The Conversion of Europe

(#litres_trial_promo) One may wonder whether Paulinus, as he opened his copy of the Moralia or the Liber Regulae Pastoralis, would have thought this the most appropriate juncture to explain that Pope Gregory had taught that rulers should be humble. Bede could tackle the problem of a king, like Edwin, who became very powerful before his conversion to Christianity by claiming this as an augury; in the words of a modern scholar, Edwin got his power ‘on account so to say’.

(#litres_trial_promo) More problematic was the successful king who remained obstinately heathen. Such was Penda, king of the midland kingdom of Mercia, who defeated and killed Edwin in 633. Bede sidestepped the problem by saying as little as possible about him.

Second, we might care to notice the role of the Christian queen in bringing about the conversion of her pagan husband. Here too there was an apposite scriptural reference. ‘The heathen husband now belongs to God through his Christian wife’ (I Corinthians vii.14). St Paul’s words were quoted both by Bishop Nicetius in his letter to Chlodoswintha and by Pope Boniface V in his letter to Ethelburga. This was a role for the queen which was to have a distinguished future. Much later on, when coronation rituals were devised in Francia in the ninth century, it would be emphasized that it was the duty of a queen ‘to summon barbarous peoples to acknowledgement of the Truth’. One may wonder whether we have something of a topos here. How important really was Clotilde in bringing about the conversion of Clovis? We cannot answer this question, it need hardly be said. But there can be no doubting the fact that royal conversions did frequently follow the marriage of a pagan king to a Christian wife.

It was not always so. Here is Bede on the (unnamed) wife of King Redwald of East Anglia.

Redwald had been initiated into the mysteries of the Christian faith in Kent, but in vain. For on his return home he was seduced by his wife and by certain evil teachers and perverted from the sincerity of his faith, so that his last state was worse than his first. After the manner of the ancient Samaritans, he seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served; in the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils.

It is an interesting story. Another way of interpreting it would be to see Redwald’s acceptance of Christianity simply as the addition of a new god to his pantheon of deities. It may well have been that the exclusive claims of the Christian God were ill-understood at first by royal converts.

Royal hesitation, thirdly, is a notable feature of our narratives. Clovis, Ethelbert and Edwin all took their time. Abandonment of the old gods was no light matter. Consultation with counsellors was prudent. How would the pagan priesthood react? Coifi is the classic case of the poacher turned gamekeeper. Redwald’s men seem to have been less pliable. There are difficult questions here about the dynamics of a king’s authority over his kinsfolk, his realm and his vassal kingdoms. It is hard to judge whether conversion came about through individual choice or through pressure exerted by the solidarity of a group. Arguments can be marshalled in support of both propositions. For example, the interesting information preserved by Bede that eleven members of the royal entourage were baptized with the infant Eanflaed in June 626 – ten months before Edwin’s baptism – might suggest that in Northumbria at least there was scope for individual choice. Doubtless the truth is that both individual and group motivation co-existed side by side; even, at different times, in the same person. We can be sure that a royal lead for others to follow was effective, even though the conversions it prompted may have been less than wholly sincere, as Bede was aware. We must note too that giving a lead did not always work even within the royal family. Ethelbert’s son Eadbald remained a pagan throughout his father’s life; the heathen Penda’s son Peada became a Christian.

Finally, we may observe the manner in which conversion was accompanied or quickly followed by royal actions which marked entry into the orbit of Romanitas. This is not to say that Roman culture was not already to some extent familiar and in prospect before conversion – one need think only of Bishop Remigius and the young Clovis – though doubtless more for some kings than for others. Convert kings acquired, in their missionary churchmen, experts who could school them in what was expected of a Christian king. The results are to be seen in the Pactus Legis Salicae and the council of Orléans, in Canterbury cathedral and Ethelbert’s charters, in Edwin’s thuuf and the timber structure like a wedge of Roman amphitheatre revealed by the Yeavering excavations.

Is there an ‘archaeology of royal conversion’? Perhaps. The graves of some royal persons and of some who may have been royal persons in Frankish Gaul and early Anglo-Saxon England have been discovered. They range in date from 481/2 (Childeric) to 675 (his namesake Childeric II). In the past, archaeologists were confident that it was easy to distinguish a Christian from a pagan grave. Pagans cremated their dead and furnished them with grave-goods. Christians buried their dead on an east-west axis and did not deposit grave-goods in the tomb. Nowadays archaeologists are much more cautious. In northern Gaul and Anglo-Saxon England the shift from a predominant but not exclusive use of cremation to the custom of inhumation seems to have preceded the coming of Christianity. Orientation is no longer interpreted as a clue to belief: some apparently pagan graves are oriented and some certainly Christian ones are not. Neither is the presence or absence of grave-goods a sure indication of religious loyalties. Indeed, among the Frankish aristocracy the fashion for furnishing graves in this manner became widespread only after their conversion to Christianity. It follows that any inferences about changing beliefs founded on archaeological evidence of funerary practice are hazardous.

The most famous, and certainly the most puzzling, among the apparently royal graves of this period is an English one: the deposit beneath the so-called Mound 1 in the cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. For nearly sixty years now, since its excavation just before the beginning of the Second World War, discussion has raged about this burial, unparalleled among early medieval graves for the number, richness and variety of its contents. It is widely accepted that this was the grave of a king of the East Angles and that it cannot have been dug earlier, or much later, than about 625. Regardless of which king might have been buried there – there are four principal candidates – this is exactly the period when the ruling dynasty passed in a formal sense from paganism to Christianity. Is this change of religious affiliation one that can be detected in the archaeology of Mound 1? (We could ask the same question of the cemetery as a whole but that is not my present purpose.) It is hard to claim with any conviction that such a change is detectable. The burial rite may have been traditional, but that does not make it pagan. There may have been objects in the grave decorated with Christian symbolism, but that does not make it Christian. The most promising, and not the least enigmatic, objects on which to base an affirmative answer to the question posed above are two silver spoons (illustrated in plate 10). They bear on their handles the names SAULOS and PAULOS in Greek characters, each name preceded by a small incised cross. The names not only have a clear Christian association but would seem, in their allusion to St Paul’s change of name, to refer to a conversion. It has been suggested that these were baptismal spoons which had been presented to the man buried beneath Mound 1 at the time of his conversion to Christianity. But the case is not clear-cut. The letters of the name SAULOS were so incompetently executed that it might have been no more than a blundered attempt to copy the name PAULOS on the other spoon by a craftsman who was illiterate. The spoons may have no reference at all to the conversion of an East Anglian king. They remain puzzling – as does the burial as a whole. Its latest investigator sees in it ‘an extravagant and defiant non-Christian gesture’.

(#litres_trial_promo) His judgements invite respect but need not command assent. I am more impressed by the religious neutrality of Mound 1. This very neutrality, or inconclusiveness, may in itself have something to hint to us about the hesitant process of royal conversion.

Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, whose words are quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, was far removed in time and space from the new Constantines of early medieval Gaul and Britain. His kingdom and its people were widely – but not unrecognizably – different from those of Clovis or Edwin. Yet his encounter with that Christian faith presented to him by the representatives of the Société des Missions Évangéliques de Paris echoes some of the themes that are sounded for us in the pages of Gregory of Tours and Bede.

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The most disruptive chain of events in the life of south-east Africa in the early nineteenth century was the rise of the Zulu empire under Shaka. It was aggressive and organized for war. Before Shaka’s death in 1828 his Zulus had had a destabilizing effect upon the neighbouring peoples, long remembered by them as the Faqane or the Mfecane, literally ‘forced migration’, by extension ‘the crushing of the peoples’. Roughly speaking, the rise of the Zulu empire had the same sort of effects upon nearby peoples such as the Sotho as the rise of the Hun empire had upon the German peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries. Moshoeshoe, often abbreviated to Moshesh, created a kingdom for some of these Sotho people which he ruled with skill and statesmanship for nearly fifty years until his death in 1870 at the age of about eightyfour. This kingdom was the nucleus of the state we know today as Lesotho.

In 1824 Moshoeshoe had established a new royal settlement at Thaba Bosiu, an isolated tableland protected by cliffs which rose above the upper waters of the river Caledon some hundred miles above its confluence with the Orange river. It was there that three members of the Paris Société approached him in 1833, and at the foot of this natural fortress that they established their first mission station. It was a proximity that echoes the close spatial association of royalty and mission so often found in early medieval Europe. Thus in 635 St Aidan would establish his monastic mission station at Lindisfarne, within sight of the royal rock-fortress of Bamburgh. Moshoeshoe had wanted the missionaries to come to his kingdom for reasons that arose from the Zulu Faqane. Its effects of destabilization and demoralization had led him, a thoughtful man (as Bede presents Edwin), to wonder about the efficacy of his traditional religious observances. How could the ancestors and spirits have let these things occur? – if they really were as powerful as he had been taught to believe. Second, the Faqane had pushed his people into closer proximity to the white man. The British government at the Cape was a long way off but the Afrikaners were close at hand, some of them even beginning to cross to the northern side of the Orange river in search of new pastures for their flocks. The missionaries were outsiders, neutrals. They might help Moshoeshoe to cope with this unfamiliar world which threatened to encroach upon his people. They were baruti, teachers, who might initiate him into the secrets of the white man’s power.

Circumstances were such, therefore, that a friendly rapport was established between king and missionaries at the outset. With one of the three in particular, Eugène Casalis, Moshoeshoe struck up a warm friendship. The king showed a keen interest in Christianity. He would discuss the faith for hours on end with Casalis, encouraged his people to listen to the missionaries’ teaching, and put no obstacles in the path of individual converts. Every Sunday Moshoeshoe would don European clothes and descend from Thaba Bosiu to attend divine service at the mission chapel which had been built by workmen supplied by him free of charge. At the end of the sermon he would add his own comments on it for the edification of the congregation. One of the missionaries recorded that these royal glosses ‘often conveyed the essence of what they had been saying in words that made it more intelligible to the rest of the congregation without distorting it’. After church the king would dine with Casalis and his Scottish wife at the mission house.

Clothes and dinners were not the only trappings of Christian civilization which appealed to Moshoeshoe. He developed a taste for European horses, saddlery, wagons, firearms, agricultural implements and household utensils. He employed a deserter from the British army to build him a house of stone. Another mason whom he employed, Josias Hoffmann, later became the first president (1854–5) of the Orange Free State. He planted wheat, fruit trees and vegetables under missionary guidance. He had the greatest respect for literacy, but though he struggled hard he never quite mastered the art of writing. He adopted the European habit of issuing written laws ‘with the advice and concurrence of the great men of our tribe’: these edicts were printed in the Sesotho vernacular on a missionary printing press.

The presence and skills of the missionaries enhanced Moshoeshoe’s prestige. Under his rule the kingdom found stability and began to enjoy prosperity. The king was convinced that this was the fruit of Christianity. ‘It is the Gospel that is the source of the prosperity and peace which you enjoy,’ he told his subjects in 1842. Trade prospered under royal encouragement, regulated in one of Moshoeshoe’s written ordinances. Coin began to replace barter as a means of exchange. Casalis and his colleagues encouraged the peaceful consolidation and expansion of Moshoeshoe’s power: both parties profited from it. The string of mission stations gradually founded as offspring of the original at Thaba Bosiu was rightly perceived as useful by the king. They helped to encourage peaceful nucleated settlement; they assisted to consolidate the royal hold upon new territory; they performed a defensive function for local people and livestock in troubled times. As for the outside world, Casalis acted as a kind of secretary for foreign affairs to Moshoeshoe. Surviving diplomatic correspondence is in Casalis’s hand, subscribed by the king with a cross. Everything looked as if it were going the missionaries’ way.

Casalis and his colleagues made many converts in Lesotho. But the king, finally and after much anxious hesitation, was not among them. In deference to missionary teaching Moshoeshoe decreed changes in some of the most intimate areas of Sotho life, affecting marriage customs, initiation rituals, resort to witches and burial practices. Some of these initiatives provoked opposition. Moshoeshoe had to restore the traditional initiation rituals in all their gruesomeness, and his attempts to change marriage customs met with resentment and resistance. One of the leaders of the opposition was Tsapi, Moshoeshoe’s chief diviner, a man respected and feared for his power to foretell the future and to communicate with the spirit world. In 1839 there was an epidemic of measles. Moshoeshoe’s ancestors appeared to Tsapi and told him that ‘the children of Thaba Bosiu die because Moshoeshoe is polluted and because the evening prayers offend the ancestral spirits’. The king’s son Molapo accepted Christianity and was baptized, but apostasized a few years later. Even though three of Moshoeshoe’s wives and two of his leading counsellors became Christians, there was strong opposition at court. Moshoeshoe realized that to commit himself to Christianity would be to split his kingdom. So he never did.

There is much for the early medievalist to ponder in the story of the coming of Christianity to Lesotho. How much more we might learn could we but eavesdrop on some heavenly conversation between Casalis and Augustine, or Moshoeshoe and Ethelbert. Whimsical fancies aside, all we need note here is that early medieval missionaries were in general successful in persuading kings to declare themselves adherents of Christianity. However, as they were well aware, this was just a first step. Round and behind these new Constantines were ranked their warrior aristocracies. How were these men, and their often formidable womenfolk, to be brought to the faith? Some answers will be suggested in the next two chapters.

* (#ulink_2390334b-b159-53b5-a3cd-59273a0c3a2a) The ornaments included some 300 golden bees, later to be interpreted as a symbol of French royalty and adopted as part of his imperial insignia by Napoleon I.

* (#ulink_728c5c80-4dbf-519f-89c4-978a9844844f) A momentary digression on his name, usually rendered Chlodovechus in our Latin sources, representing a vernacular Chlodovech, with two strong gutturals. In the course of time the gutturals softened, to give something like Lodovec, which could be Latinized as Lodovecus, Ludovicus. From this descend the names Ludwig, Ludovic and Louis, all synonyms of Clovis.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_7709cf7e-d683-50b2-8527-b0e37b4336da)

An Abundance of Distinguished Patrimonies (#ulink_7709cf7e-d683-50b2-8527-b0e37b4336da)

Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.

LORD MELBOURNE, 1800

BARBARIAN KINGS like Edwin might make judicious use of ‘gifts and threats’ to bring pressure to bear upon their leading subjects. But we should not suppose that these persons became Christians only ‘through fear of the king or to win his favour’. The acceptance of Christianity by the men and women of the barbarian aristocracies was critical in the making of Christendom because these were the people who had the local influence necessary to diffuse the faith among their dependants. John Chrysostom, Maximus of Turin and Augustine of Hippo had been correct in perceiving the pivotal role of local elites, and in this respect (if not in others) the seventh and eighth centuries were no different from the fourth and fifth. This chapter and the next will examine some aspects of the conversion of the barbarian aristocracies, first in Gaul and Spain in the seventh century, then in the British Isles in the seventh and eighth, and attempt to point up significant common features. One word of warning. Surviving sources tend to be more concerned with kings than with their nobilities. It is accordingly more difficult – even more difficult – to get to grips with aristocratic than with royal conversion.

Germanic settlement in what had been imperial Roman territory wrought changes in Europe’s linguistic boundaries. The eastern frontier of the empire on the continental mainland had been marked, roughly speaking, by the course of the rivers Rhine and Danube. Within that line the language of everyday speech for many, and of authority for all, had been Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages of today. The influx of Germanic peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries pushed Latin westwards and southwards and substituted Germanic speech in a swathe of territory within what had once been the imperial frontiers. That is why Austrians and many Swiss speak varieties of German to this day. It need hardly be stressed that the pattern of linguistic change is neither neat nor simple. It therefore affords plentiful opportunity for lively academic debate. Philologists are a combative lot, and scholarly wrangling has been made the fiercer by the nationalistic dementia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Particularly has this been so in relation to the area upon which we must first concentrate attention in this chapter, the valleys of the Rhine and its western tributary the Mosel (or Moselle – which neatly encapsulates the debate). The linguistic frontier was never static. However, as a very rough approximation the map facing page 136 shows the state of affairs in the latter part of the sixth century. It will be seen that Germanic speech was current as far west as Boulogne and as far southwest as Metz and Strasbourg, with outposts further to the west, for example among the Saxon settlers in the Bayeux region and near the mouth of the Loire. And there were enclaves of Latin/Romance further to the east, for example at the city of Trier.

There is every reason to suppose that the fortunes of Christianity had run in tandem with those of its Roman language. We can detect a flourishing urban or suburban Christianity in the late fourth century. Trier, as befitted a city which was then the imperial capital in Gaul, was emphatically Christian. We might recall the community which had so impressed Augustine’s friend Ponticianus (above, p. 27). The sense of burgeoning vitality imparted by that story is confirmed by the archaeological evidence of Christian building activity in Trier – and elsewhere. At Bonn, for example, a Christian church was rebuilt at the end of the fourth century, replacing on a more generous scale an earlier chapel. Matters were different, of course, in the rural hinterland. But there were grounds for optimism. Martin had visited Trier and made an impression upon members of the local elite such as Tetradius. His friend Bishop Victricius of Rouen was making sorties into the pagan countryside of Artois.

Quite suddenly the light was snuffed out. The seat of government was removed from Trier to Arles – with all that this implied for influential concern and wealthy patronage. The Rhine frontier was pierced by the barbarian invasion of the winter of 406–7. Trier was attacked by the Franks four times in thirty-four years. Roman order collapsed, and with it the apparatus of organized Christianity. This is not to say that the faith itself entirely disappeared. It withdrew into little enclaves here and there, where best it could survive under the protection of town walls or powerful men. We know little of its fortunes, for the written sources give out almost as completely as they do in fifth-century Britain: a silence which is itself eloquent. There are gaps in the episcopal lists. At Cologne, for example, no bishop is known between Severinus in about 400 and Carentius, attested in 566. We catch glimpses of Christianity in the occasional Rhineland tombstones, some of them illustrated in plates 11 and 12. The sorrowing parents of the eight-year-old Desideratus could commission a gravestone, at Kobern near Koblenz, inscribed with Latin hexameters and Christian symbols, at some point in the fifth century. Sometimes we can spot the new arrivals embracing the faith of Rome. The parents of Rignetrudis – presumably Frankish, from her name (though this argument is not without its difficulties, as we shall see presently) – erected an elegant Christian tombstone with a Latin inscription to mark the grave of their beloved sixteen-year-old daughter at Brühl-Vochem, a little to the south of Cologne, sometime in the sixth century. But frequently the signals are ambiguous. Consider the Frankish nobleman buried at Morken, between Aachen and Cologne, a likely contemporary and a near neighbour of Rignetrudis. His relatives buried him in a wooden chamber with weapons and whetstone and shield, with jewellery and coin, with vessels of glass and bronze, bit and bridle and bucket, hefty joints of pork and beef. Was he a pagan or a Christian? There is no conclusive evidence either way. And what of the warrior commemorated in the famously enigmatic stone (plates 13 and 14 at Niederdollendorf, a bit further up the Rhine, at some point in the seventh century? What did he believe in? It may be that these are the wrong sort of questions: well, less appropriate than some others. The antithesis pagan/Christian may be too neat and simple. Reality tends to be fuzzy. (It will be a part of the argument of this and the following chapter that fuzziness is an essential and important part of the process of barbarian conversion. But this is to anticipate.) For the moment let us simply observe that grave-goods and uninscribed tombstones are at best ambiguous witnesses to belief.

Gregory of Tours, however, is not. He tells a story of his uncle Gallus (not to be confused with Columbanus’ disciple of the same name), set in Cologne in about the year 530. Gallus had gone there in the company of King Theuderic I, son of Clovis.

There was a temple there filled with various adornments, where the barbarians of the area used to make offerings and gorge themselves with meat and wine until they vomited: they adored idols there as if they were gods, and placed there wooden models of parts of the human body whenever some part of their body was touched by pain. As soon as Gallus learned this he hastened to the place with one other cleric, and having lit a fire he brought it to the temple and set it alight, while none of the foolish pagans was present. They saw the smoke of the temple going up into the sky, and looked for the one who had lit the blaze; they found him and ran after him, their swords in their hands. Gallus took to his heels and hid in the royal palace. The king learned from the threats of the pagans what had happened, and he pacified them with sweet words, calming their impudent anger. The blessed man used to tell this often, adding with tears, ‘Woe is me for not having stood my ground, so that I might have ended my life in this cause.’

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The evidence, such as it is, leaves us with a sense that in north-eastern Gaul the Frankish invasions and settlement had obliterated much, though not all, of the Christian culture of the region. An effort of ‘re-Christianization’ was called for. In about 500 or shortly afterwards Bishop Remigius of Rheims sent a man named Vedastus (Vedast, Vaast), a native of Aquitaine who had been living as a hermit near Toul, to become bishop of Arras. His biographer, writing in about 640, tells of how he found his cathedral church overgrown with brambles and defiled by animals, the city deserted since its sack by Attila the Hun: Vedastus had to expel a bear from the town, commanding it never to return. These are hagiographical commonplaces, not to be taken literally. (Attila never went anywhere near Arras but he was a convenient hate-figure to whom acts of destruction could unhesitatingly be attributed.) However, they convey vividly a sense of what the seventh century thought had been going on in the sixth. We know little if anything for certain of what Vedastus might have achieved in the course of his long episcopate at Arras – he died in about 540. It was probably not much. But it was a start.

The most famous churchman to concern himself with reChristianization was Nicetius (Nizier), bishop of Trier from c. 525 to c. 565. We had a sighting of him in the previous chapter, sending a letter of advice to the Frankish princess Chlodoswintha upon the occasion of her marriage (above, p. 105). Like Vedastus, he was a native of Aquitaine. It was a time when King Theuderic I was encouraging clerics from Aquitaine to go to work in the languishing churches of the Rhineland: an interesting sidelight on the shortage of suitable clergy in the north-east. It was under Theuderic’s patronage that Nicetius became bishop of Trier. As long-lived as Vedastus, he devoted his episcopate to the restoration of church life there. We hear, for example, of how he imported Italian craftsmen to build churches in the city. (A further indication of his mission civilisatrice was his planting of vineyards on the hillsides above the Mosel. This was another act of restoration: the region’s wine had been celebrated two centuries before by Ausonius in his poem Mosella; but viticulture as well as Christianity had been a casualty of the fifth century.)

All the tales told of Nicetius by Gregory of Tours (on the authority of his friend Aredius, Nicetius’ pupil) have an urban setting. The point is not without significance. An episcopal city with a distinguished and very visible Roman past; its churches; its wine supply: these were at the heart of his concerns, at any rate as celebrated by the poet Venantius Fortunatus, Italian born but domiciled in Gaul. These were the characteristic concerns of the Aquitanian contingent of the sixth century. Men like Vedastus and Nicetius – and, we might add, Aredius and Gallus and Gregory of Tours – came from a part of Gaul which had suffered less disruption than the north-east. Beyond the Loire in Aquitaine city life had maintained an unbroken continuity, there had been little Germanic settlement, much of the administrative and legal routine of daily life was still recognizably Roman, and the church had experienced few of the tremors which had caused it to crack and crumble further north. We must not undervalue the contribution of the Aquitanian clergy in restoring church life in the north-east. They brought determined personnel – Nicetius was clearly a very formidable personality; they brought endowments, books, cults. With royal help they breathed new spiritual life into cities such as Trier. But, an important reservation, they failed to fling out any very attractive spiritual lifeline to the new masters of the region, the local Frankish aristocracy. The re-establishment of a Roman, city-based ecclesiastical pattern was not of itself going to win over the hearts and minds of a rural, tribal warrior aristocracy. The man buried at Morken may have been a Christian – indeed, it is almost inconceivable that a Frankish nobleman of the late sixth century could not have been formally a Christian, serving as he did kings who had been conspicuously Christian for nearly 100 years. He and Nicetius might even (who knows?) have met one another. But one cannot help feeling that their worlds scarcely overlapped or interpenetrated at all.

In the age of Nicetius it is likely that kings were more influential than Gallo-Roman bishops in bringing the aristocracy to adhere to Christianity. As we saw in the last chapter, kings set an example which their aristocracies were likely to follow, if only because it was useful to be in good standing with your king. Frankish kings were becoming more assertively Christian in the course of the sixth century. Childebert I (511–58) issued an edict ordering the destruction of idols: it was more than his father Clovis had done. He brought back relics of St Vincent of Saragossa from a military campaign in Spain and built a church in the saint’s honour in Paris, in which he was later buried. (It is now Saint-Germain-des-Prés.) Other leading members of the Merovingian dynasty were buried in Christian churches in the course of the century. The grave of one of them, Childebert’s sister-in-law Arnegund, was excavated from beneath the church of Saint-Denis in 1959. (The identification has been doubted: whatever the truth of the matter, the woman buried there was clearly of very high social rank.)

A Frankish church many of whose bishoprics were generously endowed, their incumbents therefore rich and powerful, must have been attractive to a predatory aristocracy. The prevalence of simony in sixth-century Gaul – that is, the practice of buying church office – shows this: people will pay for something worth having. Gregory of Tours was worried about simony and Pope Gregory I wrote several letters to Gallic kings and bishops condemning it in severe terms. Yet these simoniacs were Gallo-Roman, not Frankish aristocrats. When did bishops start to be drawn from Frankish, as opposed to Gallo-Roman families? It is a difficult question to answer because the enquirer is dependent almost entirely on the evidence of personal names, and a ‘Roman’ name need not indicate Gallo-Roman blood any more than a ‘Germanic’ name need indicate Frankish blood. Even so impeccable a Gallo-Roman nobleman as Gregory of Tours – and one who was very proud of it too – had an uncle who bore the Frankish name Gundulf. Frankish names among the bench of bishops are rare before the latter years of the sixth century, when we start to encounter such bishops as Magneric of Trier or Ebergisel of Cologne. They become common in the seventh century. After the dynasty’s acceptance of Christianity Frankish rulers came rapidly to exert a large measure of control over episcopal appointments. Kings used this power of patronage to reward loyal servants. Service to the crown became the standard route to episcopal office. We shall see plentiful examples of this in the seventh and later centuries.