Record Group - 06. gentlemen

In the 15th century, the development of Saxony's original manors into the actual knights' manors, endowed with judicial powers, began, as they appeared conceptually after the first parliament of the Electorate of Saxony in 1438. In addition to managing the property themselves, the owners of the manor now exercised their regional sovereign rights, both under older feudal and inheritance rule and under younger judicial rule. In the same period, the division of the knights' estates into written and official estates began. From this differentiation conclusions can be drawn about the origin and taxation as well as the position of the knights' estates in relation to the state authorities, the lord of the state and their representation in the state parliament. Their owners, the knighthood or estates, held a special position due to their privileged jurisdiction and tax exemption until the introduction of the constitution in 1831. The waiving of taxes was based on military service, which was gradually converted into knight's money in the course of military reform up to the beginning of the 18th century. The differentiation also concerned the exercise of superior and hereditary jurisdiction. This was also reflected in the relationship between the owners of the manor and their peasants. The supreme jurisdiction, which always included hereditary jurisdiction and only applied to written knights' estates, meant full judicial independence and, for the owners of these estates, participation in the state parliaments.<br/><br/> Such a knights' estate represented an independent judicial and administrative district which was on an equal footing with the sovereign's office. On the other hand, the official knights' estates, which as a rule were only subject to lower or hereditary jurisdiction, were subordinated to the offices. In the 17th and 18th centuries, many manor owners commissioned trained lawyers to exercise their judicial and administrative powers. The patrimonial courts created in this way belonged directly to the knights' estates. These patrimonial courts existed until the voluntary cession of the landowner's jurisdiction to the State after the constitutional reforms of the 1830s or until the final assumption of jurisdiction by the State in 1856 in accordance with the Law of 11 August 1855 on the Future Establishment of the Authorities of First Instance for the Administration of Justice and Administration. This period also saw the redemption of the fronts, easements and other services as well as the division of communal land according to the law of 17 March 1832 on redemption and division of common property. The implementation of this law, which dragged on for decades, meant the end of the landlord's circumstances.<br/><br/>In the context of the abolition of patrimonial jurisdiction in Saxony in the 19th century, the powers of the Knights' Estates in both court and administrative matters were transferred to the Royal Courts founded specifically for this purpose and to the existing judicial offices until 1 October 1856. This formally included the takeover of all files and other documents of the patrimonial courts by these court authorities. Now the manors were essentially only economic units in the countryside, although the lords of the manor still possessed some limited rights and privileges until the November Revolution of 1918. These included, inter alia, non-subordination to local courts, the granting of certain concessions, the exercise of certain patronage rights over church and school, and the exercise of police powers. After the Second World War, the knights' estates in Saxony were expropriated on the basis of the "Verordnung über die landwirtschaftliche Bodenreform" (Ordinance on Agricultural Land Reform) issued by the Saxony State Administration on 10 September 1945. With the "Order on the safeguarding and utilisation of the non-agricultural inventory of manor houses expropriated as a result of the land reform" of 17 May 1946, a large part of the archives of the knights' estates was placed in state custody. In the following years about 400 aristocratic archives in Saxony were taken over by the state archives and thus secured.<br/><br/>The individual holdings are described differently in the departments of the state archives as "Grundherrschaft ..." or "Rittergut ...", without this pointing to different holdings contents. In addition to the knightly estates, other lords exercised jurisdiction, e.g., class estates, free estates, hammer-, mill- and metallurgical estates, parish courts, hereditary courts and others. Finally, it is worth mentioning the vassal mining offices and courts in the Bergarchiv Freiberg, which were "mining authorities" of the respective lords of the manor, who mined on low mineral resources (the silver mining shelf, on the other hand, had been completely established by the Wettins in their territories since the 15th century). If the sovereign was interested in the mining in question, he had to acquire the corresponding rights of the lords of the manor to exercise these rights.<br/><br/>A special case in territorial expansion and political significance were the Schönburg Lordships in West Saxony, which had many branches and whose records can be viewed in the Chemnitz State Archives. Further information can be found under the resistance group "06.01 Landes- und Rezessherrschaften".<br/><br/>The records of knightly estates of the northern Saxon territories which fell to Prussia after 1815 are kept in the Saxony-Anhalt State Archives.

Saxon State Archives (Archivtektonik)

Es gilt die Sächsische Archivbenutzungsverordnung (SächsGVBl. Jg.2003, Bl.-Nr. 4 S. 79)

• German

This description was automatically translated with the help of www.DeepL.com. Translation errors are possible. Please note that the document itself has not been translated.

Original description: Archivportal-D

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/