ere 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, Gregor