Stedinger

Stedingen is an area north of Bremen in the delta of the Weser river in north-western Germany.

In 1106, five Dutchmen journeyed from the mouth of the Rhine to Bremen to negotiate an arrangement with Archbishop Frederick I of Bremen to settle the swampy regions south of the Hunte on both sides of the Weser River, an area which came to be called Stedingen. The peasants were to cultivate the land, which would pass from father to son in free hereditary possession, while every settler would pay a yearly tax of one pfennig, the eleventh sheaf of all harvests, and a tenth of all livestock as acknowledgement of the archbishop's overlordship; otherwise, they would be free to administer their own affairs without interference by any secular lord. The arrangement found great favor among the younger Dutch peasants, who went to settle the area in large numbers, despite the difficulty of cultivating the marshy moorland, where the soil was poor and Heath, cotton grass and reeds covered the land and the riverbank. The settlers dug ditches to drain much of the water and built dikes to provide dry land and to prevent flooding.

During the reign of Gerard I (German: Gerhard) as archbishop (1210–1219), his kinsman Otto I, Count of Oldenburg, was given permission to built two fortresses, Lechtenburg and Lineburg, in Stedingen, in order to enforce both ecclesiastical and feudal discipline on the peasantry, who clung to old-style Germanic folk-customs and continually sought greater independence from the overlordship of Bremen. "The Stedingers refused to pay tithes and to perform forced labour as serfs, sticking to the original agreement of settlement. These duties were demanded of them with considerable severity...". The Stedingers accused the Count's vassals of rape and kidnapping, and determined at their Thing or popular assembly to proclaim total independence, to refuse to pay their feudal tithes, to build bulwarks with fortified gates and trenches along the roads, and to form militias in order to defend against any encroachment. Gerard, busied with other concerns, did little to counter these acts of defiance.

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