Context hierarchy in Spring Web MVC

 In the Web MVC framework, each DispatcherServlet has its own WebApplicationContext, which inherits all the beans already defined in the rootWebApplicationContext. These inherited beans can be overridden in the servlet-specific scope, and you can define new scope-specific beans local to a given Servlet instance.

 

https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html