JAUER, chief town of a circle in the government district of Liegnitz, in the province of Silesia, Prussia, is situated on the Wüthende Neisse. St Martin’s church, recently renovated, dates from 1267-90, and the evangelical church from 1655. The castle has been a penitentiary since 1746; and in the town there is a Protestant gymnasium and a hospital. Jauer manufactures leather, buckskin, carpets, cigars, carriages, and gloves, and is specially famous for its sausages. Its weekly grain and cattle market was instituted in 1404. The population in 1875 was 10,404.

Jauer was formerly the capital of a principality embracing 1200 square miles of the principality of Schweidnitz, now occupied by the circles of Jauer, Bunzlau, Löwenberg, Hirschberg, and Schönau. It was separated from Schweidnitz in 1314, but lapsed to the Bohemian crown in 1392. Jauer was formerly the prosperous seat of the Silesian linen trade, but the troubles of the Thirty Years’ War, in the course of which it was burned down three times, permanently injured it.