Hergenfeld lies at the foot of the Soonwald between the Naheland – the land lining each side of the Nahe – and the Hunsrück.

Clockwise from the north, Hergenfeld’s neighbours are the municipalities of Schöneberg, Windesheim, Wallhausen and Spabrücken, all of which likewise lie within the Bad Kreuznach district.

Bearing witness to settlers in this area in the “Newer Old Stone Age” (75,000 to 10,000 BC) are archaeological finds of rough-hewn quartzite tools on the Lindengrund near Heddesheim.

Later, when the Romans were beaten by the Alemanni, who then thrust northwards, these Germanic newcomers found themselves at odds with the Franks, who had come up from the Lower Rhine and had already conquered the Rhenish lands.

At the Battle of Tolbiac in AD 496, the Alemanni were beaten and thereby forced to cede the northern part of their domain, including the Naheland where Hergenfeld now lies, to the victors, the Franks, another Germanic people.

Thus, King Clovis I of the Franks, who, true to the vow that he had made in the battle, had himself baptized, became the local ruler.

After Count Emanuel Maximilian Wilhelm von Schömburg’s death, the fief passed back to the overlord, the Electorate of Mainz, whereupon Prince-Bishop-Elector Anselm Franz enfeoffed his family with it, for which privilege he was paid 7,000 Rhenish guilders.

The most valuable piece from the Hergenfeld chapel, the Late Gothic predella, is now to be found at the Diocesan Museum in Trier.

It is a painted tablet with portraits of Christ and the Twelve Apostles from about 1500, a Middle Rhine work akin to the 1506 altar at the Liebfrauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) at Oberwesel.

[9] The municipality’s arms might be described thus: Per fess abased sable three crosses pattée argent and gules a wheel spoked of six of the second.

His parents may have soon thereafter moved to southern Electoral Palatinate where they saw to their son’s higher learning in Speyer, Mannheim and Wetzlar.

On 2 December 1816, his remains were exhumed and moved to a new grave at the then newly laid-out graveyard in Karlskron, where his wife, who died in 1823, was later also buried.