Page:History of the Franks.djvu/118

86 HISTORY OF THE FRANKS gathered and encamped on the same plain and Chramnus with the Bretons had marshaled his Hne against his father, night fell and they refrained from fighting. During the night Chonoober, count of the Bretons, said to Chramnus: I think it wrong for you to fight against your father ; allow me to-night to rush upon him and destroy him with all his army." But Chramnus would not allow this to be done, being held back I think by the power of God. When morning came they set their armies in motion and hastened to the conflict. And king Clothar was marching Hke a new David to fight against Absalom his son, crying aloud and saying : ^'Look down. Lord, from heaven and judge my cause since I suffer wicked outrage from my son; look down. Lord, and judge justly, and give that judgment that thou once gavest between Absalom and his father." When they were fighting on equal terms the count of the Bretons fled and was slain. Then Chramnus started in flight, having ships in readiness at the shore; but in his wish to take his wife and daughters he was overwhelmed by his father's soldiers and was captured and bound fast. This news was taken to king Clothar and he gave orders to burn Chramnus with fire together with his wife and daughters. They were shut up in a hut belonging to a poor man and Chramnus was stretched on a bench and strangled with a towel; and later the hut was burned over them and he perished with his wife and daughters. 21. In the fifty-first year of his reign king Clothar set out for the door of the blessed Martin with many gifts and coming to the tomb of the bishop just mentioned at Tours, and repeating all the deeds he had perhaps done heedlessly, and praying with loud groaning that the blessed confessor of God would obtain God's forgiveness for his faults and by his intercession blot out what he had done contrary to reason, he then returned, and in the fifty- first year of his reign, while hunting in the forest of Cuise, he was seized with a fever and returned thence to a villa in Compiegne There he was painfully harassed by the fever and said: "Alas! What do you think the king of heaven is like when he kills such great kings in this way?" Laboring under this pain he breathed his last, and his four sons carried him with great honor to Soissons and buried him in the church of St. Medard. He died the next day in the revolving year after Chramnus had been slain.