flows into the Glan, coming down from Altenglan, near the middle of town. Here at these forks arose the town of Lauterecken, which was once called Lautereck. Vanished villages Within what are now Lauterecken's town limits once lay two villages named Bilstein and Nirthausen, and also an estate called the Liebfrauenhof. For a time, another estate called the Windhof (despite the name, not a wind farm) also belonged to Lauterecken. Bilstein first crops up in an original document from 1304, and is last mentioned in the mid 16th century, meaning that it might well have vanished even before the Thirty Years' War. The name is interpreted as having originally been "Bilo’s Estate". Nirthausen was first mentioned in an original document in 1377, and cropped up in another document in 1643. Its name is interpreted as "Nerito’s Estate". The Liebfrauenhof – whose name can be taken to mean "Estate of Our Lady" – appears in a document from 1583 as a landhold of the Offenbach Monastery. According to this record, at the time when the Reformation was introduced, the feudal lords put the estate into Erbbestand (a uniquely German landhold arrangement in which ownership rights and usage rights were separated; this is forbidden by law in modern Germany). The Windhof is actually not a vanished village at all. It now belongs to the neighbouring municipality of Grumbach. Religion During the Middle Ages, the townsfolk belonged to the unified Catholic faith and long belonged to the Church of Medard. In the time of the Reformation, on orders from the Dukes of Zweibrücken and following the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, everyone in the town had to convert to Lutheran belief. When towards the end of the 16th century the Duchy converted to Reformed belief, Palatinate-Veldenz did not embrace this newer faith and kept its people with Lutheranism. Nevertheless, in the time of the occupation by French King Louis XIV's troops and in the time of Electoral Palatinate rule that followed, a strong reversion to Catholic belief set in. In 1690, there was once again a Catholic community. Soon, roughly one third of all the townsfolk belonged to the Catholic faith, and the other two thirds were Protestant. The Reformed faith according to John Calvin’s teachings never did play any important rôle, even before the 1818 Protestant Union, although they did for a while have a prayer house at their disposal. There