of Bishop Gregory of Tours, that West-Frankish history begins. An English student feels a nearer interest in the abbey without the walls, remembering that the abbot under whom it reached its highest glory and became the very fount and source of all contemporary learning, human and divine, was Alcuin of York. [404] Ptolem., l. ii. c. 8. [405] Cæsar, _De Bello Gallico_, l. ii. c. 35; l. vii. c. 75; l. viii. c. 46. [406] Article by M. E. Mabille on “Topographie de la Touraine,” in _Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes_, series v. vol. iv. pp. 413, 414. [407] _Notitia Provinciarum Galliæ_, _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. i. p. 122. [408] Greg. of Tours, _Hist. Franc._, l. i. c. 28. [409] Chron. Archiep. Turon., Salmon, _Chron. de Touraine_, p. 201. [410] Now Stein-am-Angern. [411] Sulpitius Severus, _Vita B. Martini_, cc. 2–9. Greg. Tours., _Hist. Franc._, l. i. cc. 34, 36, 43. [412] Sulp. Severus, _Vita B. Martini_, c. 3. [413] Sulp. Severus, _Vita B. Martini_, c. 10. When the great English scholar and the great Emperor who had brought him into Gaul were gone, Tours underwent her full share of suffering in the invasions of the northmen. City and abbey became to the valley of the Loire something like what Paris and S. Denis were to that of the Seine, the chief bulwark against the fresh tide of heathen force which threatened to sweep away the footsteps of saints and scholars. Once, indeed, Tours had been in danger from heathens of another sort, and a body of Saracens had been turned back from her gates and destroyed by Charles Martel.[414] There was no Martel to save her from the northmen; her only defence consisted in the valour of her citizens, and the fortifications left to her by her Roman governors and carefully strengthened by her Karolingian sovereigns.[415] Over and over again the pirates were driven back from the walls of Cæsarodunum; over and over again S. Martin’s Abbey was burnt to the ground. For years the canons, who in Alcuin’s days had taken the place of the original monks,[416] lived in constant fear of desecration befalling their patron’s body, and carried it from place to place, like the body of our own S. Cuthbert, sometimes depositing it within the city walls, sometimes removing it farther inland--once even to the far-off Burgundian duchy--bringing it home whenever they dared, or whenever they had a church fit to contain it. Two of these “reversions”--one on December 13, 885, the other on May 12, 919--were annually celebrated at Tours, in addition to two other feasts of S. Martin, his ordination on July 4 and his “deposition” on November 11.[417] In the first reversion Ingelger, the founder of the Angevin house, was said to have borne a prominent part. The story of the second was afterwards superseded by a famous legend known as that of the “subvention of S.