Müdehorst Monastery

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The foundation walls of the monastery church, made visible in 2018
Foundation walls of the choir room
Müdehorst in the Vita sancti Waltgeri

The monastery Tired Horst , also pen Tired Horst called, was to 789 in what is now the district Lower Dornberg Depp village in Bielefeld District Dornberg founded. It was one of the oldest monastic institutions in Westphalia . It was soon given up in favor of Herford Abbey .

history

After the Saxon Duke Widukind gave up the fight against the Franks and was baptized in 785, the Christianization of Saxony was promoted. New monastic communities were founded in Bremen and Osnabrück , for example - from which the later dioceses emerged - and relics were brought into the region. The foundation of Müdehorst also belongs in this context. Corresponding royal documents are missing and the processes are difficult to reconstruct. Müdehorst is likely to have been the first women's monastery or monastery in the Saxon region.

About Saint Waltger († November 16, 825 in Herford) and his attempt to found a monastery church in Müdehorst, the clergyman Wigand , who lives in Kirchdornberg , wrote a biography in the style of the veneration of saints , the Vita sancti Waltgeri:

  • At that time the noble Herr Waltger lived in Westphalia on the mountain called Dornberg. ... The memorable Waltger is the first founder of a monastery community in honor of the Holy Mother of God on Saxon soil and pondered in his heart where he could find a suitable place for her devoted servants ...
  • When he came to the place called Mudehorst ("Müdehorst"), he laid the foundations [of the church] there. But after a divine voice from above had told him that the building there did not correspond to the will of the Lord, he gave up his plan. Evidence of this building is still visible now.

The facility in Müdehorst did not last long. After the Vita Waltgeri, the buildings were not completed. Possibly the available area at the confluence between the Schwarzbach and the Beckendorfer Mühlenbach was too small to accommodate all the buildings. It was given up in favor of the establishment at Alt-Herford . This foundation also failed. Only the founding of Herford Abbey was successful. The period between 800 and 819/823 is given for the relocation from Müdehorst.

Digs

In 1948/49, the Dornberg teacher Heinrich Schiller discovered during excavations with a group of schoolchildren in the field of the Meyer zu Müdehorst farm remains of a building made of limestone, which they interpreted as part of the sought-after monastery church. Below the depth of a plow they found fragments of a foundation wall up to one meter wide, which has now been classified as a ground monument . To protect the ground monument, the excavation site was backfilled with soil without being measured. Apparently the stone building was based on Irish-Anglo-Saxon models, which Waltger was probably familiar with from his pilgrimage to the English king. Comparable is the church of St. Johns in Escomb , built around the year 675, in County Durham in north-east England. The floor plan, dimensions and constriction between the nave and the choir are largely the same.

The documentation and measurements of the 1949 excavation, as well as a range of other information, led to uncertain assessments over time. The Archeology Working Group of the Historical Association for the County of Ravensberg therefore carried out a new excavation in 1991/92 in cooperation with LWL Archeology in order to clarify the dimensions of the foundation walls. They found the north-west corner of the building's foundations and were able to determine the size of the church from this: 32.5 meters in length with a clearance of 10 meters.

Monument protection

In the summer of 2018 , members of the Historical Association for the County of Ravensberg once again exposed the foundation walls up to the upper edge to secure the over 1200-year-old monument . In coordination with LWL Archeology, they filled the trenches with gravel and laid quarry stone slabs over them in order to keep the floor plan of the church visible in the meadow in the long term. On the day of the open memorial on September 9, 2018, they were able to hand over the traces of the oldest church building in Bielefeld, documented by written and archaeological evidence. The entry in the list of monuments of the city of Bielefeld was made on April 14, 1986 (LWL list: DKZ 3917,47 / Bielefelder monument list: No. B37).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Caspar Ehlers : The integration of Saxony into the Frankish empire . Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-525-35887-0 , p. 278, p. 282 f.
  2. ↑ Original manuscript [Wigand]: Vita sancti Waltgeri. Landesarchiv NRW / Westphalia Department, Mscr VII No. 5208, accessed on August 20, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Erich Forwick: Waltger von Dornberg or Saint Walther von Herford. The Latin text of his biography was translated and provided with an introduction, notes and references . In: Annual report of the Historical Association for the County of Ravensberg, Volume 72, 1979/80, pp. 7–54, digitized city archive Bielefeld . Retrieved July 12, 2020
  4. ↑ Press report: Mysterious remains of the wall. Excavations in Babenhausen. Was there a chapel here? . In: Freie Presse Bielefeld, November 9, 1949
  5. ^ Hans Thümmler: New finds on medieval architecture in Westphalia. In: Westphalia. Hefte für Geschichte, Kunst und Volkskunde, Vol. 31, 1953, Issue 2/3, p. 287
  6. ↑ Photo of Escomb Church on Wikimedia Commons
  7. ↑ Information on the website of the English parish Escomb
  8. ^ Historical Association Ravensberg

literature

  • Claus Dahm: The beginnings of Herford Abbey and the foundations of Müdehorst . In: Historisches Jahrbuch für den Kreis Herford 7, 1966, pp. 7-17
  • Hans-Jürgen Warnecke: Wodan and Heeresfurt. The prehistory of Herford Abbey and the church in Dornberg. In: Irene Crusius (Ed.): Contributions to the history and structure of the medieval Germania sacra . Göttingen 1989, pp. 84-87.
  • Daniel Bérenger: Müdehorst and Jostberg. Two monastery church ruins in Bielefeld. In: Annual report of the historical association for the county of Ravensberg. Volume 92, 2007, pp. 7-26.

Web links

See also

Coordinates: 52 ° 3 ′ 56.8 ″  N , 8 ° 30 ′ 11 ″  E