Reinhausen Castle

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Reinhausen Castle
Creation time : 9/10 Century
Castle type : Spurburg
Conservation status: Burgstall, remains of the church
Standing position : Count
Place: Reinhausen
Geographical location 51 ° 28 '3.6 "  N , 9 ° 59' 0.4"  E Coordinates: 51 ° 28 '3.6 "  N , 9 ° 59' 0.4"  E
Height: 218  m above sea level NHN
Reinhausen Castle (Lower Saxony)
Reinhausen Castle
In the late High Middle Ages, the castle was located where the monastery complex stands today

The castle Reinhausen was an early- to late medieval spur Castle of the Counts of Reinhausen in Reinhausen in the community peers in the district Goettingen in Lower Saxony . The castle grounds were already built over in the Middle Ages, so that only a few remains of the castle remain.

location

The castle lay on a flat, west-facing mountain spur in Reinhausen between the Wendebach valley and the Rosental. The Burgplatz is only about 30 meters above the valley floor of the Wendebach, which flows past 120 meters to the south and west, but on this side the mountain spur has a steep slope with many vertical, partly overhanging rock sections over a length of over 400 meters. The Rosental northwest of the castle is much less rugged. To the east-northeast, the terrain rises flat towards Knüll. While the steep slope south of the castle grounds and the Rosental are undeveloped, behind it in the valley of the Wendebach stream are the old town center of Reinhausen and newer building areas to the west and north of the castle grounds.

history

Continuous settlement of the castle grounds can be demonstrated since the early Middle Ages. Since the 9th century, according to other sources since the 10th century, there has been a castle of the Counts of Reinhausen on the mountain spur above the village, today's Kirchberg, which is naturally secured by rock breaks towards the valley . From the mountain spur the castle could control the valley and the military road running through it. A larger number of archaeological finds from the area around the later monastery church could be on the 9th / 10th. Century to be dated. In 10./11. In the 19th century, the Counts of Reinhausen held the Gaugrafenamt in Leinegau and thus also had supra-regional importance. In the Saxon area, inhabited aristocratic castles were still an exception in the 10th century, therefore older publications in Reinhausen also assumed that the castle complex was not permanently inhabited.

In the abbot's report on the early history of Reinhausen Monastery , written in the middle of the 12th century, the castle is referred to as locum suum principalem, unde originem duxerant , i.e. the ancestral seat of the counts. At the end of the 11th century, Counts Konrad, Heinrich and Hermann von Reinhausen and their sister Mathilde converted their ancestral castle into a monastery . The dating of the conversion into a pen to the year 1079 in older literature is contradicted in more recent research. Instead, based on possible dates of death of one of the founders, Count Konrad von Reinhausen, the year 1089 or 1086 is assumed to be the latest point in time for the foundation and thus the end of the actual castle.

The demolition of the castle wall was dated to the 12th century on the basis of small finds in the building and rubble from the Middle Ages. Before the conversion of their ancestral castle around 1100, the Counts of Reinhausen built the same as a new fortified residence. These hilltop castles now corresponded to the type of heavily fortified, permanently inhabited aristocratic residence known from the high and late Middle Ages.

Since 1980, Klaus Grote has archaeologically examined smaller areas of the castle grounds in several individual excavations and findings.

Todays use

The former castle grounds are used for different purposes: At the end of the mountain spur in the west are the library, kindergarten and school buildings as well as the former hospital chapel. The steep slope to the Wendebachtal is interrupted by a road carved into the rock. East of the street on the site of the main castle are the rectory, another residential building, a barn, the former monastery and later official building, which now houses the Reinhausen Forestry Office and an office, and the church. Most of the cemetery is on the site of the former outer bailey, as are two larger outbuildings of the Reinhausen domain. Most of the buildings in the domain are located just outside the former eastern moat.

description

The ancestral castle of the Counts of Reinhausen was also dimensioned in accordance with the importance of its builders: the living area with its own church in the west comprised around one and a half hectares, and the farmyard adjacent to the northeast was around another hectare. Both areas were separated by a neck ditch . At the edge of the mountain spur, a two-shell fortification wall up to 3.30 meters thick was exposed over a length of around nine meters . Towards the gently sloping slope, the fortification consisted of two section trenches and a three-meter-thick mortar wall. The interior of the castle can hardly be reconstructed because the area was built over by the monastery and the monastery property in the High Middle Ages. In the interior of the monastery church, however, remains of the own church of the Counts of Reinhausen were found during excavations. While the location of the castle church is thus determined, there is no evidence of its exact structural design. According to historical building research carried out by Ulfrid Müller from 1963 to 1967, it is certain that the structural substance of the own church was used for the church after the castle was converted into a canon and later a monastery. Among other things, the execution of the southern choir wall of the church indicates.

The castle was accessible from the Wendebachtal, probably through the Rosental. There is evidence of a route there for the late Middle Ages.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Klaus Grote: The medieval systems in Reinhausen . In: Guide to archaeological monuments in Germany , Volume 17: Stadt und Landkreis Göttingen , Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-8062-0544-2 , pp. 210-212
  2. ↑ Online map at navigator.geolife.de, accessed on August 22, 2017
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Klaus Grote: Castles. Investigations and findings in the mountainous region of southern Lower Saxony. 5th section: Reinhausen, Gde. Gleichen, Ldkr. Göttingen: early to high medieval count castle. In: www.grote-archaeologie.de. Klaus Grote, accessed on February 9, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Peter Ferdinand Lufen: Landkreis Göttingen, part 2. Altkreis Duderstadt with the communities Friedland and Gleichen and the integrated communities Gieboldehausen and Radolfshausen (=  Christiane Segers-Glocke [Hrsg.]: Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany . Architectural monuments in Lower Saxony . Volume 5.3 ). CW Niemeyer Buchverlage GmbH, Hameln 1997, ISBN 3-8271-8257-3 , p. 275-277 .
  5. ↑ a b Entry by Stefan Eismann zu Reinhausen in the scientific database " EBIDAT " of the European Castle Institute, accessed on January 1, 2019.
  6. ↑ a b Erhard Kühlhorn: Historical and regional excursion map of Lower Saxony, scale 1: 50,000, sheet Göttingen . Explanatory booklet. Ed .: Erhard Kühlhorn (=  publications of the Institute for Historical Research at the University of Göttingen . Volume 2 , part 3). Commission publisher August Lax, Hildesheim 1972, 10. Medieval fortifications, p. 107-108 .
  7. ↑ Martin Last: Southern Lower Saxony between the Merovingian and Staufer times. In: Guide to prehistoric and early historical monuments , Volume 16: Göttingen and the Göttingen Basin. Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1970, p. 76.
  8. ^ Manfred Hamann: Document book of the Reinhausen monastery . Göttingen-Grubenhagener document book, 3rd section. Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1991, ISBN 978-3-7752-5860-9 , No. 11, p. 34-37 .
  9. ↑ a b Tobias Ulbrich: On the history of the Reinhausen monastery church . Ed .: Ev.-luth. Reinhausen parish, parish council. Reinhausen 1993, chap. 3.1.7 The founding history of the Reinhausen monastery - The founding of the monastery - The genealogy of the Counts of Reinhausen , p. 50-54 .
  10. ↑ Ulfrid Müller: Reinhausen Monastery Church (=  large monuments . No. 257 ). Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich Berlin 1971, p. 3 .
  11. ↑ a b Peter Aufgebauer (Ed.): Burgenforschung in Südniedersachsen , book publisher Göttinger Tageblatt, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-924781-42-7 . Chapter 2: Wolfgang Petke: Reinhausen Foundation and Reform and the Castle Policy of the Counts of Winzenburg in High Medieval Saxony , pp. 65–71.
  12. ↑ a b Klaus Grote: Excavations and larger site works by the district monument maintenance of the district of Göttingen in 1989 . Chapter 2: Reinhausen: Kirchberg (early to high medieval castle wall). In: Göttinger Jahrbuch 38 (1990), pp. 261-264. ISBN 3-88452-368-6
  13. ↑ Klaus Grote: Castles near Bremke in the Reinhäuser forest . In: Guide to archaeological monuments in Germany , Volume 17: Stadt und Landkreis Göttingen , Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-8062-0544-2 , pp. 227–228
  14. ↑ Tour through the church on the website of the Kirch-Bauverein Reinhausen, accessed on September 18, 2013