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History of the Franks

St Gregory of Tours, tr. Dalton, 1927

Book 5, 35. Of Queen Austrechild

In these days,¹ Austrechild, queen of Guntram, was consumed by the same disease.² But ere she breathed out her vile spirit she had perceived with many a deep sigh that she could not escape; therefore would she have companions in her death, and so wrought that at her obsequies there should be sound of others wailing their own dead. She is said to have made petition to the king in the spirit of Herod, saying: ‘I should yet have had hope of life, were I not undone by the treatment of evil physicians; the draughts which I had from them have robbed me of my life, and caused me thus swiftly to lose the light of day. Wherefore I entreat thee, suffer not my death to pass unavenged; I adjure thee under a solemn oath to have them slain with the sword the moment that I shall have departed this light. If I may no longer live, let these also have no power to glory after my passing, but let a common grief fall on their friends and on mine.’ So saying, she gave up her unhappy soul.³ But the king, the funeral rites duly performed, was constrained by the oath sworn to his unjust queen and fulfilled her wicked behest. For he ordered the two doctors who had served her well to be slain by the sword. It stood plain in the judgement of thinking men that such fulfilment might not be without sin.

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