a, lived in the first castle belonging to the domain at
Castrum in Ogo or Chateau d'Oex. His was the time of good Queen Berthe,
who, for defence against the Saracen invasion, built a long series of
towers on height after height from Neuchatel to the borders of Lake
Leman, many of which, situated in the county of Gruyere, became the
property of its ruling family. That Turimbert was of importance among
the secular landholders of the tenth century is attested by his
participation in the Plaid of St. Gervais, a tribunal famous as being
one of the earliest on record, and held by the Seigneur de la Justice of
Geneva. His exchange of lands with Bishop Boson of Lausanne is also
recorded in the first of a series of yellow parchments, which in
monastic Latin narrate the succeeding incidents of the Gruyere
sovereignty and tell the story of the long predominance of the church in
Switzerland. Seven centuries before Turimbert, in the period of the
Roman domination, a cloister had been founded at St. Maurice D'Agaune,
near the great Rhone gateway of the Alps, in memory of the Theban legion
who had preferred death to the abjuration of their Christian faith.
Here, three centuries later, the converted Burgundian king, Sigismund,
took refuge after the murder of his son, enlarging it into a vast
monastery where five hundred monks, singing in relays from dawn to dawn
in never ceasing psalmodies, implored heaven for pardon of his crime. In
the seventh century came the missionary monks from Ireland, St. Columban
and his successor, St. Gall, who built his hermitage on the site of the
great mediaeval centre of arts and learning which still bears his name.
At the same time, St. Donat, son of the governor of lower Burgundy, and
disciple of Columban, mounted the archiepiscopal throne at Besancon. In
his honor the earliest church of the county of Gruyere was erected near
the castle of Count Turimbert in the Pays-d'en-Haut. Under the influence
of these powerful religious institutions, the country was cultivated and
the people instructed, but under Rodolph III the second Burgundian
kingdom rapidly approached its dissolution. Weakly subservient to the
church, and dispossessing himself of his revenues to such an extent that
he was forced to beg a small pittance for his daily necessities from his
churchly despoilers, it was said of him that "_Onc ne fut roi comme ce
roi_." Ceding the whole of the province of Vaud, including part of the
possessions of Coun