Saints' lives were works of edification that were addressed to all Christians – but they arose from dialogue amongst the clergy themselves and very strongly reflected clerical attitudes. Their authors were usually anonymous. Few of those whose names we know were great intellectuals or men of high importance and from what we can deduce of the vast majority of anonymous writers, they were much the same. The ideas they express, therefore, are likely to be those current among the literate clergy. The lives are, therefore, likely to be representative of the literate “Church” as a whole in a way few other types of literature are. They are often highly conventionalized: written to explain what a saint ought to be rather than to describe an actual life. They are deeply concerned with miracles, reflecting the influence of the famous Life of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus. But however conventionalized, they reflect contemporary reality, as more and more scholars have come to realize. Ian Wood has recently given us a masterly treatment of a group of such lives to reveal the crisis in Merovingian politics around 675, while Carroll Gillmor has succinctly analysed the Miracula Sancti Germani to demonstrate the movements of Vikings in ninth-century West Francia. They have their traps. Arnulf the Martyr is a soldier accused of disloyalty by his lord; he died in battle against pagans when he gave his horse to his unhorsed lord so that he could flee. He is nominally eighth-century, but I suspect this is a later life.