Regiswindis

Holy Martyr Regiswindis was a child of seven, slain at Lauffen on the Neckar around 839 and honored as a martyr. She is the local saint of the town of Lauffen am Neckar. She is said to have been the daughter of the margrave Ernst of the Nordgau (Upper Palatinate), to whom the Emperor Louis the Pious had given Lauffen in fief; she was born around 832.

The story tells that the margrave had a stable hand whipped for carelessness. The sister of the stable hand, the little Regiswindis's nurse, is said to have taken revenge by strangling the child entrusted to her and throwing her from the castle rock into the Neckar. The nurse wanted to throw herself into the river too, but people who came up held her back, and she confessed her crime. Three days later the fishermen of Lauffen drew the body of the girl from the Neckar, with ruddy skin, a happy expression and folded hands (by other sources, with arms outstretched, so that her body had the form of a cross). She was first buried in the churchyard. Shortly after, the old church, built of poor wood, leaned toward the grave and collapsed the next day. Bishop Hunbert of Würzburg then had a chapel built, to which her bones were moved. From then on her veneration began, and the diocese of Würzburg considered moving the relics to Würzburg.

The oldest written sources for the event date from the 11th century (Acta Sanctorum). In 1227 the bishop of Würzburg declared her a saint, and in that year the foundation stone of the church of Regiswindis in Lauffen was laid, the town's new main church, where the body was moved to a stone coffin. In the early 16th century the relic was kept in a precious silver shrine in a stone cupboard in the north wall of the choir. After the battle of Lauffen in 1534 the silver shrine was lost. She is honored locally, without Orthodox synodal canonization.