Rutsweiler an der Lauter is an – a municipality belonging to a , a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde Lauterecken-Wolfstein. Rutsweiler an der Lauter is one of two places in the Kusel district named Rutsweiler. The other is Rutsweiler am Glan, lying some 13 km to the west-southwest.
Geography
Location
The municipality lies on the river Lauter's valley in the Western Palatinate. Rutsweiler an der Lauter lies north of Wolfstein at an elevation of some 200 m above sea level on the Lauter's left bank at the outlying hills of the Königsberg and Selberg. Even within municipal limits, the hillsides reach some 400 m above sea level. Flowing from the Selberg is the Kettenbach, which empties into the Lauter within the village. Lying across the Lauter on the right bank is Stahlhausen, and outlying centre of Wolfstein. Within Rutsweiler's limits stands the Zweikirche, one of the Western Palatinate's noteworthiest mediaeval village churches. The municipal area measures 432 ha, of which 95 ha is wooded and roughly 13 ha is settled.
Neighbouring municipalities
Rutsweiler an der Lauter borders in the north and east on the town of Wolfstein, in the south on the municipality of Kreimbach-Kaulbach and in the west on the municipalities of Rothselberg and Eßweiler. Rutsweiler an der Lauter also meets the municipality of Aschbach at a single point in the northwest.
Municipality’s layout
The village core lies in the area where the Kettenbach and Bundesstraße 270 cross each other. The build-up area spread out from this spot, mainly along the Bundesstraße. There are branches up the Kettenbach valley and also on a northern hillside. The Zweikirche stands north of the village west of the Bundesstraße near the municipal limit with Wolfstein. This church is surrounded by the graveyard.
History
Antiquity
Archaeological finds in the neighbouring municipalities of Kreimbach-Kaulbach and Wolfstein, as well as parts of buildings unearthed inside and outside the Zweikirche, bear witness to human habitation in protohistoric and Roman times. Records mention a prehistoric barrow, but this is now no longer to be found. It is likely that the Zweikirche arose in the area of a Gallo-Roman villa rustica. As Isolde Schmidt wrote, “Pointing to a Roman building are not only unearthed foundation remnants but also countless Roman spolia in existing buildings, among them a Roman gravestone from the early 3rd century.”
Middle Ages
As a settlement with a name ending in —weiler, Rutsweiler is among the oldest places in the lower Lauter valley. In 1257, Rutsweiler had its first documentary mention; it arose sometime between 650 and 750. This holds true for the vanished village of Allweiler, too, which lay at the mouth of the Selbach where it empties into the Lauter, and which may have been slowly forsaken by its villagers soon after Wolfstein was founded in 1275. The settlement of Ober(n)hausen at the headwaters of the Selbach was abandoned in the late 16th century. The church known as the Zweikirche may at the earliest have been built in the 11th century, and the settlement at the church, Hof zu Zweynkirchen (the first two words mean “estate at”) was founded in 1372, after the Zweikirche was built. Rutsweiler to a great extent shares its territorial history with the neighbouring town of Wolfstein. The village originally lay in the free Imperial Domain around Kaiserslautern and beginning in the 14th century was pledged to various lordships one after the other. In 1350, the village was entrusted to the County of Veldenz and the Electorate of Trier, but before the 14th century was over it passed as an Imperial pledged holding to Electoral Palatinate before being pledged by that state in turn to the Lordship of Sickingen in the Late Middle Ages. Geographer Goswin Widder, writing in 1788, recorded that also in the Late Middle Ages, a knight, Sir Hans of Flörsheim, was enfeoffed with the village.