About 50 kilometers east of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and a 2.5-hour train ride (alternatively, a taxi can close the distance in 45 minutes), is the equally old city of Schwabisch Hall. Hall means "a mound of salt," and this town grew as rich as its neighbor by distilling and selling salt.
By the 5th century, the Celts discovered salty springs here and in the mid-11th century when the Benedictine abbey was consecrated, the city was officially recorded as a free imperial city in the annals of the the Holy Roman Empire. Bountiful taxes were paid directly to the emperor and the city was not beholden to the abbey or any feudal lord.
While I do not know this, I suspect that the word beholden, from Middle English and dating from the 14 century, may have derived from the Middle German. I long to open my Oxford English Dictionary to read a good airing of this word. What I know of the word is that beholden means to be obligated to another, whether person or concept. Often the two are joined as in the bonds of feudal loyalty, and bound to the past that forever creates the present in its old form.
The city of Schwabisch Hall grew rich from salt. Techniques of harvesting salt from the springs in town must have remained the same through the centuries because the process is very simple. Spring water is boiled in cauldrons, and salt is left behind and collected. The hard and dirty work of feeding the fires that boiled the cauldrons produced a rough lot of workers, and they were probably on the margins of society, one step up from the night-watchmen. Both the salters and the watchmen minded fire, which was as dire an enemy in those days as any marauding band of armed men. The salters kept theirs glowing day and night, but the night watchmen sounded the alarm on their great horns should they see any outbreak of fire in town.
Schwabisch Hall was most recently devastated by fire in the 1720s, and 400 houses were burned to the ground. The streets themselves helped route the flames as the winds gusted down narrow passages, most being about 10 feet wide. New houses later replaced the ones destroyed, and now many of the building surrounding the lovely market platz are in the new, baroque style.
Imagine the platz: It is night, and St. Michael's church stands on high ground at the top. Opposite the church, across the wide cobbled open platz is the rathaus, or town hall. To one side is a long hotel, and surrounding the platz on the other sides are very old companies that have been in business for hundreds of years. Today, large lanterns illuminate the buildings, which are plasterd over their half-timber frames. The plaster is painted green, or cream, or salmon, and shades of yellow, and the fronts are decorated with dark red, or yellow and white and gold painted designs in long curls and sweeps. Some buildings have painted shields of professions, and other shields are painted with decorative flowers and trees and animals of the forest.The buildings could be many-tiered, colorful cakes, illuminated and set in place around the platz. I want to break off a tiny corner of so many of these houses because I am certain that they really are made of gingerbread and icing.
Just off the main market platz are the narrow side streets, and these streets are often joined together by steep stairways linking them by several flights. The houses are all at least 300 years old, and one beauty was built in 1200.
A particular feature of building construction in this town is that a building would be anchored by a center pole of an upright beam of oak arising from a massive pile of stone in the basement through all floors, to finish at the roof of the house. The beam remains exposed as it rises through the floors. I saw one such house, and the center oak beam was 20 inches on the side, a little bit checked because it was hoisted green, and four stories tall. The old beam has held up the house for 500 years.
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