Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/482

474 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