Gregory, bishop of Tours from 573 until 594, is the best-known individual from the Merovingian kingdoms, and the source of the bulk of our knowledge of the late sixth century, for better or worse. He is, therefore, the obvious writer with whom to begin. It is commonly known that in his Histories and hagiographical works, Gregory described people in his native Gaul as ‘Roman’ when writing about the late Roman empire and its immediate aftermath, but not for his own contemporaries in the sixth century. There were certainly some who identified themselves or were identified by others as Romans, as we will see in the next chapter, yet Gregory did not choose this strategy of identification himself.

Historians have long puzzled over and attempted to explain this terminological choice. For Godefroid Kurth, there were no Romans to mention because everyone had become a Frank. Michel Rouche argued that as a descendant of Roman senators, Gregory would have felt a sense of superiority over non-Romans and continued to describe an extant Roman identity with terms like ‘senator’. However, these explanations rested on two long-held assumptions. First was that Gregory's work is an accurate, unmediated reflection of his society. During the literary turn of the late twentieth century, by contrast, Ian Wood and others demonstrated that, in fact, Gregory could be a cunning manipulator of information who recorded, omitted, and ordered episodes for specific purposes. These manipulations might have been ideological, or simply practical moves to preserve his status in volatile political situations. The second assumption was that his work was titled The History of the Franks and as such was meant as a story of the Frankish people. By tracing the reception of Gregory's work over the centuries, Walter Goffart showed that his Histories (or Ten Books of Histories) were only titled ‘of the Franks’ in the tenth century, on a copy of a seventh-century abridged recension. Abridgers who wanted Gregory's Histories to tell a somewhat different story less focused on Gregory's social connections trimmed his account to six books, and the name stuck once tenth-century editors retitled it for their own purposes.