Vagen is a large village (''Pfarrdorf'') in the district of Rosenheim, in

Bavaria Bavaria, officially the Free State of Bavaria, is a States of Germany, state in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the list of German states by area, largest German state by land area, comprising approximately 1/5 of the total l ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. It is 2 km west of

Bruckmühl Bruckmühl (Central Bavarian: ‘’Bruckmui’’) is a market town in the district of Rosenheim, in Bavaria, Germany. It is situated on the River Mangfall, 16 km west of Rosenheim Rosenheim () is a city in Bavaria, Germany. It is an inde ...

. Vagen is administratively in

Feldkirchen-Westerham Feldkirchen-Westerham is a municipality in the district of Rosenheim, in Bavaria, Germany. It is situated 22 km west of Rosenheim. Administrative divisions Administratively, the municipality of Feldkirchen-Westerham has 54 named populated ...

municipality.

History

In 1999 archaeological excavations revealed that Vagen was settled by at least the 5th century. The village derives its name from the Bavarian noble family of Fagana. In the

High Middle Ages The High Middle Ages, or High Medieval Period, was the periodization, period of European history between and ; it was preceded by the Early Middle Ages and followed by the Late Middle Ages, which ended according to historiographical convention ...

, it fell within the domains of the Falkensteiners. In the 12th century, Count Siboto II. von Weyarn, built a castle here overlooking the Mangfall River to the east. He called it Neuburg and it was completed by 1133. In the 14th and 15th centuries the castle fell into ruins. Locals used the stone for buildings and dug into the moraine for gravel. The last remaining stones were used to build the church in 1683, so no physical evidence remains of the castle. Documents from the 14th and 15th centuries show Vagen with a bustling economy. Beginning in 1520 with the purchase of the Vagen Tavern, the Hafner, a bourgeois family from Münich, began buying up farms and commercial properties. The Hafners eventually became the local tax collectors. But, with the decline in the economy in the 18th century, the Hafners sold out to Franz Anton Vogt. The Bavarians practiced a form of local justice where the village folk would run undesirables out of town. This was called ''haberfeldtreiben'' (''driven to the oat field''). Undesirables ranged from

fallen women "Fallen woman" is an archaic term which was used to describe a woman who has "lost her innocence", and fallen from the grace of God. In 19th-century Britain especially, the meaning came to be closely associated with the loss or surrender of a ...

usurers Usury () is the practice of making loans that are seen as unfairly enriching the lender. The term may be used in a moral sense—condemning taking advantage of others' misfortunes—or in a legal sense, where an interest rate is charged in ex ...

and

con artists A scam, or a confidence trick, is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibili ...

. In Vagen the most recently recorded ''haberfeldtreiben'' was in 1716. Information about this ''haberfeldtreiben'' was preserved because the father of the ''defendant'' sued seventeen of the village folk for assault. The case was thrown out with the court ruling that the ''haberfeldtreiben'' had been a proper use of local

customary law A legal custom is the established pattern of behavior within a particular social setting. A claim can be carried out in defense of "what has always been done and accepted by law". Customary law (also, consuetudinary or unofficial law) exists wher ...

. In the 18th and 19th centuries Goldbach creek was harnessed to run local industry. It supported five mills and a blacksmith shop. Before 1972, Vagen was in the municipality of Feldkirchen in the district of Bad Aibling. In 1972 it assumed its current place in the administrative structure.

Geography

The village sits above the floodplain of the river

Mangfall The Mangfall () is a river of Upper Bavaria, Germany. It is a left tributary of the Inn. The Mangfall is the outflow of the Tegernsee lake and discharges into the Inn in Rosenheim. The Mangfall is long. Towns and villages on the Mangfall * G ...

. The landscape is typically post-glacier deranged drainage, with Vagen sited upon a terminal

moraine A moraine is any accumulation of unconsolidated debris (regolith and Rock (geology), rock), sometimes referred to as glacial till, that occurs in both currently and formerly glaciated regions, and that has been previously carried along by a gla ...

, left by the last glacier in the Vagen area, the Inn-Chiemsee glacier of the

Würm glaciation The Würm glaciation or Würm stage ( or ''Würm-Glazial'', colloquially often also ''Würmeiszeit'' or ''Würmzeit''; cf. ice age), usually referred to in the literature as the Würm (often spelled "Wurm"), was the last glacial period in the ...

. The area is scattered with longitudinal moraines called

drumlins A drumlin, from the Irish word ("little ridge"), first recorded in 1833, in the classical sense is an elongated hill in the shape of an inverted spoon or half-buried egg formed by glacial ice acting on underlying unconsolidated till or ground ...

Notes

Rosenheim (district) {{Rosenheimdistrict-geo-stub