Saturnina

Saint Saturnina is honoured as a virgin martyr who came from Germany and was killed near Arras in northern France. The story of her life is a legend, and it dates her death to the year 907.

According to the legend, she came from a noble German family, her father being a king, and at the age of twelve she made a vow of virginity. When her parents wished to marry her off at twenty, she fled from Germany to France. Her betrothed, a Saxon lord, pursued her with her parents' approval and found her hiding among shepherds at Arras, where she worked as a maidservant. Because she resisted his attempt to violate her, he beheaded her.

The account says that the lord drowned in a fountain, and that Saturnina carried her head in her hands to the church of Saint Remigius in the neighbouring village of Sains-⁠lès-⁠Marquion, where she was buried. Another tradition says that she laid her head on a stone as the last human sacrifice the place would suffer. In the village a custom survives of a tree planted beside the stone that stands for her shepherd's crook.

Part of her relics was carried to Saxony, to the convent of Neuenheerse, where the church of Saint Saturnina was built between 1100 and 1130. She is commemorated on 4 June as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.