The forests of the Gornji grad estate in a tradional way of husbandry and unsuccesful trials of introduction a rational forest management in the period of transition from the eighteenth to nineteenth century

The estate Gornji grad, since 1462 in the ownership in the diocese of Ljubljana, owned for centuries large forests and leasehold pastures. They were managaed in a traditional way with the servitude or otherwise acquired rights of the bondsmen, applying selected felling of the trees, mostly without allocation to the bondsmen or by increasing the acreage of the pasture on the expense of that of the forests as well as in many other ways. All this finally resulted, although unintentionally, in the benefit of the bondsmen. To increase the productiveness of the forests, administration staff from abroad was employed, whose expertise should introduce new forest management based on the principles of the German forest school. The methods of the forest management should be changed as much as possible, but the bondsmen raised against all such solutions and they hindered mostly very effectively every realization of these innovations. All these measures were punishable according to the laws valid in that time in the region, the direction of the estate being at the same time also administrative, juridical, police and recruiting authority. The feudal order was already pretty weak in that time and so the estate authorities could not exhibit the expected strictness and expediousness in the processing the denunciations of the forest management staff dealing with forests and pasture excesses. They could not afford to upset the bondsmen even more. The aim of this treatise is the description of the mentioned forests and their management together with extremely complicated relations between the authorities and the bondsmen as well the problems arising at the introduction of the rational forest economy.