As the peasants saw it, the overlords relentlessly pursued their agenda of pushing them out of the forests: sometimes through legal tricks, sometimes through violence, sometimes through "the tyranny of the forest office"

Most of the petitions concerning woodland centred around access to woodland resources: richer peasants complained that they used to have it but now the overlord took it away. Poorer peasants complained that they had gone from little to zero.

The petitions range from sophisticated and self-assured (by wealthier peasants) to naive and desperate (by members of the rapidly expanding poorer layers of peasantry - they could usually read and write at this point, see pic, but observe how unsure much of the handwriting is)

The first Bohemian statistical work (published in 1885) already contained maps as well.

From the mid-1870s, the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture also started to publish official forest statistics, including details on, for example, offences against forest law. As the picture shows, in 1874 Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia gave more than one third of all cases.

Nonetheless, altogether they provide a huge mass of data! Here's a picture of the person behind it all: Emil Hošek (1923-2000). As the uniform also shows, he was (like most authors of individual volumes) originally trained as a forester not as a historian.

The volumes are essentially descriptive, summarizing information from older management plans and similar documents. Considering the number of people involved, the quality of individual volumes naturally varies quite a bit.

This impressive but internationally little known research programme was carried out between the 1950s and 1980s. Altogether ca. 550 (!) volumes were prepared by forest historians describing in detail the history of individual forest districts based on archival documents.