194 
to 584 : "He added also letters to our letters, i.e., w as the 
Greeks have it, ce, the, iiui, of which we have underwritten 
the form (see PL I., g), and sent letters to all the cities of the 
kingdom that boys should be thus taught, and that books 
written in old times should be erased with pumice and re- 
written." 
By " our letters " Gregory certainly means those of the 
abecedarium, and the letters added thereto by Chilperic were 
as certainly intended to convey Teutonic sounds for which 
the abecedarium had no adequate expression. Of these 
sounds, the futhorc does supply representatives, and we may 
be assured that Chilperic's letters resembled their corre- 
spondents in the old futhorc of his people, just as the characters 
which express the sounds iv and th, added to the abecedarium 
in England, resemble the runes iven and thorn. 
The new characters are given with much variety in different 
MSS., but we may believe that the Cambrai MS., which is 
of the middle of the 7th century, gives them (see PI. I., 9) 
most nearly as Gregory wrote them ; and we may recognize 
in the first, as he tells us, the Greek omega, intended to 
supply the place of the rune othil ; in the second we have 
undoubtedly II. 7 of the futhorc, which had certainly an a 
sound; the fourth is intended for the rune teen; the third, 
expressing the sound of thorn, is of a form difficult to be ac- 
counted for, but perhaps a long down stroke on the left hand 
has been omitted, which would give nearly our MS. form. 
The fact which this passage reveals, that there existed at 
the time books written of old, is of great importance ; for 
those books could not have been written in Latin. If they 
had, there would have been no occasion to erase the writing 
in them, and write them again with the addition of characters 
which do not belong to the Latin system. They must have 
been written in the language of the Franks, and in Teutonic 
characters ; they were to be re- written in the same language. 
