Vom Ritterhof zum Gut

[From manor house to estate. Mecklenburg’s lower noble estates in the late Middle Ages. E-Book]

The first credit history of Mecklenburg is the result of intensive source research. The author analyses thousands of pledges from the lower nobility and other late medieval written sources in order to trace the economic development of the 14th and 15th centuries in Mecklenburg on this basis.

This work also closes a gap in our knowledge of the origins of the Mecklenburg manors. It explains the disappearance of numerous manors in the course of late medieval transformation and under the pressure of the late medieval agrarian depression. The estate economy in Mecklenburg was by no means taken over from Holstein, but the Lübeck area, including north-west Mecklenburg and neighbouring areas of Holstein, represented a common nucleus of the estate economy in the southern Baltic region at the beginning of the 15th century.

The results of the study show that manor farming not only goes back much further in Mecklenburg’s regional history than previously believed, but also provides what is probably the oldest evidence to date in the Baltic Sea region with a source discovery from the first decade of the 15th century.