Trees for marking boundaries of landed property in premodern Estonia

The German and Danish conquest of the Estonian region in the 13th century, which resulted in new power and property relationships, restructured the cultural landscape and gradually replaced the former zone or regional boundaries by linear boundaries. Until ca 1650 property boundaries were usually described by trees marked with a cross. At the end of the 17th century, Swedish authorities began to regulate the demarcation of landed property boundaries with stones, which do not change their form as trees do. In folklore collections, little information is found about boundary trees; rather, tales about the trees with a sign of a cross cut into them were usually related to the magic of death, to remember the deceased by a tree with a cross scraped into it on the border of their former farmstead or village.