It is not easy, indeed it is not possible, to make sure of the dates connected with Luidhard's work among the English at Canterbury--to give them the general name of "English." It is of some importance to make the attempt. The indications seem to me to point to a ministry of some considerable duration; but I am aware that among the many views expressed incidentally in the books, some names of great weight appear on the other side. When Ethelbert died in 616, Bede tells us that he had reigned gloriously for fifty-six years; that is, he began to reign in 560, a date earlier than that assigned by the Chronicle. Matthew of Westminster thinks Bede and the rest were wrong. With the Chronicle, he puts Ethelbert's accession later, as late as 566; but he keeps to Bede's fifty-six years' reign, and so makes him die in 622, much too late. If, as is said[8], he was born in 552, he was eight years old at his accession--rather an early age for an English sovereign in those times--and sixty-four at his death. His wife Bertha, whose marriage dates the arrival of Luidhard, was the daughter of Charibert, king of that part of the domains of his grandfather Clovis which gave to its sovereign the title of King of Paris. Her mother was Ingoberga; and if the statement of Gregory of Tours, that king Charibert married Ingoberga, is to be taken strictly, i.e. if he married her after his accession, Bertha was born about 561. But I much doubt whether Charibert had time for all his many marital wickednesses in his short reign, and I am inclined to think that he married a good deal earlier. He was the eldest son of his father Clotaire, who died in 561, and the known dates of Clovis make it probable that Charibert was of marriageable age a good many years before he succeeded his father. So far as these considerations go, Bertha may have been of much the same age as her husband Ethelbert, and their marriage may have taken place about the year 575. I find nothing in the notices of Gregory of Tours inconsistent with this. Indeed, it may fairly be said that Gregory's facts indicate a date quite as early as that I have suggested. Ingoberga put herself under Gregory's own special charge. He describes her admirable manner of life in her widowhood, passed in a religious life, without any hint that her daughter was with her; and when she died in 589, Gregory guessed her age at seventy. The chief reason for assigning a later date to the marriage is that King Edwin of Northumbria married Ethelberga, Bertha's daughter, in 625. Edwin was then a middle-aged widower, but that does not quite decide for us what sort of age he was likely to look for in a second wife. If Ethelberga was thirty when she married Edwin, Bertha would be about forty, or a little more, when her daughter was born.