Löllbach () is an – a municipality belonging to a , a kind of collective municipality – in the Bad Kreuznach district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde Nahe-Glan, whose seat is in Bad Sobernheim.
Geography
Location Löllbach is a typical clump village and lies between Lauterecken and Meisenheim, off the major traffic routes, in the North Palatine Uplands at an elevation of above mean sea level. Running through the village is the Jeckenbach, and emptying into it in the village core is the Schweinschieder Bach. The municipal area measures .
Neighbouring municipalities Clockwise from the north, Löllbach's neighbours are the municipalities of Jeckenbach and Breitenheim, which likewise lie within the Bad Kreuznach district, the municipalities of Medard and Kappeln, which lie in the neighbouring Kusel district, and the municipality of Schweinschied, also in the Bad Kreuznach district.
Constituent communities Also belonging to Löllbach are the outlying homesteads of Alte Ölmühle and Altheckmühle.Statistisches Landesamt Rheinland-Pfalz – Amtliches Verzeichnis der Gemeinden und Gemeindeteile , Seiten 15&16 (PDF; 2,3 MB)
History
Prehistory Some 5,000 years ago, the Löllbach area lay in trackless wilderness. The mountains were covered in old-growth forest, and most of the dales were marshy. It was at about this time, though, that the first humans set foot here, nomadic hunter-gatherer folk, whose feet made the first human paths through the area, although these would not have looked very different from trails made by the deer. In the rural cadastral area known as the “Lagerstück” near Löllbach, a stone hatchet and a sharp-edged arrowhead were unearthed, which these early hunters would not have been happy to lose. Only 2,000 years later, thus about 3000 BC, scattered bits of tribe from far away made themselves at home on the local heights at homesteads. They already knew about the metals tin and copper, and the alloy that could be made from them: bronze. Iron was then still unknown to them. Knowledge of these people's presence comes from the graves that they left behind, barrows, known in German, not altogether accurately, as or “Huns’ graves”. These can be found in the Striedter Wald (forest), as well as in other places in the area. These Bronze Age dwellers had also learnt the rudiments of cropraising. These people were succeeded by the great Celtic tribes who came into the area from northern France and northern Germany to settle across their vast new homeland stretching to the northern edge of the Alps. They, too, worked the land and raised livestock, although they hunted as well. Archaeological finds have also shown that they had also mastered pottery along with bronze and iron casting. In their time, the Löllbach area was already widely settled with homesteads in hillside glades. In their struggle with Germanic peoples who had crossed the Rhine, the Celts fled for shelter behind the ringwalls at their refuge castles that they had built on mountaintops: Marialskopf near Medard, Raumberg, Donnersberg, and many others. The Celts, however, were outnumbered and melded with the victors, with the result being the Treveri, a people of mixed Celtic and Germanic stock, from whom the Latin name for the city of Trier, , is also derived.Prehistory
Antiquity In the 1st century BC, the rulers of the Western World at that time, the Romans, had incorporated Gaul into their empire as a new colony. When the Treveri now once again found themselves beset by the Germanic hordes, they called on the Roman general and conqueror of Gaul, Julius Caesar, for help. In 58 BC, he drove the Germanic peoples back across the Rhine. Nevertheless, the Treveri were hardly spared foreign rule, as the Romans remained in their land as rulers for the next 500 years with the Rhine as the Imperial frontier to be guarded against the Germanic peoples that they had driven out. From their stronghold at Trier, supplies rolled through the Löllbach area to the frontier, but not before the old wilderness paths gave way to paved roads leading across the heights. Thus did the Roman roads come into being. These would have carried all manner of traffic, from marching legions to commercial wagons to dignified Roman ladies hurrying to their husbands in some garrison town on the Rhine. Here and there on each side of the Roman roads, however, on the hillsides, lay Roman , proud lordly seats. They were extensive farms taken from the defeated Celto-Germanic people that the Romans had then granted long-serving legionnaires as a reward – and also to ensure their continued hegemony. Celts worked the land there and served their Roman masters. One such Roman estate is known to have lain near where the church now stands in neighbouring Medard, but there were definitely several others in the area. Besides the Roman roads and the Roman monument near Schweinschied, many other Roman finds bear witness to a great number of Romans having lived in the area. Near Löllbach, in the rural cadastral area known as the “Lochwiese”, a Löllbach farmer unearthed a so-called Viergötterstein (a “four-god stone”, a pedestal on which a Jupiter Column was customarily stood) in 1872. This is now kept at a museum in Worms. Some people from Löllbach have also found Roman coins. About AD 450, the Romans had to withdraw their forces from the Rhine into the Gaulish backlands. Another Germanic tribe, this time the Franks, was threatening the Romans with superior military might. Not everyone withdrew from the area, however. The subject people, the Treveri, stayed behind, as did landed Roman families. The invading Franks, however, arranged for themselves to become the new lords and for these remaining people to be a “host people” who would serve their new lords. Later, both Celts and Romans would be assimilated into the body of the Frankish people.Antiquity
Middle Ages
Frankish times The Franks who were thronging into the land came with kith and kin, with plough and seed. First, they settled the dales, where the best soil was. More of their kin came in fits and starts. They were driving westwards, first fighting, but then setting their ploughs to the new earth. Wherever a group's leader staked a claim, there was where the cabins arose. These tiny settlements were often named after an early leader. This is so for nearly all villages with names ending in —heim. In this way, the Franks conquered the whole of Francia. All the new land belonged to the king. He divided the empire up into Gaue and named one of his stalwarts the gaugrave (Gaugraf i.e. "Gau count") to each Gau. He administered the king's Gau, reaped the income from it for him, made the law and in times of war, raised armies for him. There were also subordinate viscounts who ran smaller areas, and below them even lower nobles. They, too, lived at castles. From the Hunsrück deep into the Palatinate stretched the Nahegau. Löllbach lay in the middle. Beginning in 926, the Nahegaugraf (the count) was living at the newly built Kyrburg (castle). Beginning in 943, the title of gaugrave became hereditary. This led to the counts and viscounts sharing out their estates to their children. More and more, they also began to view the land as their own. From the partitions arose several lines of comital families. Locally, these were the Houses of Kyrburg, Wildburg and Dhaun. Because the king had granted them the oversight of the great forests in the Soonwald and the Winterhauch, they called themselves the Wildgrafen (“Waldgraves” in English). The Counts of Veldenz, too, who held a castle on the Moselle had formed by splitting away from the gaugraves, and then came, among others, the Raugraves in the Alsenz valley. The formerly free people, however, became less and less free. Their lives and bodies, along with all that they had, belonged to the lord at the castle, an arrangement known as serfdom. Because counts and lords were locked in a seemingly endless struggle with each other over their feudal rights, there was always feuding, and the serfs were often the ones who paid the price, by being mishandled, robbed, murdered and having their homes set ablaze by soldiers. The impoverished serfs were even bereft of any pleasure in life by the toll that their lords took on them in the shape of tithes and unfree labour.Frankish rule
Waldgravial times In 1319, Löllbach had its first documentary mention when a document from the Hochgericht auf der Heide (“High Court on the Heath”) named a village called Leubilbach. Löllbach belonged to this court throughout the Middle Ages. The lords of the court were the Waldgraves. A high court district roughly equalled a Frankish hundred. The High Court on the Heath comprised the whole area of the Winterhauch between the Nahe and the Glan, this according to the boundaries laid down for it in many Weistümer (singular: Weistum; cognate with English wisdom, these were legal pronouncements issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times). The boundary ran from Oberstein down the Nahe as far as Hachenfels (a castle named in 1075), thence by way of Otzweiler to Hundsbach, Schweinschied, Löllbach, Udencappeln and Grumbach to Lauterecken. From here, the Glan was the boundary as far as the point where it was joined by the Steinalb. This brook then formed the boundary with the High Court of Baumholder, and near Breungenborn (now vanished; its former site now lies within the Baumholder Troop Drilling Ground), it merged with the Nahegau's border, then running concurrently with it back to Oberstein. All together, the High Court on the Heath at Sien comprised 50 villages with an area of 18 041 ha. Löllbach belonged with Schweinschied and part of Sien together with the estates to the Kyrburg-Waldgravial Amtsbezirk of Sien-Löllbach. For a time, a man from Löllbach held the post of Amt Schultheiß, bearing witness to which is the gravestone built into the church wall in memory of Johann Ludwig Meurer. In the 14th century, the Waldgraves of Kyrburg bought the one part of the village that they had for some unknown reason sold, back from the knightly family of Frey in Oberwesel. It was indeed a specific geographical area in the village rather than a share of the feudal rights, and it lay in the village's north end, a part of the village mit der Kapelle (“with the chapel”). Soon afterwards, though, some of the houses there were granted to Zymar von Sponheim, known as Mandel, perhaps because he was enfeoffed with Mannendal (now Mandel near Bad Kreuznach), a village that belonged to the Knights of Bolanden. The Waldgraves then enfeoffed a Mulenstein von Grumbach, who might have been in the service of the Waldgraves of Grumbach, with the other houses in this part of the village. From 1515 on, however, this whole part of the village was once more under Waldgravial administration. The case was quite different for the southeastern part of the village and the houses there on the right banks of the brooks. In the 14th century, they belonged to the Amt of Naumburg near Becherbach. Only in 1757 did this “Palatine side” pass to the Waldgraves and Rhinegraves of Salm-Kyrburg. Löllbach, along with most of its homesteads, was thus throughout almost the whole of the Middle Ages bound together in its historical fate with the Waldgraviate of Kyrburg.Waldgravial times
Life and taxes under feudalism