But he could not be driven forth from the woman, who was therefore suffered to depart. When he had recited over her a formula of exorcism and anointed her brow with holy oil, the demon cried aloud, and revealed to the bishop what he was. She was seized and brought before him when, according as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, he perceived that she had an unclean spirit that prophesied through her. These things came to the ears of Ageric, the bishop of Verdun, who sent to have her arrested. Every day she was amassing gold and silver, and went abroad bejewelled and bedizened till the people held her a kind of goddess. If any one was fobbed or suffered misfortune, she at once proclaimed whither the thief had fled, to whom he handed over the spoil or what he had done with it.

VII,44] At this time there was a woman possessed with a spirit of prophecy who brought much gain to her masters by divination she won their favour that they set her free, and she now lived as she desired. In his record of event Gregory exposes himself more personally than in his enunciation of Orthodox belief -his passion for peace, his curious, observing writer's eye, his appreciation of a queer sort of humor in Sichar's drunken talk of the value of wergeld, which like Clovis's gilded armlets reveals the rare tone that mocks Germanic society's pious and important cliches. Sichar and Chramnesind (in a passage recently made more famous by its use in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis) act out the drama of blood-feud and wergeld. Here the poor, in famine, sell their freedom, the merchant goes towards Orleans to buy wine, the witch Bees to the wicked queen Fredegundis, and punishment follows crime. Something of the connection between men's religious beliefs and their view of history is here apparent. T hese passages from the beginning of The History of the Franks and from its record of events for the years 584 to 587 show what a man might say when he tried to define his faith and what he might see when he looked out on the world around him in the late sixth century, in Frankland. Gregory of Tours: His Faith and the World Around Him HIstory of the Franks THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES: 500-1000

Gregory of tours history of the franks