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Who Held the Mills, and the Lawsuits

Who Granted the Tenure

A hereditary-rent mill belonged to someone else, who granted it, collected its rent, and kept the file. For Linse’s two mills the answer is not the same.

For the middle mill the grantor was the ducal Chamber, through the district of Wickensen. Hassel and Bege say so of one Linse mill in 1803, and it fits the middle mill’s history as a Chamber purchase of 1661. The Chamber’s grant file of 1770 to 1844 is joined in the catalog by its other Linse mill files: a file on the grinding and oil mill at Linse and its lease, 1770 to 1782, covering Dempewulff’s tenancy and the grant of 1774; the “hereditary mill at Linse,” 1691 to 1804; improvements to the lord’s grinding and oil mill at Linse, 1716 to 1776; and the Brünig sawmill request of 1777. None has been read.

The second wheel, which Hassel and Bege call a hereditary mill, had an older and different history. A file of 1661 and 1662 concerns a mill at Linse held as a fief from the abbey of Abdinghof at Paderborn, disputed between a von Wiedenbrück, a Hake and the district of Wickensen. Abdinghof’s own register of fiefs places its holdings in Brunswick along the Weser from Holzminden to Hameln, at Halle on the Weser, and at Bodenwerder.

Two other lords stood in the background. The von der Schulenburg estate at Hehlen, the family’s opponent in the 1820s, could in principle have been a grantor, and if so its lease would be among the estate’s mill papers. This is possible only: no document names the estate as the Wesemanns’ grantor, Linse was governed through Wickensen rather than Hehlen in the 1700s, and the Hehlen court district was dissolved in 1807. Then there was Häger law. Rustenbach’s 1903 study counts not just two hereditary mills at Linse but two hereditary mills under Häger law (hägerische Erbmühlen), a separate legal system. The Häger were Flemish and Dutch settlers brought in around 1100, first at Eschershausen and nearby, by Bishop Udo of Hildesheim and confirmed by his successor Bernhard, to clear woodland on unusually good terms; the only remaining mark of servitude was a death duty. Their holdings lay scattered across the lordship of Homburg and were governed by their own Häger law, under the local nobility and the monastery of Amelungsborn, right up to the French period. Amelungsborn held a Häger court at Stadtoldendorf. A mill held under Häger law answered to neither the Chamber nor the Schulenburgs. Rustenbach adds that apart from the holders of the Häger mills and a few others, almost no landholder in the register farmed Häger property alone, so the Häger millers were a small, named class. In 1529 the last high court of the lordship of Homburg, at Heyen, denied the local nobles any jurisdiction except over their own Häger courts.

The Lawsuits

For sixty-three years the Wesemanns of Linse were in court almost without a break, against three different opponents: the Thran miller, the Schulenburg estate and a family of Hameln creditors. They were plaintiffs as often as defendants. The quarrels were over gears and dams, never over title; nothing in the files shows anyone challenging the family’s right to its mill. Hereditary tenure is the thread that runs through the files, from the district registers of about 1545 and 1580 to the suit of 1775, the Bodenwerder grant and the Reppner buyout of 1841, and the appeal file of 1825 names a hereditary-rent mill near Hehlen without saying whose it was.

The first suit is the earliest file to name a Wesemann at Linse, and it is the one that shows he held his mill on hereditary rent. The same file holds the oil miller Johann Friedrich Daniel Höveler’s request for a groats gear, which shows that the Lenne mills ran oil gears as well as grain gears, and a document of 1733 bound into it. The brawl of 1785 at the Weser ferry had nothing to do with water, but the clerk still wrote Deneke down as “the Thran miller” when Bodenwerder tried to hold the Linse innkeeper Konrad Settemeyer and Deneke’s servant. The 1791 suits sit in the files of the ducal high court (Justizkanzlei), the Duchy’s supreme court until the French abolished it in 1808. In 1791 the new Thran miller, Boerms, sued Johann Heinrich Wesemann over water overflowing, and in the same year sued the justiciary Fricke at Bevern for dragging out his case; the caption of the second file reads “Boerms against Börms”.

The longest fight came in the 1820s, over a new grinding gear. Three files tell one dispute at three levels. In the estate’s own three-volume file, the Schulenburgs sue “the miller Wesemann in Linse” over damage from the grinding gear in the Gripsmühle. In 1824 Wesemann sued the estate, then in the hands of guardians for a minor heir, before the Brunswick state court. From 1825 to 1829 the guardianship pressed its demand to remove the gear before the high court of appeal. Each side sued the other. That court, set up in 1817, served Brunswick, Waldeck-Pyrmont, Lippe and Schaumburg-Lippe, so a quarrel over a gear on the Lenne went on appeal to a court shared by four German states.

The 1831 suit was brought by the heirs of Schomburg, millers at Hameln, over interest owed. Schomburg and Schulenburg are separate families. The suit had first been brought by a guardian for minor heirs; by 1831 the heirs sued in their own names, so the debt behind it was much older than 1831.

The last file, of 1838, is the only one that names Ludwig. The town council’s brief in the file calls the plaintiff “the miller Ludewig Wesemann the elder at Linse,” which settles that it was Georg Ludewig, not his son Heinrich Christian Ludewig. He was petitioning the Hannover ministry over a parcel in the Bodenwerder fields said to have been sold to him; bundled with it, the heirs of the baker Weferling asked for a new inquiry into a concealed sale. It was no ordinary purchase but a disputed, hidden sale with a denunciation attached. A mortgage bond copied into the file recites Georg Ludewig’s inheritance contract with his brother, the miller Ernst Wesemann, of 18 August 1818, with a supplement of 3 December 1819. It is the only record of how Johann Heinrich Wesemann’s estate was divided.

Across these files the family’s center of gravity moves west: from a Brunswick village mill in 1775, to a Hanoverian town mill by 1807, to a disputed land purchase across the border in 1838. One more file shows how far the name reached. In 1841 and 1842 the miller Heinrich Peters of Woltwiesche paid off a hereditary rent he owed to the millers Maasberg and Wesemann of Reppner, near Salzgitter, ninety kilometers east. That Wesemann collected the rent rather than paying it, and belonged to a separate eastern branch.