The emergence of the kink landscape
from the peasant sheet of 10 September 1988

For our villages, apart from certain times of war, there has hardly been a more agitated, but at the same time more beneficial, time than coupling.

Christian Wegner, chronicler of the Tornescher Ortschronik, begins his account of the agrarian reform carried out in the second half of the 18th century. What was it that made our ancestors so excited about 200 years ago and was so beneficial to the development of agriculture? In order to make this event understandable for us today, we need to look back at the way in which our farming communities used to live in the Middle Ages.

In order to obtain settlement and economic space, extensive deforestation had to be carried out in the early Middle Ages to reclaim the land. There were many settlement islands - the birthplaces of our villages - in the otherwise large forest areas. This creation of cultivated land was made in a cooperative way by the farmers. The result was a varied field, pasture and meadow corridor, which was interspersed with Krattwäldern and bushes.

House, yard and cabbage garden (house garden) were in the individual possession of the farmers. Each new field (Kamp) was divided into small strips (blows) according to the number of farms or hooves in the village. They were farmed together in so-called. Dreifelderwirtschaft (it changed fallow, winter and summer grain) as a field community. There was only one common access to the respective Kamp. The individual work steps such as plowing, sowing and harvesting had to be carried out jointly by the hoof- men (Flurzwang).

Similarly common was the common land, the common pasture, the Meentland or community, however it was named, used. It served mainly as cattle pasture, but also for hitting heath and moorland plagues, for fertilizing the fields and as a bush forest for supplying wood.

The cohabitation of the village as well as the field community affairs were regulated by "Beliebungen". In them were guidelines on the uses in field and village strung together. Decision-making body of the field community was the meeting of the Hufner or Bauleute. They decided on their "arbitrariness," whose observance was enforced by penance. Only then could the cooperative management of the corridor be secured. The so-called "little people" of the village, Kätner, Heuer people, Brinksitter and Insten had no access to the meetings of Hufner or builders, they had no rights of use, they had to pay for their small livestock grass money.

The nature of the management of our villages and the organization of the villages has existed for centuries. This agricultural constitution is called "hooves" or "market constitution". It left little room for individual action, expulsion of new farmsteads as well as economic freedom of the individual farmer. The extensive and cumbersome operation on the village fields ordered in the field communities and the then modest fertilizer possibilities with heath plagues produced only small profits. Nobody was able to meet the increased tax burdens that burdened individual hooves after the long wars of the 17th and early 18th centuries.

The liberal aspirations in the intellectual world and politics that emerged generally in Western Europe in the eighteenth century did not stop in the field of agriculture either.

Already at the beginning of the 18th century, the "authority" gave the farmers the recommendation to combine several smaller fields into larger ones. That read like this:

As much as anyone, by voluntary conversion, brings each one of his country into satisfied koppeln or Kämpe, as well as the general Weyde according to Hoff number is shown without compensation and recorded recorded.

In 1744 a decree on land expulsion was issued. She gave the opportunity to found new farmsteads. During this time, many new farms have emerged. In 1767 the landgrave of the Pinneberg estate had all peasant bailiffs come to him. He taught them about the benefits of pairing and encouraged them to "use their best efforts to bring their fellow inmates to the proper exchange and hooking up of their village fields."

These requests and encouragements from "official side" had a different success. Thus, just one year after the instruction of the peasants by the Landdrosten 12 villages had their individual scattered parcels exchanged among themselves so that larger areas were obtained for each farmer. Other villages behaved stubborn, here was with requests and encouragements "from above" nothing to achieve.

In 1771 the coupling regulation is issued. This regulation repeals the Feldgemeinschaft and the Flurzwang and carries out extensive land consolidation. This was the legal basis that transformed the land into the private property of the peasants. But even this regulation did not impress many peasants yet, so the ruler of the country saw himself on July 28, 1784, as the cause of a "supreme resolution". This showed effect.

In 1785, for example, in Esingen the Royal Schleswig-Holstein Land Commission, at its head Johann Bruyn, Major and upper surveyor, with the Generalvermessung the entire village. The result was recorded in a survey register. A distinction was made between "Old Field and Meadow Land", "Recorded Land" and, last but not least, the "Land of the Commons". At the same time, a so-called "crediting instrument" was put together. In it the qualitative differences of the individual soil types were specified. (For Esingen: 1 Himpten meadow land equals 2 Himpten farmland equals 6 Himpten Heide.)

The peasants had to agree by oath and signature to this "norm". The next step was the making of a provisional earth book. For each farm site, a sheet was created in which the "Old land" and the "Received land" were listed in terms of quantity and quality.

Then one began with the distribution of the commons, whereby the small farmers (half, third and twelfth Hufner) got the larger portions. This put this part of the village population on a more sound economic footing. The final Erdbuch, in which the landed property of each individual farmer is recorded, was passed through the village Esingen - after reading by the surveyor Lund - signed by the farmers on 4 August 1788.

Every farmer - as was explicitly required - had to integrate his own land with "living pathos"; As the official German said, they pacified the fields with "ditches, ramparts, and pathenes," that is, with knicks. The fenced arable land was called paddock. The Knicks and Redder (double kinks) still determine our landscape today. The forest elements, craters and shrubs, which had been scattered randomly before the agrarian reform, were completely replaced by the ecology system after being coupled by the arranged buckling system.

The agrarian reform, which was introduced in the 18th century and was largely implemented, was the basis and prerequisite for the progressive agriculture of the 19th and 20th centuries.