if the archbishop or his marshal in Westphalia became involved in feuds, the bailiff had to lead them in their name and at the expense of his master.
Individual offices up to around 1500
The time of origin can only be roughly determined. While the development of the offices was not yet complete around 1300, by 1330 they were fully trained in their characteristic functions. This can be seen, for example, from the fact that the Archbishop of Cologne expressly pledged his offices in Westphalia in 1333. In this case it was about the offices of Waldenburg, Menden, Werl, Hovestadt, Brilon, Rüthen and Medebach.
After the death of Soest's last inheritance debt around 1300, the archbishop appointed an official to manage his property in the Soest Börde . It was based in Hovestadt. After the Soest feud , Hovestadt-Oestinghausen formed a smaller office, while Soest held the rest of the old office.
In the old county of Arnsberg it was the Drostei or the Schultenamt, from which the offices developed. It can be proven that they received military duties only after the county was bought. It is therefore controversial whether the county of Arnsberg already knew the official constitution. The offices of the former county were mainly Balve , Neheim , Arnsberg , Hirschberg and Eversberg . Here Arnsberg had a superior position, which is evident from the title "Supreme Administrator".
In the areas of Fredeburg and Bilstein , the official constitution was only introduced after the acquisition by Kurköln. The forerunner of the bailiff was a castle captain. The Waldenburg Office, which for a long time was considered independent of the territory of the Westphalian Marshal's Office, had a special position. Presumably this was due to its location, which was separated from the rest of the Electorate of Cologne until 1368. It still held this special position in the 15th century, which can be seen in its own hereditary land association, which was concluded in 1462. After the Soest feud, the office was often administered by the same bailiff as Fredeburg and Bilstein.
The Siegen office, which was still owned by the archbishop around 1300, was lost in the course of the 14th century. The Archbishop owned the Herford Gogericht before 1300. Archbishop Dietrich von Moers pledged this Gogericht, which in 1472 came to the Duke of Jülich-Berg. The Archbishop of Cologne still claimed the Gogericht in 1535, but was never able to enforce the claim. Other goge dishes that the archbishop owned in the Detmold and Lemgo area had already passed to the noble lords of Lippe around 1400 . In the west the Gogerichte Wickede and Langschede, which originally belonged to the Gogericht Menden, were lost to the Count von der Mark in the 14th century at the latest . The same applies to the Gogerichte Hagen and Schwelm.
Remarks
literature
- Albert K. Hömberg : County, Free County, Gografschaft. Munster 1949.
- Wilhelm Hücker: The emergence of the official constitution in the Duchy of Westphalia. In: Westphalian magazine. 68 (II), 1910, pp. 1-18.
- Joseph Korte: The Westphalian Marshal's Office. (= Munster contributions to historical research, New Series Volume 21). Munster 1909.
- Ewald Schmeken : The Saxon go-jurisdiction in the area between the Rhine and Weser. Munster 1961.