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Updated: June 9, 2025
The fortified citadel of the seigneury was built on the site of a Gallo-Roman camp, or castrum, the castrum on that of a Gallic oppidum. The once warlike, grim little place, that often defied its enemies in the seigneurial wars, is now the most dead-alive, sleepy little provincial place imaginable.
The whole history of the occupation of France is told by Augustin Thierry, in his 'Narratives of the Merovingian Times. "There are Franks," he says in his Preface, "who remained pure Germans in Gaul; Gallo-Romans, irritated and disgusted by the barbarian rule; Franks more or less influenced by the manners and customs of civilised life; and 'Romans more or less barbarian in mind and manners. The contrast may be followed in all its shades through the sixth century, and into the middle of the seventh; later, the Germanic and Gallo-Roman stamp seemed effaced and lost in a semi-barbarism clothed in theocratic forms."
For this is the world of Gregory of Tours, of which you may read in his History of the Franks. The rule under which it lives is the rule of the horrible Merovingian kings. Side by side with the villas barbarism spreads and flourishes like a jungle growth. Learning is dying hardly the ghost of a university is left and Gregory himself who came of a great Gallo-Roman family and was a bishop bewails his ignorance of grammar. The towns are shrinking, crouched behind their defences. The synagogues are flaming, and the first step has been taken in that tragic tale of proscription and tallage, tallage and expulsion which (it seems) must never end. As to politics, the will of the leader and his retinue is the rule of the Franks, and purge and bloodbath mark every stage in the rivalry of the Merovingian princes. The worst of them are devils like Chilperic and Fredegond, the best of them are still barbarians like that King Guntram, who fills so many indulgent pages in Gregory of Tours. He is a vaguely contemporary figure, a fat, voluble man, now purring with jovial good nature, now bursting into explosions of wrath and violence, a strange mixture of bonhomie and brutality. It is an ironic commentary on what has happened to civilization that Gregory should regard him with affection, that he should be known as 'Good King Guntram' and that the church should actually have canonized him after his death. Good King Guntram; Michelet has summed him up in a phrase 'Ce bon roi
It used to be said of the old Gallo-Roman city that its wealth was so great that the streets were paved with mosaic. Now one would be thankful for a bit that was smooth. The pavement is almost as bad as that of Arles.
Lastly, and this was, perhaps, his most original merit, he understood of what importance, for the Frankish kingdom, was the conversion to Christianity of the Germanic peoples over the Rhine, and he abetted with all his might the zeal of the popes and missionaries, Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and Gallo-Roman, devoted to this great work. The two apostles of Friesland, St. Willfried and St.
Consider the dreariness of the hagiographers, every one of them boasting the noble rank and the conventional status of his hero, and you may say not one giving the least conception of the man's personality. You have the great Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running down the centuries from the Decline of the Empire to the climax of Charlemagne.
Here we have a sign of a definite attitude towards historical fact, an attitude which is open to question but which is still permissible. He believes that the civilization of Rome endured for the main part, particularly in Gaul, until the ninth century. In The Eye-Witness he states roundly that Charlemagne came of an old family of wealthy and powerful Gallo-Roman nobles.
For all these reasons, the invasions of the Saracens in the south of France did not threaten, as those of the Northmen did in the north, the security of the Gallo-Frankish monarchy, and the Gallo-Roman populations of the south were able to defend their national independence at the same time against the Saracens and the Franks.
It cannot, however, be admitted that a desire to popularize the Frankish kings is a sufficient and truth-like explanation of these tales of the Gallo-Roman chroniclers, or that they are no more than "a poetical expression, a romantic development" of the real facts briefly noted by Gregory of Tours; the tales have a graver origin and contain more truth than would be presumed from some of the anecdotes and sayings mixed up with them.
Notwithstanding the abundance of mammalian bones in the peat, and the frequency of stone implements of the Celtic and Gallo-Roman periods, M. Boucher de Perthes has only met with three or four fragments of human skeletons.
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