Frauenfeld

Frauenfeld, in Alemannic Frauefäld, is a town of about 26,000 inhabitants and the capital of the canton of Thurgau, Switzerland. The earliest traces of human settlement are several La Tène era graves east of Langdorf, and the Roman road from Oberwinterthur (Vitudurum) to Pfyn ran through what is now the Allmend; two Roman villas were found at Thalbach and Oberkirch, and on the ruins of the villa at Oberkirch an Early Middle Ages cemetery was laid out and a church stood by the 9th century. The area around Frauenfeld belonged to the Dinghof of Erching, a church- or monastery-owned manor farm with a manor house, twelve houses and at least one mill, which in the 13th century formed a self-contained manor complex occupied by a Habsburg Vogt after 1270. Villages grew up around Erching and around the church at Oberkirch from the late 12th century, and by the end of the 1220s a fortified tower with a mill and chapel had been built, around which a third village grew on land owned by Reichenau Abbey. That village became Frauenfeld.