Lauenstein Castle

The barons of Homburg raised Lauenstein on an island-like cone of hill in a narrow valley running down from the Ith ridge, after their victory over the counts of Spiegelberg. The neighbouring castle of Spiegelberg was destroyed in 1226; the building of Lauenstein is put at the beginning of the 13th century by some accounts and at about 1240 by others. What is fixed is 1247, when Heinrich von Homburg made the castle over to the Welf duke Otto the Child with the consent of all his heirs and received it back from him as a fief. The charter of 30 June that year is Lauenstein's first record, and Welf protection was what it bought.

Under that protection, people from villages that had fallen derelict settled on the ground below and founded the village of Lauenstein, first named in a document in 1430. The castle held the seat of the Homburg Amt of Lauenstein, which by 1359 took in forty places in the country between the Ith, the Hils and the Leine.

The male line of the Homburgs died out in 1409 and the castle passed with all its chattels to the Welf dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Financial difficulty moved them to pledge it in 1433 to Bishop Magnus of Hildesheim, who sublet it on in turn: the brothers von Cramm in 1434, Ludolf von Ruscheplate in 1445, the brothers Böcke von Nordholz in 1456, Bartold von Oberg and the knightly brothers vom Rutenberge in 1495, then Heinrich von Saldern in 1497 and his son Burchard in 1515.

A document of 1456 names the buildings then standing: a cellared Great House, a kitchen, a bakehouse with two chimneys, a zwinger with two bulwarks, and an outer ward with a ditch around it. The gate building carried flanking towers, and the ring wall is said to have been some 3.5 metres thick.

When Burchard von Saldern and his two brothers took over castle and Amt from their father Heinrich in 1515, the bishop of Hildesheim terminated the contract. The brothers refused to give either up, and demanded 3,000 guilders for what they had invested in the defences. Arbitration in 1518 ruled that the bishop should repay the building costs and that the von Salderns should quit Lauenstein. Burchard would not take the money offered and was driven from the castle that same year, Stacius von Münchhausen being installed in his place as the Hildesheim advocate.

An attempt on the castle failed, and Burchard burned Lauenstein down in revenge, nailing a letter of feud to the castle gate: "Borchert von Salder do bekand; dat ick hebbe jedan dußen Brand; dat bekenne ick mit meiner Hand" — Burchard von Saldern makes known that I lit this fire; I confess it with my own hand. The act fed the fighting of the Hildesheim Diocesan Feud. The dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg took the castle back in 1521 and reinstated Burchard von Saldern in the Amt.

Burchard's son Heinrich fell out with the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1587 and was evicted; after him the castle was managed by bailiffs. During the Thirty Years' War imperial troops under Tilly fell on the village of Lauenstein and did great damage, staying four years as an occupying force. Swedish troops followed in 1637, and in 1640 soldiers from Weimar plundered the place. The castle had counted for nothing militarily since that war, and decayed from then on.

When a house fire burned the village of Lauenstein to the ground in 1730, stone from the castle was used to rebuild it. The ground of the outer ward, called the Knabenburg, was bought in 1737 by the Amtmann Niemeyer, who farmed it until 1850, and in 1806 the village was used as billets for Napoleonic troops. At the beginning of the 19th century the last remnants of the castle were pulled down and the castle well filled in.

In the middle of the 19th century a small observation tower was put up on the highest point of the castle hill, since fallen derelict, along with a chapel-like building known as the Teehaus, whose ceiling has now caved in; the thick wood that covers the site was planted when the hill was remodelled. A notice at the entrance now closes the site off, the crumbling walls and steep hillsides bringing a risk of collapse and of falls.