Altengronau court

The court Altengronau (also: Gronau ) came in 1379 to half of the Steckel salvors to the rule of Hanau and was thus later to the county of Hanau and follow the Hanau-Münzenberg . This judicial district was a unit inherited from the Middle Ages . The Altengronau court included the places

• Altengronau (as a fiefdom to Hutten )
• Breunings
• Dittenbrunn (today: Dittenbrunnhof )
• Emmersbach (desert)
• Gerrod (desert)
• Kunhecken (desert)
• Luderbreiden (desert)
• Mottgers
• Rohrbach (desert) - to Hutten
• Rotelsau (desert)
• Willingshof

Places of the Hanau Office in Schwarzenfels:

• Fronrod ( desert )
• Heubach
• Hubertsdorf (desert)
• Leibolds (desert)
• Neuendorf (desert)
• Neuengronau
• Oberzell
• Ramholz (to court until the 2nd half of the 17th century, after that Ramholz reign )
• Schwarzenfels
• Dying fritz
• Uttrichshausen
• Vollmerz until 1698
• Weichersbach
• Wintersbach (desert)
• Züntersbach (half part of the office)

The process of territorialization and the formation of state sovereignty carried out by the County of Hanau-Münzenberg in the second half of the 15th century remained incomplete in the Altengronau court, as other nobles held important rights in a number of villages , in particular the von Hutten and von families Thüngen , but also the Landgraves of Hesse , so that the Counts of Hanau-Münzenberg did not succeed in integrating the Altengronau court as a whole into their county.

For the Counts of Hanau-Munzenberg, the solution to the problem was to form the Schwarzenfels Office from those parts of the Altengronau court in which their rights seemed sufficiently strong to carry out territorialization . That was the vast majority of the old dish. The places of the Altengronau court in which there were strong rights of the lower aristocracy were continued by Hanau as the "Altengronau court", although this administrative unit had lost much of its importance due to the outsourcing of the Schwarzenfels office. Added to this was the phenomenon that a large number of villages in the Altengronau court fell into desolation in the late Middle Ages. This may have been due to the fact that the area covered by the court, the low mountain range in the area of ​​the eastern Kinzig valley , belonged to the less agriculturally less productive areas and therefore first locations in the event of negative changes in the climate ( Little Ice Age ) or in the social structure ( Plague ) were abandoned here. Nonetheless, the “Altengronau court” continued - at least conceptually - until the dissolution of the Old Kingdom .

literature

• Heinrich Reimer: Historical local dictionary for Kurhessen . Marburg 1926.

Web links

• Altengronau, Main-Kinzig district. Historical local dictionary for Hessen. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).