History
In 1097, Sankt Aldegund had its first documentary mention as Sanctam Aldegundam. It is known that the place was settled as far back as Roman times from the foundations of a Roman villa rustica south of the village, and also from a woman’s grave from Constantine the Great’s time (Emperor from AD 306 to 337, in early Christian times) unearthed in 1953 during vineyard work. The grave also yielded up valuable grave goods made of glass and ceramic, among them a blue glass bowl shaped like a little ship, whose fine execution had never before been seen in a find north of the Alps.
The municipality’s namesake is the Merovingian prince’s daughter and abbess Aldegonde (or Aldegundis), who in the 7th century lived and worked in Maubeuge, and who was canonized shortly after dying of breast cancer.
The old village school, mentioned in 1523, was used as a one-room school until 1781.
Beginning in 1794, Sankt Aldegund lay under French rule. In 1815 it 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. Under the Verwaltungsvereinfachungsgesetz (“Administration Simplification Law”) of 18 July 1970, with effect from 7 November 1970, the municipality was grouped into the Verbandsgemeinde of Zell.
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“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)