The Amt Oedt

The abbots of Gladbach as landlords

It begins with a grant. The region of Oedt passed to Gladbach Abbey as an endowment, and from that time its abbots acted as landlords. In Oedt they built a manorial farm (Salhof or Fronhof) as their administrative centre. That farm stood until 1604, when it burned down; the rebuilt structure served from 1757 also as the district office and is used today as the presbytery.

Beside the manorial farm a small church was built. Its foundations were found in 1965 during an excavation inside the present church. Church and village of Oedt are first mentioned in 1170 in a charter of Abbot Robert. It was a proprietary church of Gladbach Abbey – and like Gladbach, the Oedt parish venerates Saint Vitus as its patron.

In the northern part of Oedt the abbots were the sole landowners. In the southern part, the Honschaften of Hagen and Unterbroich, other ecclesiastical corporations also held scattered property alongside the Gladbach holdings, but the abbots asserted their lordship there early as well.

How the district was structured

Politically the Amt Oedt was divided in three. The southern part was the Honschaft Unterbroich, the middle part the Honschaft Hagen, the northern part the parish of Oedt. A Honschaft was a rural sub-district with its own limited self-administration. The parish was divided again: into the Auffeld in the south and the Niederfeld in the north, with the boundary running at the Oedt church.

In the northern area of the Auffeld the castle village and later market town of Oedt developed. In the middle of the Niederfeld, by the Mülhausen mill, the district of Mülhausen later grew up.

Two villages that did not grow together

A peculiarity of Oedt: the castle village had no built connection to the church village, which was about 150 years older. A gap of some 200 metres lay between the lower gate and the church. Only in the eighteenth century did the two parts grow together.

The castle village itself lay in front of the castle on the sandy ridge and was secured with ramparts, ditches and three gatehouses. The route to the castle led from the village past the Oedt mill complex and through the outer bailey into the main castle.

The price of a border position

As a border fortress of Cologne against Jülich and Guelders, Burg Uda was militarily valuable. For the population that meant, over centuries, chiefly one thing: troops marching through, billeting, plunder and requisitioning. The old chronicles record houses plundered and burned, and townspeople repeatedly killed.

After the Cologne War came the Thirty Years' War, which reached the Lower Rhine in full force from 1640 because other regions had been bled dry. In 1643 the castle was blown up – but remained in use as the district office for almost another hundred years.

And it continued: the second and third French wars of conquest in 1672 and 1688, the War of the Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1713, in the course of which 50 dwellings in Oedt burned down in 1707, probably through arson by plundering soldiers. Then came the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740 to 1748, and from 1756 the Seven Years' War, in which the Electorate of Cologne stood with Austria and France against Prussia.

In that last war the castle was taken down in 1757 as a quarry for a road embankment. The district itself was left carrying a debt of 30,000 Reichstaler.