Berny-Rivière and the Civic Bishop

The great crisis of Gregory’s episcopate came in 580, when he was accused before a royal council at Berny-Rivière of spreading a slander touching Queen Fredegund and King Chilperic, and was cleared only by swearing his innocence on oath at three altars. This file recounts the trial and sets it within the wider portrait of Gregory’s office — the bishop as judge, patron, protector of asylum, and political actor in his city.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)

The Accusation of 580

In 580 Gregory found himself in mortal danger. During a period when Tours was under the control of Chilperic I of Neustria, a charge was brought against Gregory that he had spread a damaging rumor about Queen Fredegund — specifically, on Gregory’s own account of the affair, the allegation that the queen was in an adulterous relationship with Bishop Bertram of Bordeaux (Gregory of Tours, Hist. V.49; trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974; Wood, Gregory of Tours, Headstart History, 1994). The accusation was laid by one of Gregory’s own subordinates, a man named Leudast, the former count of Tours, in league with a priest named Riculf — enemies of Gregory who saw an opportunity to destroy him by touching the honor of the fearsome queen (Gregory, Hist. V.48–49; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994). To slander the queen was, in the atmosphere of Fredegund’s court, a potentially capital matter, and the charge threatened Gregory with deposition and worse.

Chilperic convened a council of the bishops of his kingdom to judge the case. It met at the royal villa of Berny-Rivière (Berny-Rivière, near Vic-sur-Aisne) in 580 (Gregory, Hist. V.49; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994). The king, rather than pronouncing judgment himself, left the decision to the assembled bishops — a fact Gregory records, and which itself illustrates the peculiar standing of the episcopate, whom even a hostile king would not simply override in a matter touching one of their own (Gregory, Hist. V.49; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001).

The Oath and the Acquittal

Gregory’s defense was to deny the charge absolutely and to offer the canonical purgation: to clear himself by oath. He recounts that he swore his innocence at three altars, after celebrating Mass at each, declaring on oath that he had never spoken the words attributed to him (Gregory, Hist. V.49; trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974). The oath of a bishop, sworn thus at the altar, was accepted; the council cleared him, and the accusation collapsed (Gregory, Hist. V.49; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994). His accusers came to bad ends: Leudast was eventually hunted down and killed, and the priest Riculf was punished — outcomes Gregory records with evident satisfaction as the just recompense of those who had borne false witness against him (Gregory, Hist. V.49, VI.32; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994).

Gregory’s friend the poet Venantius Fortunatus, resident at Poitiers in the circle of Queen Radegund, was present in connection with the affair and delivered a poem in honor of Chilperic at the time — a gesture that some accounts credit with helping to smooth the king’s disposition, though Gregory’s acquittal rested formally on his oath (Gregory, Hist. V.49 and the poems of Fortunatus; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994; George, Venantius Fortunatus: A Latin Poet in Merovingian Gaul, Oxford, 1992). Gregory also records, as part of his account of the trial, a miracle: the release of a man named Modestus, imprisoned for criticizing Gregory’s accusers, through the intervention of Sts. Martin and Medard — a sign, in Gregory’s telling, of the saints’ vindication of the truth (Gregory, Hist. V.49; Cult of Saints database E07766). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5 this deliverance is reported as Gregory’s testimony within his own defense of himself.

The whole episode is known almost entirely from Gregory’s own narrative, which is of course an interested one — his self-vindication against enemies he wished to see condemned (see Value and Limits). But its main lines are secure, and it reveals with unusual clarity both Gregory’s peril and the resources that saved him: the standing of a bishop, the mechanism of the oath, and the belief that the saints would defend the innocent.

The Bishop as Civic Ruler

The trial is a window onto the office Gregory held. A Merovingian bishop of a great see was the leading man of his city, exercising an authority that was at once spiritual and civic (Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, Berkeley, 1985). Gregory’s Histories show him — and bishops like him — performing functions that in an earlier age would have belonged to Roman magistrates: sitting in judgment, arbitrating disputes, managing the church’s estates and its charity, ransoming and protecting the vulnerable, and standing between his people and the violence of counts and kings (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

Central to this civic role was the protection of asylum. The basilica of St. Martin was a place of sanctuary, and Gregory records repeated episodes in which fugitives from royal wrath — including men caught up in the dynastic wars — took refuge at Martin’s tomb, and in which Gregory defended the saint’s right of asylum against kings and counts who wished to drag them out (Gregory, Hist. IV.18, VII.21–29; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993). To defend asylum was to defend the honor and power of the saint, and Gregory did so as Martin’s steward, at real risk to himself. The famous case of Gundovald’s supporters, and the sieges and violations around the basilica during the wars, show the bishop as the human guarantor of the saint’s protection over the endangered (Gregory, Hist. VII; Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985).

Patron, Judge, and Intercessor

Beyond asylum, Gregory acted as the patron of his city and its people. He interceded with kings on behalf of Tours and its churches; he sought remissions of taxation and the redress of injustices; he mediated between warring parties; and he used the moral authority of his office, and the threat of the saint’s displeasure, to restrain the powerful (Gregory, Hist. IX.30 and passim; Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985). His model of the good bishop — the ideal against which he measured himself and others — was the pastor who fed the poor, defended the church, spoke truth to kings, and guarded the flock, on the pattern of the holy bishops of his Vita Patrum (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; see The Life of the Fathers).

The trial of 580 thus stands as the sharpest single illustration of what it meant to be a Merovingian bishop: a man of real power and real vulnerability, whose office made him the leader of his city and a figure the kings had to reckon with, but whose position could be threatened by court intrigue and whose defense, in the end, lay in the canons of the Church, the solidarity of his fellow bishops, and the belief — which was also his own deepest conviction — that St. Martin would not abandon the guardian of his shrine (Gregory, Hist. V.49; Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

References

Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (V.48–49, the accusation, the council of Berny-Rivière, the oath at three altars, the acquittal, and the Modestus miracle; VI.32, the fate of Leudast; IV.18, VII.21–29, IX.30, asylum and the bishop’s civic role.)
Wood, Ian. Gregory of Tours. Bangor: Headstart History, 1994. (The trial of 580; Leudast and Riculf; the political context.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The bishop as civic leader; asylum, patronage, and justice at Tours.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The basilica of Martin as sanctuary.)
Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The trial in Gregory’s self-presentation; the ideal of the bishop.)
George, Judith. Venantius Fortunatus: A Latin Poet in Merovingian Gaul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. (Fortunatus, his poem for Chilperic, and the circle of Poitiers.)
The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, University of Oxford, record E07766 (the Modestus deliverance in Hist. 5.49). (Cited for the attestation of the episode.)