Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 7/Castles of the Taunus - Part 3
CASTLES OF THE TAUNUS.
PART III.
The tall tower of Eppstein has somewhat the aspect of one of the Irish round towers. The castle itself stands on a rock of its own, separated on one side by a deep ravine from the hill which hangs over it. The dell below could be flooded formerly by means of sluices—so tradition says—though, in that case, it is difficult to know what became of the village, whose houses bear the signs of a high antiquity.
The name Eppstein has been derived from the ivy which covers the ruin or the rock, so that it was originally Epheustein; but this derivation is more picturesque than accurate.
The other derivation from Eppo—a man who built the castle—is much more according to analogy, as we find Eppenhain at a short distance, and it is connected with an old legend. Once a knight named Eppo lost his way while hunting, and was resting from his fatigue at the foot of a rock, when he was startled by a female voice in tones of stifled lamentation, behind a neighbouring thicket. He made his way according to the direction of the sounds, and saw at the mouth of a cave a beautiful damsel in chains. She told him that she was kept in durance and watched by a giant who slept on the rock above. Those were the days when game was driven into nets. Eppo was provided with a hunting-net, whose meshes could hold a struggling wild boar, or even on occasion a struggling giant. He approached the monster warily, who, overcome with Rhine-wine, was sleeping heavily, and completely invested him. The rock was to the giant on the scale of a German bed to the sleeper, and like a German bed, too short for him, and with a considerable slope. The giant, in his struggles to get free, rolled off and broke his neck. Eppo, of course, married the young lady,—built a castle to commemorate the event, and hung a rib of the giant over the principal entrance, where it was to be seen some time ago; how long ago we are not informed.
Certain it is, that the Mouse-tower was no more originally than a Mauth or toll-tower, built for the purpose of collecting toll for the robber-knights of the Rhine. First the name was corrupted in the mouths of the people, then the primeval legend was adapted to account for it, the name of Bishop Hatto being added, who had probably made himself unpopular by fleecing his flock.
All that appears certain about the castle of Eppstein is that it was standing at the beginning of the twelfth century. There is an old story that the site of the building was originally intended to be at Walderstein, near Lorsbach, in the valley below, but that Eppstein was found more convenient, probably as commanding the roads which converged from four valleys. There is also an ancient account, but one of doubtful authority, that between 1111 and 1137, one Count Udalovich presented the two castles of Etichenstein and Eppstein to the archiepiscopal see of Mainz in the time of Archbishop Adalbert. Certainly, in 1122, a man of this name lived, calling himself Count of Etichenstein and Eppstein. Oue Gottfried or Godfrey, in 1173, is the first positive historical ancestor of the Eppstein family. This family gave five archbishops to Mainz and a patriarch to Jerusalem, and continued to hold the castle of Eppstein till 1522, as well as other widely extended possessions. Its fates were as changeful, perplexing, and uninteresting to the general reader, as those of most of the other castles of the middle ages. It often belonged to more than one owner at a time; and, at one time was held in pawn by the free town at Frankfort, which retained for some time to come a right of entrance.
In the beginning of 1648, during the reign of Louis XIV., the French, under Turenne, occupied the town of Eppstein. They made the church into a stable, and warmed it by burning the seats. The inhabitants had taken refuge in the castle, but a fire breaking out in the town, the French called them out of the castle to assist in extinguishing it, probably having kindled it first as a means of drawing the townspeople into their power. The ruse, if ruse it was, was successful. In the beginning of the revolutionary war, the Prussians turned the castle into an hospital, which completed the ruin of a part of it, which it was soon afterwards judged expedient to pull down. That side which belonged formerly to the see of Mainz is still inhabited, and the catholic church adjoining is still used for divine service.
In 1803, the Diet assigned the territory to Nassau; the castle itself passed into the hands of some private gentleman, who held it on condition of taking care of it, and ornamenting its grounds with shrubs and flowers.
From Eppstein a road leads down to the beautiful valley of Lorsbach, whose sandstone hills are covered with fine beech and birch woods, past the town of Hofheim, over which is a chapel on a promontory of the Taunus, to the station of Hattersheim on the railway which leads to Frankfort. Hattersheim probably means the home of Hatto, which was the name of the notorious bishop of the mouse story. A man of the same name built the castle of Hattstein, whose antecedents appear to have been as bad as those of the Right Reverend Prelate, as it was the most noted nest of brigands in the neigbourhood. Vengeance, however, has overtaken it, for its site in the woods is somewhat hard to find now.
If, instead of returning to Frankfort, we stop at the Höchst station, a road as straight as if the Romans had made it leads up to Königstein. Whether it was originally a Roman road is not quite clear. There was a Roman station at Höchst, where the Nidda flows into the Main: and Höchst itself is thought to be a corruption of Ostium.
A little beyond Reiffenberg are the ruins of the castle of Hattstein. These ruins are overgrown with maple, and other trees, and even the remains of the ditch are nearly hidden by vegetation. The place is solitary, and “the path of the dead,” the name given to the foot-path by which the Hattsteiners brought their dead to Arnoldshain, is consistent with the general melancholy effect. Hatzicho, or Hatto, of Reiffenberg, is said to have built this castle in the latter half of the twelfth century, so that Reiffenberg, contrary to expectation, would be older, since so much more remains of Reiffenberg than of Hattstein. There was a chapel, dedicated to St. Anthony, in the meadows below, served by the brotherhood of Arnoldshain. But, notwithstanding their pious offices, Hattstein was the terror and pest of the whole neighbourhood. The first account of a siege of Hattstein dates from 1369, when it was taken by Cuno, Archbishop of Trêves, of the Falkenstein family, yet given up again to the original joint-heirs on payment probably of heavy damages and promise of future good behaviour. Five years afterwards, however, we find it besieged by the same prelate, in conjunction with Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Philip of Falkenstein, the Prince of Hanau, and the towns of Frankfort, Wetzlar, Friedberg, and Gelnhausen; and this time probably without success, for in July of the same year, 1374, we find a battle taking place at Rodheim, to the east of Homburg, which may have been occasioned by a retaliatory expedition of the Hattsteiners against Friedberg. In this battle several of the Hattstein family were taken prisoners, but released again on oath; which they, of course, took the first opportunity of breaking. Nothing is more surprising in reading the dry records of this time, than the extraordinary long-suffering of the poor Frankfurters, poor in one sense, though rich in another. These robber-knights seemed to have lived entirely upon them, and to have preyed on their commercial prosperity, like human vermin. Yet the number of times they were forgiven, would suggest the prevalence of an almost romantic charity among the burghers, did not subsequent events show that the mild measures were dictated by fear. All the robber knights in Germany, though in chronic feud with each other, would band together to take vengeance for any summary proceedings taken against any of their body. At last, one Dieterich, of Hattstein, made himself such a prodigious nuisance, by carrying off sheep, oxen, and pigs, belonging to Frankfort, and inflicting personal outrages on unoffending travellers, messengers, and even religious persons, that in 1432, the Frankfurters and their allies, one of the most powerful of whom was the Archbishop of Mainz, succeeded at last in storming the castle, and getting it into their own hands, with a store of arquebuses, cross-bows, and ammunition, which the Hattsteiners had not time to carry off. After their victory, they took measures for the arming and provisioning of the castle; which afterwards, the Hattsteiners and their friends made several vain attempts to recover, both by force and fraud. The castle was surprised and destroyed by Walter of Reiffenberg, in 1468, but restored again in 1494. Through a variety of complications, the castle came again into possession of the Hattstein family, whom we find living there during the thirty years’ war. At last it came into the exclusive possession of Canon Philip Ludwig of Reiffenberg, then it fell to Mainz, and was abandoned, and suffered to fall to ruin. But connexions of this man appear still to be the owners of the ruin, and the land about it. The Hattstein family became extinct in the male line in 1767, having lasted through little good and much ill report six hundred years. Their crest was a pair of eagle’s wings, so that they were connected with the Wing branch of the Cronberg family. To this day, on the feast of the Ascension, a popular festival, which dates from the beginning of the fifteenth century, is held near the lonely site of the castle. If the festival is prolonged to a late hour of the night, it is said that a white figure appears at one of the castle windows, ordering the people, with a cry thrice-repeated, to go home.
The castle of Reiffenberg is the most conspicuous object in the middle distance, if you take stand near Brunhilde’s rock on the top of the Great Feldberg, and look to north-west. Its two tall towers, one round and the other square, crown a knoll at the foot of the mountain. The solitary and starved aspect of the surrounding country gives it a weirdness which does not belong either to Cronberg or Königstein; and the pinched look of the people when we come to the village of Reiffenberg, is enough to tell us that we are in Electoral Hesse. These Hessians, the descendants of the Catti, are a fine race to this day. They are to be seen in greatest perfection in the neighbourhood of Marburg, where the costumes of the women are most remarkable. The Cattian females are not fair, but stalwart, fit to be the mothers of a race of warriors. With a Spartan disregard of the graces, they still brush their hair back from their brown foreheads and pile it up behind with a comb, and bind it with black stuff, as they did when their husbands defied the Romans; and wear their skirts so short as to display to the knee their legs, which look like fluted pillars in their ribbed and embroidered cotton-stockings. Their ambition consists in an endeavour to make themselves as tall as their husbands, who are the highest of the high Germans. Yet the fineness of the race makes more deplorable their poverty-stricken aspect, which is evident at once to one who enters a Hessian village from any of the neighbouring states. Selfish misgovernment is doubtless at the bottom of this. Nor do matters appear to have mended since the time when the Elector of Hesse, to his disgrace and ours, hired out his subjects against their will for war between England and a continental nation. The present Elector also is not very pleasantly known. However, those Germans who happen still to be governed by an obsolete feudalism may be quite sure that they are ten times better off than their fathers who lived in the times of the robber-knights. One tyrant can harm but few now, and public opinion is some restraint upon him; but then in every one of those picturesque castles, lurked a human spider, to whom the surrounding farmers were flies, and even the bees of the industrial towns were occasionally ensnared and their blood sucked, though they wore stings for defence and retaliation. The castle of Reiffenberg is separated from the rest of the crag on which it stands by a great ditch hewn out of the solid rock. Little is left of it but the towers before named, the round one ninety, the square one seventy feet high. Some of the castle fell to pieces about twenty years since. A rock jutting out to the eastward was added to the works of defence by burrowing and cutting out loop-holes, making it a Gibraltar on a small scale.
As there was no opening into the tower below a height unattainable except by a ladder, from which point the winding stair began, the people believed that a subterranean passage gave access to the lower part of the tower, and that great treasures were secreted there, the solid masonry being only a blind to hidden chambers; and there is a story that a man of the village of Reiffenberg once found out this underground way, which is now undiscoverable, and penetrated through it into a bright white chamber, when his lamp was blown out suddenly, and he was hunted out the way he came by screeching spectres. The name is said to have been derived from the Reif, or circle of mountains with which the castle is surrounded. However this may be, the family which gave it its name, or derived its name from it, appears to have existed as early as the fourth century. The family had two branches: one like the Hattsteiners had eagle’s wings for a crest, and were called the Weller family, the other bore a crest of asses’ ears, and were called the family of Wetterau. They also bore for a difference an azure bridge on their shield. The asses’ ears appear not to have been a degrading but an honorary distinction. It is said that an ancestor of the family had this difference in the arms granted him by the emperor because on one occasion he carried a bridge by assault, sitting on a donkey after he had lost his horse, exactly as old Admiral Napier is reported to have stormed Sidon. This cognisance appears to have been in use as early as 1280. The misdoings of the knights of Reiffenberg were much on a par with those of their brethren of Hattstein, and it would be difficult to assign the palm of sheep-stealing and highway robbery between the two neighbouring castles. The castle and village of Reiffenberg suffered much from the natural quarrels of the different claimants and joint-heirs of the castle among themselves. It is surprising that most of these castles were held not by a single owner, but by partners, who possessed legal claims in different proportions. The thirty-years’ war did not spare Reiffenberg. It was taken in 1631 by a Graf Von Lippe and the Lower Hessians, and again in 1635 by the imperialists, and held by them for a long time, till they lost it in 1646 to General Mortaigne, and then it was given by Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, to his secretary, who gave it up again at the conclusion of peace to the only surviving representative of the Wetterau family, the Canon Philip Ludwig, but in a most dilapidated condition. It was, however, restored and inhabited in the second half of the seventeenth century by the Marquis de Villeneuve, who had married Anna of Reiffenberg, a sister of the Canon, and used it as a recruiting station for France. The Canon himself had been thrown into prison for seven years by the Archbishop and Elector of Mainz, because he would not give up his right, the Mainzers having long had privilege of entrance to the castle, and he was not released till the death of the Elector. The Mainzers had so spoilt his castle in the meantime, that on his return he was obliged to hire a house elsewhere. He appears, though a churchman, to have broken an oath which was forced upon him at his release, so he was imprisoned again at Königstein, where he died in 1686. The subsequent claims to the ruin and adjacent property gave rise to much litigation and genealogical research; at last they came into the possession of the Graf Von Bassenheim by adjudication of the Nassau courts. From the castle of Reiffenberg we may return to the Feldberg, which almost overshadows it.
This name appears to denote a mountain with a fell or field at the top, to distinguish it from a peak. It is borne also by the highest eminence in the Black Forest. Its summit is distant some fifteen English miles from Frankfort, 2721 feet above the sea-level, and at present crowned like most eminences in Germany by an inn, kept by one Herr Ungeheuer, whose name would be rendered in English by Mr. Monster. On the north-east side of the grassy platform at the top is a rock of quartz some thirteen feet high and eighty feet round. It is called the Brunhildenstein, and also the Devil’s Pulpit. It was known in former times by the names of Venusstein, and the Temple of Agrippina. This Brunhilde is not the heroine of the Nibelungen, but almost as notorious a virago. She was the wife of Siegbert, king of Austrasia, beautiful but cruel. She lived till the age of eighty, and in the course of her long life this northern Athaliah had occasioned the deaths of ten persons of the royal house. At last she met with a fearful end, it is said, in 613. She was put to the rack for three days, then placed on a camel and carried round the army as a spectacle, then tied to the tail of a wild horse and dragged to death. This lady, to whom a tradition ascribes the foundation of Frankfort, used to love to look at her wide domains from the top of the Feldberg, which she was in the habit of ascending, and, to see it better at sunrise, used to sleep on the rock which bears her name, there being then no inn there. Some say that she built a castle there which she called her bed, and some that she was buried under the rock.
This stone is also connected with a legend of St. Hildegarde, the Abbess of the Convent of Rupertsberg by Bingen. This holy lady made a pilgrimage to the Feldberg, in order to pray to Heaven for the success of the crusade which Bernhard of Clairvaux was then preaching in Frankfort. From morning to evening she prayed; then fatigued, sank to sleep on the hard rock. But the rock became miraculously soft for her repose, and she slept as if her couch had been a spring-bed. When she rose it became again hard, but the impression where her head lay remained, and remains till this day. The holy Hildegarde died in 1180, in her 82nd year.
There is a hill in the neighbourhood of Soden called the “Nadelkissen,” or “Pincushion,” where there was an ancient convent, where another holy lady lived who was as cleanly as she was godly, for her mundane accomplishment was the getting-up of linen. She did not, however, hang her linen on a cord as usual, but in the air by miraculous agency, the air of Soden being as remarkable for giving whiteness to linen as roses to ladies’ cheeks. The white linen hanging in the air to dry was regarded by the Sodeners as a sign of fine weather. When the convent fell to ruin, and the white clothes were seen no more, it was supposed that the holy lady had gone to a better place. The inhabitants tried to remove the ruins of the convent and build a new one, but their new buildings always fell down again. And they could only remove the stones by carting them to Frankfort, where they formed the Frohnhof, or “soccage” farm, which gave its name to the yet existing Frohnhofstrasse.
The Altkönig, though some hundred feet lower than the Great Feldberg, is a much more remarkable mountain. Even as seen from Frankfort-on-the-Main its outline is deeply cut into by those remarkable circular trenches with remains of rough walls about them which crown the summit. This strange fortress is older than any history. Some suppose it to have been a refuge for the neighbouring German population in the time of the Roman wars; some think it much older, and ascribe it to the Celts, who inhabited the country before the Germans, and are as convenient to antiquaries as the Pelasgians to historians. The origin of the name itself, “the Old-king,” is doubtful. Some think it was the site of an ancient court of justice. But the name may have been given from the old quartz ramparts which crown the summit, suggesting to the peasantry the idea of a king of the giants turned into a mountain, like the classical Atlas.
Remains of the Castle of Vlbel.
If we descend from the Taunus again to Frankfort, and take the Main-Weser railroad as far as Vilbel, we have an opportunity of visiting the castle there, and ascending to the eminence of Bergen, which rises gradually from the Frankfort plain, and though not a part of the Taunus, may well be included in a notice of it.
Vilbel is a long, straggling village on the sluggish and often muddy Nidda. Of its castle little is left but a square tower, bridge, and gate, and the remains of some walls. The race of the knights of Vilbel was first heard of at the beginning of the thirteenth, and were extinct in the seventeenth century. They belonged to the household of the Imperial palace at Frankfort, and their arms are believed to exist on a monument of the Roman king Günther, of Schwarzburg, who was buried in 1349 in the Frankfort Cathedral. The knights of Vilbel had the usual character of the knights of those days, and we find one Bechtram obtaining a nickname by plundering the market-boat between Frankfort and Mainz. The Archbishop of Trêves, Werner of Falkenstein, obtained the castle by purchase in 1399, and rebuilt it after its destruction. His arms are still to be seen over the gateway. The misdoings of Bertram von Vilbel, captain of the Frankfort mercenaries, and his execution, have been already noticed. The castle was for a long time in possession of Frankfort, then of Mainz. When, in 1796, the Austrian army, under General Wartensleben, was retreating from the French to the left bank of the Nidda, the French General Kleber required of the Mainz authorities the restoration of the Nidda bridge, which had been destroyed by the Austrians. The Nidda is a kind of river just made to obstruct an army, cutting its quiet way through deep loamy banks with bottomless mud at its bottom. The authorities escaping in order to avoid complying with this requisition, Kleber had the principal buildings of the castle set on fire and burnt down.
Watch-Tower on the Field of Bergen.
From Vilbel a gradual ascent leads up to the watch-tower of Bergen, which is a conspicuous object from Frankfort and all the country round about, standing on a round rising ground in the middle of a vast corn-field. The town of Bergen itself is distant about half a mile from it, on the side where the hill slopes down into the valley of the Main. This simple watch-tower bears the date 1557 on it, and was made accessible by an external winding stair in 1844. It is far too inconsiderable for defensive purposes. If the watchers were in expectation of an enemy, they probably took refuge in the town, or drew up the ladder by which the door was entered.
The watch-towers round Frankfort have a court and walls which could have resisted an enemy for a considerable time, and held a garrison of fifty men at a pinch. The view from the Bergen tower is immense, considering the elevation of the hill on which it stands, which is about 600 feet over the sea, and it is the only point really commanding a beautiful view within easy walking distance of Frankfort. This view is said to comprise nearly 200 towns, villages and hamlets, with a setting of distant mountains, the Taunus being nearest. The Main winds like a silver serpent in the valley to the south-west. It strikes the visitor at once, like the field of Waterloo, as exactly the place for a battle. And a battle was fought here in 1759 in the seven years’ war, between Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, commander of the German allies, and the French under the Duc de Broglie. The Germans were the attacking party; the French had the advantage of position, and made it good. There appears to have been much loss of life on both sides, the advantage remaining with the French.
Old Tower at Bergen.
The principal traces which the battle has left are balls which have been built into the walls of houses at Bergen. Bergen itself is half-lost among its fruit trees; and the slope below it has a good aspect for its vines. It is a perfect specimen of a little mediæval town, quadrilateral, walled all round, with towers at intervals. Two of these are more remarkable than the others: they have both little spires of masonry, and one is surrounded with a very picturesque frieze. One straight main street pierces the town, with old gates at each end. In the middle of the market-place there is a quaint old town-hall. The whole town is quaint, “bizarre” as the French call it; small in scale irregular, brown and yellow and black, oddly gabled, and swarming with dirty children. These last seem to abound in all the old towns of the Rhine land, where one does not see enough men and women to account for them. They look as if they had been hatched from the ancient dirt by the modern sunshine, after having been dormant in it for centuries.
Bergen was formerly the property of a family belonging to the imperial household in Frankfort, bearing the strange name of the Schelms, or Skinners of Bergen. The castle which belonged to them is of more modern date than the town and outside it, so that at first they lived in the town itself, as notices of them are as old as 1194. To account for so noble a family with so ignoble a name, there are several traditions. The word “Schelm,” which now means a rogue, signified in old German, “a corpse,” or “carrion,” then “a flayer,” or “skinner,” then “a hangman.” The Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, or the Red Beard, of glorious memory, once gave a promiscuous masked ball at his palace in Frankfort. His new Empress was very fond of dancing. A stately mask came up and asked for the honour of her hand. She accorded it gladly; for she recognised in the mask the comeliest shape and the best dancer of the evening. The partners pleased each other well. At last came the hour for unmasking, and who should the partner of the Empress be but the public hangman, who, from the odiousness of his office, was obliged to live out at Frankfort, at Bergen. The first impulse of the Emperor in the midst of the universal horror, was to order the executioner to instant execution. The latter, however, plucked up a spirit, and addressed the Emperor:—“Reverse the matter, Sir Kaiser, and we may be good friends. Instead of saying that the Empress has been dishonoured by touching me, say rather that I have become honourable by touching her.” The Emperor was touched likewise, and laughingly said, “You have too much wit for a hangman: rise up ennobled, Sir Schelm of Bergen.” The family died out in 1844; but the eastern end of the wood by Bergen still bears the names of Schelm’s Corner. Another story is, that the Emperor had lost his way, and missed his hunting company, in the forest near Dreieichenhain. He was thirsty and tired. Meeting a waggoner, he asked for a draught and a seat. The waggoner gave both. When the retinue came up, the gentlemen cried out in horror, “the Schelm of Bergen!” But the Emperor made him a knight under that name. Yet another account. Barbarossa had just finished his castle in Gelnhausen, beyond Hanau, whose ruins are still to be seen. He lay down to rest in his new stronghold, and pleased with the work, said: “Whoever it is who puts his foot first in the castle-yard to-morrow morning, shall be ennobled.” The first comer in the morning was the hangman of Bergen. But the Kaiser could not break his word, and gave a remarkable illustration of the German proverb—“The morning hour has gold in its mouth,” or its English counterpart—“The early bird picks up the corn,” by making the hangman of Bergen both rich and noble. And the Schelm of Bergen bore henceforward as his arms: on a field argent two bloody ribs, gules. It is an easy walk from Bergen to Frankfort, either by the edge of the hill through the interminable village of Bornheim, “the home of the springs,” or by the Friedberg watch-tower, through the gate of Friedberg, famous for the trophy commemorating the gallant resistance of the Hessians in the first French revolutionary war, and infamous for the murder of Auerswald and Lichnowsky by the mob, in 1848.