Monastery forest

A monastery forest or monastery forest is a forest that belongs to a monastery . In the Middle Ages, many monasteries had extensive forests, which, for example, served to supply the monks with wood and meat. Often these forests passed into their ownership as a sovereign foundation when the monastery was founded, sometimes the forests were only acquired later through purchase or donation.

In the course of the German colonization in the east and the development of the country in the Middle Ages , a monastery was often the starting point for settling previously uninhabited forest areas, so that it often had correspondingly large forests.

Examples of a former monastery forest are

• the Paulinzella forest of the Paulinzella monastery in central Thuringia
• the cell forest of the Altzella monastery near Freiberg (Saxony)
• the forest of the former Benedictine nunnery in Kitzingen, Lower Franconia.

literature

• Stefan von Below, Stefan Breit: Forest - from God's gift to private property: judicial conflicts between sovereigns and subjects over the forest in the early modern era. Lucius & Lucius, 1998, ISBN 3-82-820079-6 .