Hausweiler is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde Lauterecken-Wolfstein.
Geography
Location
The municipality lies in the Western Palatinate, west of the Glan and the town of Lauterecken, on the Kreisstraße to Buborn. Hausweiler lies at an elevation of roughly 200 m above sea level in the Rötelbach valley. The elevations around the village reach heights of about 350 m above sea level. The municipal area measures 156 ha, of which roughly 5 ha is settled and 21 ha is wooded.
Neighbouring municipalities
Hausweiler borders in the north on the municipality of Grumbach, in the east on the town of Lauterecken, in the southeast on the municipality of Wiesweiler and in the southwest on the municipality of Buborn. Hausweiler also meets the municipality of Herren-Sulzbach at a single point in the west.
Municipality’s layout
Hausweiler has been thrust together over time to form a clump village whose buildings are old. It is cloven in two by the through road. A small graveyard lies in the village's southwest on the road leading to Buborn. All together, there is very little in the way of building that is new.
History
Antiquity
It is certain that the area around what is now Hausweiler was settled in prehistoric times. archaeological finds confirming this, however, have only been unearthed in places around the village.
Middle Ages
Theoretically, this village with the placename ending —weiler may have been settled as far back as the Early Middle Ages by Frankish farmers from a nearby Roman road. Likelier, though, is the assumption that here in the Rötelbach valley, only much later, perhaps as late as the 10th or 11th century, a small settlement (and the word Weiler would apply, for this is German for “hamlet”) arose, which may be considered the seed that grew into today's Hausweiler. The village originally belonged, within the Grumbach castle ban to the Nahegau and passed together with Grumbach in 1258 into Count Godefried's ownership; he endowed the Waldgravial line of Dhaun. Together with other villages in the Grumbach castle ban, it was pledged in 1363 to Sponheim-Starkenburg. In 1347, Hausweiler had its first documentary mention, although the document is now only preserved as a later copy. The document deals with a dispute between Count Heinrich of Veldenz and Provost Johannes of the Remigiusberg over tithes from Pfeffelbach and Hausweiler. In an arbitration it was decreed that the monastery should deliver to the Church of Kusel eight Malter of corn from the tithes (which were very often paid in kind, not in cash) from these two villages. In 1448, Waldgrave and Rhinegrave Gottfried zu Dhaun sold the village of Hausweiler along with a number of others in the Grumbach valley to Count Palatine Stephan of Simmern-Zweibrücken, although he did reserve the right to buy them back. Indeed, the Waldgraves did just that as early as 1477. Shortly thereafter, the independent line of the Rhinegravial House of Grumbach came into being. Henceforth, Hausweiler belonged to this line, until the French Revolution put an end to the age of feudalism. About 1500, the Junker Faust von Wachenheim owned a major estate that, after a number of disputes, ended up in the Rhinegraves’ ownership. The new owners leased the estate to their subject Gerhard Müller from Hausweiler. The lease can be viewed at the Koblenz State Archive. Described precisely therein are the estate's size and location. The lease also names fields and even people who then lived in Hausweiler.