It has been well said that his work, though the Church long remained corrupt, was not in vain. "He succeeded in establishing a regular intercourse between himself and the churches of Gaul, especially in the cities of the east and south; he fixed a tradition of friendship between the apostolic see and the Frank princes; he held up an ideal of Christianity before a savage and half-pagan people; and he caused the name of bishop to be once more reverenced in a land where it had grown to be almost synonymous with avarice, lawlessness, and corrupt ambition. If Gregory did no more than this he accomplished enough. Though his work was not rich in definite results at the moment, yet afterwards, in the reign of Charlemagne, its effects became manifest." [8] [Sidenote: Relations of the Frankish Church with Rome.] At the same time the Frankish Church undoubtedly maintained a position distinctly independent of Rome. Arles never really became a papal vicariate. Gregory's endeavours were fruitless in practical result.[9] The Gallican churches continued to be governed by their bishops, with every degree of local variety, not by the pope. Gregory rather set forth an ideal than established a subordination. His influence was personal not constitutional, and it was not strong. Yet in the days between Gregory and Charles the Great the links connecting Rome with Gaul were not weakened. Later on they were to be strengthened still more by the growth of a reformed monasticism, which gave support {51} to the papacy while yet it looked to the popes for guidance. But meanwhile the influence of individual ecclesiastics in Gaul must not be forgotten. As was so often the case in medieval Europe, an age of wickedness presents, in the chronicles and biographies, a very large proportion of lives which received the praise of sanctity. Bishops, anchorites, monks, often, it would seem, rose far above the standard of their day: men noted their lives with awe and remembered them with reverence. They moved in a society of curious complexity. [Learning at the court of the Merwings.] Venantius Fortunatus, who dedicated his poems to Gregory the Great, and was "the great man of letters of his age," was a poet, but a Christian poet--a writer of letters, but a close friend of holy souls, and notably of S. Radegund, the exiled princess and saint.[10] We learn from him that even in those days of blood there was a literary society at the Frankish courts, and the savage king Chilperich made pretence to be a writer, a theologian, and even a poet, though Gregory of Tours assures us that he had not the least notion of prosody. Venantius Fortunatus and his literary friends, Chilperich and his obsequious courtiers, link us to another and more notable name. To one bishop, who achieved canonisation, we owe very much of what we know of the history of those times.