Grégoire de Tours
538-594 6th century
Speaking to God, and of people, in the language you have rather than the one you wish you had.
Who was Grégoire de Tours?
Bishop of Tours in a Gaul where the schools had closed and no one any longer took on the task of writing down what was happening. He did it himself, in clumsy Latin, hiding nothing of the violence of kings or the cowardice of bishops. His ten books of Histories are almost all we know of that century.
In their own words
Few understand a philosophising rhetorician, while the speech of a plain man without art is heard by a great many.
I judged it right to keep, even in unpolished language, the memory of things past.