was built anew, the building was done around the old church, essentially moving the village to the southeast, and even leaving one street once wholly within the village – Bohrgasse – wholly outside it. The bad luck continued into the 18th century with yet another great fire, this one set off by lightning, on 13 July 1714. This time, the church was not spared, and all but a few houses burnt down, along with a great deal of livestock. A plea was made to the Elector to lift certain levies for a period of three years to ease the great “poverty and ruin” that the fire had brought down on the village. In 1718, on the Elector's orders, all land was measured, and the information yielded by this survey was compiled into a Grund- und Extraktbuch, a catalogue not only of land measurements, but also ownership. Non-resident owners at this time were Himmerod Abbey, Stuben Monastery, Sieburg Monastery, the Foundation at Pfalzel (nowadays an outlying centre of Trier) and the virgins’ convent at Karden. Hunting rights were held by the Lords of Metternich-Winneburg, as were fishing rights on the Ellerbach, although these were actually jointly held with the Elector of Trier. The monastic institutions were later stripped of their landholdings in 1794 when the French Revolutionary occupation began. The Seven Years' War was particularly hard on Faid, then known as Faith (this was pronounced more like “fight” than like the English word spelt the same way, as is the name's modern form, too). The villagers were forever having to supply and billet troops, a very costly and burdensome exercise. In 1815 Faid was assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia at the Congress of Vienna. Since 1946, it has been part of the then newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Politics Municipal council The council is made up of 16 council members, who were elected by majority vote at the municipal election held on 7 June 2009, and the honorary mayor as chairman. Mayor Faid's mayor is Stefan Thomas. Coat of arms The German blazon reads: Zweimal gespaltener Schild im roten Feld ein aus dem Schildfuß wachsender goldener Abtsstab, silbernes Feld mit schwarzem, rot bewehrten Wolf mit roter Zunge. Rotes Feld mit goldener Palme. The municipality's arms might in English heraldic language be described thus: Gules a pale argent surmounted by a wolf rampant sable armed and langued of the first, the