For instance, Mr. Wells quotes, quite innocently, as though it were history, the ridiculous sentence from some other popular history or other, that “to practise medicine was forbidden by the Church, which expected cures to be effected by religious rites.” He probably means that the strong general feeling of the day against _dissection_ of the dead had clerical support. But to think that there were no doctors in the Dark Ages is really going a little too far in old-fashionedness: it is not even 1850. It is 1820. In the same way the idea that Austrasia and Neustria were the German and French speaking halves of the Frankish dominion is really too antiquated. The people who believed that kind of thing and yet could claim to be scholars have been dead, even the longest-lived of them, many years since, and to use such language is rather like talking (as some people still do talk) of the United States as though they were a colony of Englishmen. The truth is, of course, that the two divisions were purely administrative, an eastern and a western; the area being too great for permanent single rule. They were obviously made without any consideration of language. Who cared about language in the seventh and early eighth centuries? They were designed to give fairly equal burdens and resources. The majority of people living in Austrasia had probably never heard German speech. The only thing in Austrasia that was German was the broad Eastern fringe, very ill-populated, with no cities that were not Roman, and with all the culture and the wealth—save Alsace and the Cologne-Aix, Rhine and lower Moselle region—romance in speech. After all, Rheims was in Austrasia, and perhaps its most important city. In the same way, to talk of the “subject population” after the defeat of Syagrius by his fellow-general, Clovis, is beyond the limit of what is tolerable in the way of exploded mid-nineteenth century convention. Everybody knows, since Fustel, that there was no trace of a conquering and a subject race. The Gallo-Romans, the Flemish-speaking Franks in the very beginning of the business, sundry German-speaking adventurers and nobles, chance soldiers from the extreme East, a great many from the South of Gaul, a mass of clerics, made up that society. It was never divided by race at all or by speech. That was the quite gratuitous assumption of people who thought noble Protestant Prussia to be the modern example of Franks, and decadent Catholic “Latins” to be the modern example of Gallo-Romans. It has no relation to reality. The social divisions of the sixth and seventh centuries were between free and unfree, between those belonging to the Curia and those governed by it, and (much the most prominent division of all) between Christian and non-Christian.