50 MEDLEVAL CIVILIZATION it will soon clash out your brains/' In terror Guntrain said one day to the faithful assembled at the church, "I adjure you, men and women here present, not to assassinate me as you have assassinated my brothers." These undisciplined warriors consented to follow their king to war again, because they hoped to return with captives and booty. But they had no thought of paying taxes. Some kings sought to establish the Roman system which seemed to them adapted to secure revenue. Theudcbert, king of the Austrasian Franks, bade his minister Parthenius levy a tax; as soon as the king was dead the Franks revolted and killed Par- thenius in the church of Treves (547).1 Thirty years later Chilperic prepared lists of property and ordered a tax on lands and slaves. In the following years the country of Chilperic was ravaged by inundations, fires, and epidemics. The king lost his two sons and was himself at the point of death. Everybody believed that God was punishing Chilperic for the crime of estab- lishing the impost. Queen Fredegonde, seeing her children ill, cast into the fire the tax-rolls of the cities that were her special property, and when her husband hesitated to burn his she said: "What stops you? Do as you have seen me do, so that if we lose our children we at least may escape eternal punishment" (580). At last, in 614, the bishops and the leudes together obliged King Chlothar to declare in an ordinance that all the taxes were abolished. The Barbariaa Laws—The king of the Franks in the seventh century was the king of all Germany. But »Thetidebert died in 548 (Smith-Wace Diet, of Christian Bios. IV, 900; London, 1887)*—E0»