Huttwil is a municipality in the Oberaargau administrative district in the Swiss canton of Bern. History Early history Huttwil is first mentioned in the 9th Century as Huttiwilare. The Huttwil area was probably first settled in the 7th or 8th century, though it first appears in historic records in the 9th century. Initially it was part of the Upper Aargau lands of the Adalgoze family, though by the 11th and 12th centuries the Counts of Rheinfelden and Fenis-Neuchâtel owned land and rights in Huttwil. In the 12th century Fenis-Neuchâtel donated their Huttwil lands to Erlach Abbey. The village church is first mentioned in 1093 or 1108 when Agnes von Rheinfelden and her husband Berchtold II von Zähringen donated the patronage rights to the Abbey of Saint Peter in the Black Forest. The remainder of the Rheinfelden rights passed to the Zähringens through Agnes' marriage. When the Zähringen family died out in 1218 the Counts of Kyburg acquired the growing town and surrounding lands. In 1313 the Counts of Neu-Kyburg gave Huttwil to their overlord, the Austrian Habsburgs. Following the surprising Swiss Confederation and Bernese victory at the Battle of Laupen in 1339, Bernese troops destroyed the Habsburg town of Huttwil in 1340. Though the town was rebuilt and the Kyburgs remained in power Huttwil came increasingly under the Bernese sphere of influence. Over the following centuries it was owned by a Bernese noble family before being completely absorbed into the Bernese bailiwick of Trachselwald in 1516. In 1528 Bern adopted the new faith of the Protestant Reformation and Huttwil converted along with the rest of the Bernese lands. When they suppressed Erlach Abbey in the same year, the Abbey's rights and lands from the Counts of Fenis-Neuchâtel were acquired by Bern. Swiss peasant war of 1653 During the Swiss peasant war of 1653, Huttwil was a center of the rebellion. On 23 April 1653, representatives of the people of the countryside of Lucerne, Bern, Basel, and Solothurn met at Sumiswald and concluded an alliance to help each other to achieve their goals. A week later, they met again at Huttwil, where they renewed that alliance and elected Niklaus Leuenberger from Rüderswil in the Emmental as their leader. On 14 May 1653, the peasants met again at a Landsgemeinde at Huttwil and formalized their alliance as the "League of Huttwil" by signing a written contract in the style of the old