NOTES TO CHAPTER I.
The reader will please observe that notes immediately necessary to the understanding of the text will be given, with numbered references, under the text itself; while questions of disputing authorities, or quotations of supporting documents will have lettered references, and be thrown together at the end of each chapter. One good of this method will be that, after the numbered notes are all right, if I see need of farther explanation, as I revise the press, I can insert a letter referring to a final note without confusion of the standing types. There will be some use also in the final notes, in summing the chapters, or saying what is to be more carefully remembered of them. Thus just now it is of no consequence to remember that the first taking of Amiens was in 445, because that is not the founding of the Merovingian dynasty; neither that Merovaeus seized the throne in 447 and died ten years later. The real date to be remembered is 481, when Clovds himself comes to the throne, a boy of fifteen; and the three battles of Clovis' reign to be remembered are Soissons, Tolbiac, and Poitiers—remembering also that this was the first of the three great battles of Poitiers;— how the Poitiers district came to have such importance as a battle-position, we must afterwards discover if we can. Of Queen Clotilde and her flight from Burgundy to her Frank lover we must hear more in next chapter,—the story of the
