The medieval monastic landscape of Dikninge. Layout of the monastery, property rights and influence on reclamations.

Founded in 1141, the Benedictine monastery of Ruinen in the Dutch province of Drenthe is the oldest monastery in the northern part of the Netherlands. It was founded by the noble Van Ruinen family with the help of the Bishop of Utrecht in the vicinity of the family’s castle and church in the village of Ruinen (southwestern Drenthe). In 1325 the monastery was moved to a coversand ridge called Dikninge along the river Reest, where it survived until the Reformation in 1598. In the fourteenth century it became more independent from the noble family. In 2021 an extensive master thesis project was carried out in order to reconstruct the layout of the medieval monastic landscape and the medieval property rights of the former abbey. Archive research, soil borings and geophysical research revealed the medieval locations of the abbey house (main building), abbey church and refectory. Studies of medieval charters, registers and accounts showed that Dikninge owned 54 farms within a radius of about 30 kilometres around the abbey, making it one of the biggest landowners in medieval Drenthe, with a yearly income from the farms that could be used to secure the maintenance of the abbey and the livelihood of its monks and nuns. The Wilderness Act enabled the Bishop of Utrecht to grant wetland reclamation rights to several of his noblemen, monasteries and chapters in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Dikninge abbey obtained these rights from the Chapter of St John in the year 1200. The abbey subsequently played a decisive role in reclaiming the wetlands and peat bogs along the central part of the Reest valley.