[2][3] The Diepholz Lords then owned the Hollburg Castle between Holßel [nds] and Midlum on the brink of the Wesermünde Geest ridge,[4] allowing a good view over the lower Land of Wursten, then a corporation of free Frisian peasants under only loose overlordship of the Prince-Archbishopric of Bremen.

[10] Unlike unsettled and undeveloped areas where Cistercians usually founded new monasteries the farmlands donated to the convent were held by feudal tenants and sparsed in and around Midlum.

All over the parish of Midlum, e.g. in Sorthum,[11] Northum,[12] Wenckebüttel and Esigstedt,[13] the convent acquired the overlordship to farmlands from those lords who held it before,[14] in order to round off its demesne.

[14] In the valley cuts of the geest between Holßel and Nordholz the convent impounded little becks in order to lay out stewponds for the fish as fasting dishes at lent.

[14] The convent's demesne expansion meant the exclusive usage of geest forests, mires and heaths, previously also commonly used by the free Frisian peasants from the mostly treeless Land of Wursten in order to gain turf, firewood, timber and the fertilising plaggen.

[2] The defeated knights hat to withdraw deep into the Bederkesa Bailiwick and exposed the boundary adjacent to the Land of Wursten, among others the Midlum parish.

[10] The Wursten Frisians remembered the ordeal of the free Stedingen peasants in 1234, who refused to accept feudal overlordship too, but whom Gebhard had excommunicated and against whom he induced and fought a papally confirmed crusade, all after few Stedingers had slain an itinerant monk.

[17] In 1331 the commoner Gerhard de Merne (= Marren, Süder- and Nordermarren near Midlum) usurped the tithe from Esigstedt, protested by the convent, the enfranchised beneficiary, and only left again to the nuns after the pastors of the Wursten parishes had intervened.