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Men of the earlier Middle Ages knew what they meant by war and peace. Their definitions are not hard to find, even though, when found, they prove to be inconsistent. They knew that there were just and unjust wars, good kinds of peace and bad, and they could envisage war and peace as two poles of a single concept. My intention is not to survey this large and ramshackle field but simply to enquire how far some of the definitions tallied with the facts of war and peace; and whether, at the end, the pressures making for peace had affected the nature of war. To ask whether Western Europe in the days of King Alfred and the later Carolingians was more or less peaceful than it had been four centuries earlier is not very meaningful, since an entirely new situation was created by the attacks of the Vikings, Arabs and Magyars; but it is meaningful to ask whether four centuries of additional experience had caused men to look at war and peace in a different way.

It is now three years since Wilhelm Levison, one of the last of the great Monumenta editors, died at Durham. Among the tasks he left unfinished were two of major importance to those whose concern is with Frankish studies. The first, a much-needed edition of the Lex Salica, he seems to have brought no nearer completion than had his predecessor, Bruno Krusch, or any other of the long line of Monumenta scholars who broke their hearts in the attempt to unravel it. The second, the completion of the new Monumenta edition of the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours, to supersede that of Arndt and Krusch, was a good deal further advanced. In fact, the text itself had already appeared in print under the name of Bruno Krusch alone, although it was an open secret that a great part of the burden of editing had fallen on Levison's shoulders. What remained—and still remains—to be published is the critical introduction, w*here Levison is under-stood to have developed views on the manuscript tradition that owed less to Krusch than to Krusch's own master, Wilhelm Arndt. While this introduction remains unpublished it is hazardous for others to proceed very far with work based on the text of the Historia Francorum. My own intention here is to do no more than to present an interim report on some of the ways in which historians have been using Gregory in the twenty years since the publication of Dill's and Dalton's books; for they were the last English scholars to whom Frankish studies seemed important for themselves. My debt to them is great.