The former village of Niederaschbach, which was always named in old documents as one of the Eßweiler Tal villages, lay northwest of today's village of Aschbach, which itself was once known as Oberaschbach ("Ober—" and "Nieder—" are cognate with English “over” and “nether”, and mean “upper” and “lower”, respectively). Johannes Hofmann had this to say about Niederaschbach in 1595 (the village had already been forsaken by that time): “In this Aschbach Ground, a rifle shot from the Glan, lay the village of Niederaschbach, of which only old walls are now to be seen. Was a great village, which, as the old people say, was made to suffer a war and a fire by the old "Gerken", or Armagnacs as they call themselves.” The Armagnacs were a cohort of mercenaries under the French Count of Armagnac Bernard VII, who in the early 15th century waged a war against the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, and later Philip the Good. After the war, the troops marauded their way to the Rhine. They were beaten in 1444 in a battle near Basel by a Swiss army, suffering great losses in the process. Thus, it is assumed that Niederaschbach (in 1393 called Nieder Aspach) was utterly destroyed a few years before that battle.