CHRISTIANITY IN GAUL FROM THE SIXTH TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY
A very special interest belongs to the history of Christianity in Gaul.
There is no more striking example of what the Church did to bridge over
the gulf between the old culture and the barbarians.
[Sidenote: Roman Gaul.]
Among early Christian martyrs few are more renowned than those who died
in Southern Gaul. Paganism lived on, concealed, in many country
districts, but the life and power and thought of the people became by
the time of Constantine, by the fourth century, entirely Christian. As
the state organised so did the Church. Gaul had seventeen provincial
governments; it came to have seventeen archbishops, and under them
bishops for each great city. On the Roman empire and the Christian
Church the foundations were laid; and they were laid firm.
[Sidenote: The barbarian invasions.]
At the beginning of the fifth century a terrible storm swept over the
land. It was the storm of Teutonic invasion. Vandals, Burgundians,
Alans, Suevi poured over the land; the Huns followed them, only to be
beaten back by a union of the other tribes. Then, after the Battle of
Châlons (451), there gradually rose out {42} of the Teutonic conquerors
the conquering power of one tribe, that of the Franks.
[Sidenote: The Church in Gaul.]
By the first ten years of the sixth century Gaul was united again,
under the rule of Chlodowech (Clovis), King of the Franks. Till well
on in the Middle Ages it was that title which the rulers of Gaul always
bore, "Rex Francorum," King of the Franks. France to-day still dates
her existence as a nation from the baptism of Clovis. It was that, his
admission into the Catholic Christianity of the Gauls over whom he
ruled, which enlisted on the side of the Frankish power all the culture
and civilisation which had never died out since the Roman days. Under
the fostering care of the Church it had survived. Brotherhood,
charity, compassion, unity, all the great ideas which the Church
cherished, were to work in long ages the transformation of the Frankish
kingship. And when Chlodowech became king under the blessing of the
Church, which had survived all through these centuries since it was
planted under the Romans, the fusion of races soon followed. The
French nation as we now know it is not merely Celtic, or Gaulish, but
Roman too, and lastly Frankish--that is, Teutonic.
[Sidenote: The baptism of Chlodowech, 496.]
The history of the baptism of Chlodowech is one of the most dramatic in
the annals of the early Middle Age. His wife, Chrotechild, was the
niece of the Burgundian king, and she was a devout Catholic. Slowly
she won her way to his heart. Never, said the chroniclers, did she
cease to persuade him that he should serve the true God; and when in
the crisis of a battle against the Alamanni he called her words to
mind, he vowed to {43} be baptised if Christ should give him the
victory. The legend adorns the historic fact that Chlodowech was
baptised by S. Remigius at Rheims, on Christmas Day, 496, and that some
three thousand of his warriors were baptised with him. "Bow thy neck,
O Sigambrian," said the prelate, "adore that which thou hast burned and
burn that which thou hast adored." Within a generation all races of
the Franks had followed the Frankish king.
[Sidenote: The dark days of the Merwings.]
The years that followed were full of growth. But for long the
Christianity which was nominally triumphant was imperfect indeed.
Chlodowech died in 511; his race went on ruling, Catholic in name but
very far from obedient to the Church's laws. The tale of their
successors, their wars and their crimes, is one which belongs to social
or political history, not to the history of the Church. The Church's
life was lived underground in the slow progress of Christian ideas.
Chlothochar, sole ruler of the Franks, died in 561. How little had the
half-century accomplished. Then came an age of division, murders,
horrors, in which the names of great ladies stand out as at least the
equals of their lords in crime. Predegund, who became the wife of
Chilperich of Neustria, and Brunichildis, the wife first of Sigebert of
Austrasia, and then of Merovech, Chilperich's son, were rivals in
wickedness. The horrors of those days are recorded in the history of
Gregory, who ruled over the see of Tours from 573 to 595. It was an
age in which, while the rulers were Christian in name, and the land was
mapped out into sees ruled by Christian bishops, and monasteries were
springing up to teach {44} the young and to set an example of religious
life, the general atmosphere was almost avowedly pagan. Men said,
tells Gregory, that "if a man has to pass between pagan altars and
God's church there is no harm in his paying homage to both," and the
lives of such men showed that it is impossible to serve God and Mammon.
Yet for a century and a half the Merwings, descendants of Chlodowech,
had among them strong rulers, great conquerors, men of iron as well as
men of blood. Early in the seventh century, from 628 to 638, there
ruled in Gaul Dagobert, the greatest of the Merwing kings. His rule
extended from the Pyrenees to the North Sea, from the ocean to the
forests of Thuringia and Bohemia. He was "ruler of all Gaul and the
greater part of Germany, very influential in the affairs of Spain,
victorious over Slavs and Bulgarians, and at home a great king,
encouraging commerce and putting into better shape the law codes of his
subjects."
[Sidenote: Break up of their kingdom.]
That was the culmination of the Merwing power. The seventh century saw
its decay, and a new step towards the medieval monarchy of the Franks.
Two causes effected the fall of the Merwings--their own vices and the
growth of feudalism with the creation of great local lords. These
threatened to break up the kingdom of Chlodowech into small states, to
disintegrate and thus destroy the united nation of the Franks.
The first cause is one which it is difficult to exaggerate. We read in
the pages of that great historian and great bishop, Gregory of Tours,
the terrible tale of their crimes, their brutal luxury, their lust for
blood, the {45} unbridled licence of their passions. That was the
record of the days of their decay. There was, however, even at the
best a great change from the times of Roman rule. For civilisation,
literary culture, law, we find substituted in the pages of Gregory of
Tours savagery, scenes of brutality, drunkenness, robbery. Law and
civilisation seem to sleep. It was in this state of the country, when
every man's hand was against his neighbour, when law was unheard amid
the strife, that feudalism arose, a natural development of the desire
for self-preservation, which led to associations to supply the mutual
protection which there was no strength behind the law to enforce. In
all these movements the Church had an active part. [Sidenote: The
influence of the Church.] It was her principles of association which
taught men the idea of unity, of bonds by which personal security
should be based on new guarantees amid the weakness of government and
the neglect of law. The Church held the tradition of a civilisation
the barbarians had never known, and in her own moral teaching she set
forth the way to an ideal state which should combine all the elements
of strength. The growth of the Frankish nation was guided almost
entirely by the Church.
Feudalism, Roman administration and law, Christian faith and
discipline--these three factors were at work throughout the Dark Ages
from the fifth to the ninth century: and they were all--the last two
most especially--under the direction of the Church. And first and most
obviously the monarchy of the Merwings was a patent imitation of the
Roman Empire. The clergy had maintained the imperial tradition. It
was they who taught the sovereigns to replace the emperors {46} and to
produce around them the illusion of a Roman rule. They employed
officers with the same titles, centred their administration in their
household, claimed and exercised unlimited power. No power above them
did they recognise, save only, when they would listen to their
teachers, the power of the love--more often the fear--of God. The
barbarian invasions that had swept over the land had destroyed the
local, as well as the central administration. At Arles survived the
relics of the old Roman functionaries of the prefecture; but in the
land of the Franks the whole system had to be reconstructed from the
tradition of which the Church was the faithful guardian.
[Sidenote: Relations with the Eastern Empire.]
Thus the real aim of Chlodowech and his successors was not to conquer
the Roman Empire, not to substitute a Teutonic power for a Roman one;
but to take the place of the empire in Gaul, to succeed to its
heritage, to re-establish its authority, under Frankish kings. Thus
when the Empire of the West had ceased to be, the Frankish kings sought
titles and alliances from the emperors who still ruled at
Constantinople. It is a significant characteristic, indeed, of the
Merwing monarchy that it kept up close relations with the distant Roman
Empire in the East, that the Frankish kings professed to be the loyal
allies, as they were often the formally adopted sons, of the Roman
emperors and the consuls of the republic.
The Frankish kings, by their Christianity, imperfect though it was,
were admitted to fellowship with the central power of the Christian
world, with emperor at Byzantium and pope at Rome.
"Gaul was really independent of the empire in all {47} respects," [1]
and it is not there that we should seek for ecclesiastical relations
with Constantinople. But there can be no question that the Catholicism
of the Franks owed something to Eastern influences. There are points
in the Gallican ritual which are distinctly Byzantine, and must belong
to this period. Chlodowech, as an ally rather than a subject, and not
least, perhaps, because he was a Catholic, received the dignity of the
consulate from Anastasius.[2] And in the reign of the great Justinian
the Merwings looked to the emperor for recognition and support.
Theodebert, his "son," accepted a commission to propagate the Catholic
faith in the imperial name.[3] Bishops, too, who might be in need of
advice and consolation, applied naturally to Constantinople. Nicetius,
Bishop of Trier, that "man of highest sanctity, admirable in preaching,
and renowned for good works," [4] persecuted by Chlothochar and his
men, wrote naturally to the holy and orthodox emperor, "dominus semper
suus." In the midst of barbarities scarce conceivable,[5] the finest
characters were trained by the simple verities of the Catholic faith,
to which they clung with an extraordinary tenacity. Nor is this
anywhere more strongly shown than in the history of the Franks. Of the
meaning of the great struggle of Catholicism against Arianism, and of
its immense personal value, the histories afford many instances. There
is an eloquent passage in {48} [Sidenote: The strength of the Catholic
faith among the Franks.] Mr. Hodgkin's _Italy and her Invaders_[6]
which I cannot forbear to quote. "In the previous generation both
Brunichildis and Galswintha had easily conformed to the Catholic faith
of their affianced husbands. Probably the councillors of Leovigild
expected that a mere child like Ingunthis would without difficulty make
the converse change from Catholicism back into Arianism. This was ever
the capital fault of the Arian statesmen, that, with all their
religious bitterness, they could not comprehend that the profession of
faith, which was hardly more than a fashion to most of themselves, was
a matter of life and death to their Catholic rivals. Here, for
instance, was their own princess, Brunichildis, reared in Arianism,
converted to the orthodox creed, clinging to it tenaciously through all
the perils and adversities of her own stormy career, and able to imbue
the child-bride, her daughter, with such an unyielding devotion to the
faith of Nicaea, that not one of all the formidable personages whom she
met in her new husband's home could avail to move her by one hair's
breadth towards 'the Arian pravity.'"
It was the strength of the Catholicism of those who were trained in it
and by it, seen in Spain and Gaul as well as in Italy, which drew the
Frankish churchmen naturally towards the great witnessing power of the
Roman bishop. The pontificate of Gregory the Great affords significant
illustrations of this influence.
From 595 the letters of S. Gregory show a continual interest in Gaul.
A good deal of it is personal, concerned with the management of papal
estates or with {49} the relations of particular persons towards the
pope himself. [Sidenote: Gregory the Great and Gaul.] But Gregory was
careful to assert a very special connection between Rome and the "lands
of the Gauls" in all ecclesiastical matters. The Roman Church was the
mother to whom they applied in time of need.[7] Gregory gave the
pallium to Vergilius, bishop of the ancient city of Arles, and with it
the position of papal vicar within the kingdoms of Burgundy, Austrasia,
and Aquitaine. He recognised the terrible laxity of the Gallican
Church: the clergy were negligent, simoniacal, vicious; laymen were
often consecrated to the episcopate. He gave counsel freely to the
kings: Childebert he warmly commended: Brunichild, whose tenacious
adherence to the Catholic faith he knew, while he probably knew but
little of her personal character, he wrote to with paternal affection,
granted the pallium at her request and that of Gallican bishops to S.
Syagrius, Bishop of Autun, and appealed to her as one who had the will
as well as the power to reform abuses, remove scandals, and destroy
paganism. He set himself determinedly to work against the taint of
money which hung over the whole Church. He earnestly pleaded for the
expulsion of "these detestable evils," for the summoning of a synod
which should reform the whole Church. He pleaded in vain; but his work
was not without lasting results. He founded the alliance between the
papacy and the Frankish kings which was to be so fruitful in later
history. And he founded it not with a political but with an entirely
religious object. Through the court he hoped to reform the Church. He
saw how closely Church and State were {50} linked together, and he
thought that he could make the kings act as rulers who set the Church's
interest always first. It has been well said that his work, though the
Church long remained corrupt, was not in vain. "He succeeded in
establishing a regular intercourse between himself and the churches of
Gaul, especially in the cities of the east and south; he fixed a
tradition of friendship between the apostolic see and the Frank
princes; he held up an ideal of Christianity before a savage and
half-pagan people; and he caused the name of bishop to be once more
reverenced in a land where it had grown to be almost synonymous with
avarice, lawlessness, and corrupt ambition. If Gregory did no more
than this he accomplished enough. Though his work was not rich in
definite results at the moment, yet afterwards, in the reign of
Charlemagne, its effects became manifest." [8]
[Sidenote: Relations of the Frankish Church with Rome.]
At the same time the Frankish Church undoubtedly maintained a position
distinctly independent of Rome. Arles never really became a papal
vicariate. Gregory's endeavours were fruitless in practical result.[9]
The Gallican churches continued to be governed by their bishops, with
every degree of local variety, not by the pope. Gregory rather set
forth an ideal than established a subordination. His influence was
personal not constitutional, and it was not strong. Yet in the days
between Gregory and Charles the Great the links connecting Rome with
Gaul were not weakened. Later on they were to be strengthened still
more by the growth of a reformed monasticism, which gave support {51}
to the papacy while yet it looked to the popes for guidance. But
meanwhile the influence of individual ecclesiastics in Gaul must not be
forgotten. As was so often the case in medieval Europe, an age of
wickedness presents, in the chronicles and biographies, a very large
proportion of lives which received the praise of sanctity. Bishops,
anchorites, monks, often, it would seem, rose far above the standard of
their day: men noted their lives with awe and remembered them with
reverence. They moved in a society of curious complexity.
[Learning at the court of the Merwings.]
Venantius Fortunatus, who dedicated his poems to Gregory the Great, and
was "the great man of letters of his age," was a poet, but a Christian
poet--a writer of letters, but a close friend of holy souls, and
notably of S. Radegund, the exiled princess and saint.[10] We learn
from him that even in those days of blood there was a literary society
at the Frankish courts, and the savage king Chilperich made pretence to
be a writer, a theologian, and even a poet, though Gregory of Tours
assures us that he had not the least notion of prosody.
Venantius Fortunatus and his literary friends, Chilperich and his
obsequious courtiers, link us to another and more notable name. To one
bishop, who achieved canonisation, we owe very much of what we know of
the history of those times.
Gregory of Tours wrote memoirs which "are those of a man who has played
a great part in the State. At the same time he has the sense for
interesting {52} things, miracles, and adventures, which is sometimes
wanting in historians." [11]
[Sidenote: Gregory of Tours.]
We learn from his books that he had been trained in classic learning,
and that the bishops of the day did not turn aside from the pagan
classics. It is quite clear that his education was not merely
theological or even exclusively Christian. Other writers he refers to,
but with Vergil he certainly was familiar. And it is difficult to
believe that he stood alone, bitterly though he complained of the
ignorance of his contemporaries. The very fact that Gregory the Great
denounced the custom of bishops studying and teaching classical grammar
and classical fables, shows that the education of those days was not
very closely confined. And of its results, seen also in a goodly list
of clerical men of letters, Gregory of Tours is perhaps the best
example.
He was before all things a bishop; he wrote indeed, as a French writer
has happily said, "en évêque"; but he was also a statesman and a very
keen observer of life. From his pages we learn how slight had been the
impression that Christianity had yet made on the lives of barbarous
men. We see kings still wondering that God's power could be greater
than their own, yet when they were awoke to terror by the thought of
death flying in craven fear to the feet of the minister of God. The
whole history is a tale of treacheries and murders, of quarrels and of
sins among men and women pledged to God; and yet it is evident that
behind the cruelty and crime there was a new spirit at work, slowly
transforming society by the conversion of individuals. It was a
transformation {53} which was going on all over Europe; nowhere at this
time, perhaps, more conspicuously than in Gaul and in Ireland. There
are many parallels between the Celtic "age of saints" and the Merwing
age of sinners. It is difficult to learn the full truth about either;
but out of the darkness comes the conspicuous witness of individual
saints. Of one or two of these a word may be said. Most notable is
one who served both Ireland and Gaul.
[Sidenote: S. Columban (540-615).]
The figure of the great Irish monk Columban is a light in the darkness
of the gross and cruel Merwing age. Born about 540, he died in 615,
after a life of achievement and hardness such as was given to few of
his time. He died at Bobbio, crowned with the halo of heroism and
sanctity; but he was born in distant Ireland, and the main work of his
life had been to introduce into Gaul the monastic movement which was
led in Italy by S. Benedict. During the intellectual and moral
weakness which the barbarian invasions brought upon the West the Church
in Ireland appeared to stand forth resplendent in the security of her
faith and virtue and in the cultivation of learning. In the warm
Celtic nature the Gospel, so late introduced, had found a natural home.
The monasteries which rose all over the land, with the huts of hermits
and the cells of anchorites, were the seed-plots of religion and sacred
lore. The community life of Christian religious was naturally grafted
on to the old Druid stock. The tribes of the Goidels became the
monasteries; the head of the family was the abbat; the country looked
everywhere to the monks for leadership. Thus Armagh and Emly, Clonard,
Ennismore, Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, {54} Bangor, arose to teach and
govern the Church. Their monks lived by severe rule, based, no doubt,
upon the customs of the East, of Egypt or Syria, most strict in the
abasement of the selfish will, in penitence, in work, in prayer. "Good
is the rule of Bangor," said the ancient sequence, "strait, austere,
holy, and just." It was this rule, with the enthusiasm which marked
all classes for religion and for knowledge, which inspired S. Columban
in his great work. It was a work whose keynote was sacred study and
which found its harmony in monastic service. S. Columban was the type,
the representative _par excellence_, of the Irish monk, in his high
idealism, his thirst for self-sacrifice, his adventurous and missionary
spirit.
[Sidenote: His work in Gaul.]
He was trained at Bangor, but there he could not stay. He was fired
with the determination to spread the Gospel over sea, among the Gauls
who, under a veneer of Christianity, still often lived a pagan life.
There heathen superstitions still flourished, in worship of the old
gods, in veneration of trees and rocks and idols: the heathen morals
were hardly disguised. The Frankish society over which the Merwings
ruled, the Gaul of Sigebert and Chilperich and Chlothochar, was stained
with blood and lust. Apart from it altogether, it would seem, and
exercising hardly any influence, were a few holy bishops and very many
isolated monasteries, the homes of prayer and renunciation and
penitence. In the sixth century it is said that some two hundred
monasteries were founded in Gaul; but their protest against the vice of
their age was for the most part a silent one. Columban, when he
landed, was to make a more effective protest against the luxury of the
time, {55} the ineffective, unmeaning faith in the forgiveness of sins
apart from renunciation of them, which marked the semi-Christian
society into which he came.
[Sidenote: Luxeuil and its rule.]
Guntchramn, king of the Burgundians, gave him a settlement at Annegray,
and afterwards at Luxeuil, where there grew up, on the site of an
earlier Roman township, a monastery of stern and rigid rule.
Eventually he added a third foundation at Fontaine; and he presided
over three houses, governing according to a rule which he himself drew
up, after the examples of Clonard and Bangor. Its characteristic was
the completeness of the self-denial aimed at; its motto the thought,
"Think not of what thou art, but of what thou shalt be"; its government
an autocracy depending wholly on the abbat; its scholarship not only
that of the Bible, but of the Latin classics--of Horace and of Vergil.
Its work was twofold. In the first place, it exemplified a strict life
of obedience, self-sacrifice, and prayer, the home of which was ever
ready to minister to sick souls without; and, secondly, it supplied the
religion of the age with a penitential system--in the penitential based
upon Irish models--which was of great influence in the secular and
ecclesiastical legislation of the future. Columban was not favourably
received by all the episcopate of his new country. They were men of
different ideals, unacquainted with the culture which meant so much to
him; and their acceptance of the general Western custom of observing
Easter caused a warm dispute with the Celtic monks. To Gregory the
Great and to the Gaulish bishops Columban alike appealed on behalf of
the custom he had received; but finally, after more than thirty {56}
years' residence in Burgundy, he consented to observe the Celtic custom
in silence, without endeavour to make converts to it. A more grave
enemy at the beginning of the seventh century was the wicked young
Burgundian king, Theodoric, at whose court was his grandmother,
Brunichild. His stern denunciations of vice, his refusal to recognise
the king's unlawful children, brought on Columban the fury of the
oppressor, and he was ordered away from Luxeuil into a sort of
semi-captivity at Besançon, and thence into exile. Long he wandered
through Gaulish lands, to Nevers, down the Loire to Nantes, whence it
was said that the ship refused to bear him back to Ireland. At last,
after a meeting with Chlothochar, King of Neustria, whose rule over all
the Franks he had prophesied, he found refuge at Bregenz, by the lake
of Constance. With him were several of his monks, among them the S.
Gall whose settlement in those lands has given the name to a canton of
what is now Switzerland. The long journey of the exiled monks, with
their strange tonsure, their holiness, their alms, their works of
healing, was a veritable mission. [Sidenote: Bobbio.] The journey
eventually ended in Italy; the internecine strifes of the Merwings
which ceased for the time in the union of the whole land of the Franks
under Chlothochar, left Columban without interest in Gaul, and the
Lombard sovereigns gave him a home at Bobbio, in the Apennines, where
his monastery, aided by the holiness of Queen Theodelind, was a mighty
influence in the conversion of Lombardy from Arianism. There, in 615,
he died, the prophet of his age, the stern preacher of righteousness,
the wise student, the faithful herdsman of souls. {57} Columban is a
great figure, of the chief facts of whose life there is no doubt. It
is not so with many others.
[Sidenote: S. Wandrille.]
S. Patrick belongs, we do not doubt, to true history; but there is no
doubt as to the richness of the legendary element in his life. Much
the same is true of S. Wandrille. Few Englishmen, we suspect, have
heard his name; but he was a great figure in an age which Mabillon
called golden in its religious aspect, the strange, wild time of the
Merwings, the seventh century after Christ. In 648 S. Wandrille
founded the abbey of Fontenelle, in the district of Caux. He lived
till a great age, his death being probably much later than 667, to
which year it has been assigned. His career affords a very vivid
picture of the monastic life of the time, standing out amid the
darkness of crime. He rightly emphasises the holiness and wisdom and
learning of the great bishops of the Merwing age. It was their work as
leaders, missionaries, statesmen in the highest Christian sense which
the monasteries were called upon to continue and perfect. The
monasteries were the refuge and the rallying-ground of those who fought
against the secularisation of the Church at the hands of the
Gallo-Roman aristocracy. S. Wandrille, born of the great Karling
house, was a leader among leaders, statesman among statesmen, monk
among monks. He was one who passed from a great though barbaric court,
where he had been a trusted official, into the strictness of monastic
training, and then into the solitude of secluded communion with God.
Such lives as his were the great attractive forces of the seventh
century; such retreats as the valley of Fontenelle were the centres of
Christian influence of the age.
{58}
Between these men and Gregory of Tours it might seem that there was
little in common. But there were others whose lives combined the
interests of the two, the interests of monk and statesman and bishop.
[Sidenote: S. Didier.]
Another great clerk of the seventh century who must not be forgotten is
S. Didier (Desiderius) of Cahors, at one time treasurer of Chlothochar
II, and of Dagobert I., the friend of saints like Eloi (Eligius), Ouen,
and Arnulf. Through him we learn something of the religious life of
Southern Gaul. He died probably in 655, and thus he represented the
earlier part of the seventh century. His biographer gives a long list
of the holy bishops who were his contemporaries, and of the churches
and monasteries which were scattered thickly over the land. The whole
tone of his writing--earnest, biblical, spiritual, shows how the
Church, in spite of weakness and sloth and failure in some of her chief
men, yet held up a standard of right and justice, purity and devotion,
which penetrated all over the country, into castles and humble
homesteads, and profoundly affected the whole national life. And this
work was concentrated in the public eye in those good men who at court,
amid good and ill report, lived as servants of Him who went about doing
good.
But while the Church was thus entering into all the national life, as a
sharer in its interests of every kind, it was the monastic ideal, there
can be little doubt, which ultimately exercised the greatest influence
on the Franks. The saints who won reverence were for the most part
monks. The work of Columban passed into the work of Benedict, and when
Luxeuil accepted {59} the Benedictine rule, and when the Council of
Autun in 670 declared it to be the rule for all monks everywhere, a
great step was taken towards the intimate union of Gaul with the rest
of Christendom in the things on which they had begun to set most store.
[1] Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, vol. i. p. 396.
[2] Greg. Tur., ii. 38 (Migne, _Patr. Lat._, p. 236).
[3] Bouquet, _Recueil_, tom. iv. p. 59, epist. 15: cf. Gasquet,
_L'Empire byzantin et la Monarchie franque_, p. 165.
[4] Greg. Turon., _Hist. Franc._, x. 29 (Migne, p. 560): cf. also his
_Vitae Patrum_, 17. Hontheim, _Historia diplomatica_, i. 47.
[5] Cf. Greg. Turon., v. 3, on the frightful cruelty of Rauching.
[6] Vol. v. p. 262.
[7] S. Greg., _Epp._ v. 58.
[8] F. H. Dudden, _Gregory the Great_, ii. 69.
[9] Cf. E. Lavisse, _Hist. de France_, tome ii. p. 219,
[10] M. Roger, _L'Enseignement des lettres classiques d'Ausone à
Alcuin_, p. 100.
[11] W. P. Ker, _The Dark Ages_, p. 125.
{60}