6 HISTORY OF FRANCE. [chap. succeeded,, in name at least, by his son and grandson, and in 882 all the Frankish dominions were joined again under the Emperor Charles the Third or the Fat, save only the kingdom of Burgundy, which had begun in 870 between the Rhone and the Alps. But in 887 Charles was deposed, and the empire was again divided. There was now a separate king of the West-Franks again, but he M^as no longer of the house of the Karlings. 8. Beginnings of the French Kingdom. — The begin- , ing of the kingdom of Karolingia or of the Western Franks was one step towards the formation of the kingdom of France. Its boundaries did not differ veiy greatly from what the boundaries of the kingdom of France were for a long time. It was the first time that the Frankish dominions had been divided in at all the same way. It had been divided, or men had thought of dividing it, many times, both among the Mervvings and among the sons of Chailes the Great and Lewis the Pious ; but no one had before thought of so dividing it as to put the whole western part of the Frankish dominions together as they now were. Then again, nearly all the people of the new kingdom, all except the people of Flanders at one end and the few Basques in their own corner, were people of the Romance speech. Men were now beginning to find out that the language which was commonly talked in those lands which had been provinces of the old Western Empire had come to be very different from the Latin of books. It was called littgtia Romana or vulgaris, the Roman or vulgar tongue, as distinguished from the lingua Latina which men wrote. Now in the western part of the Frankish dominions men now spoke a Romance tongue, while in the east of course they spoke Ger- man. Two Romance languages were growing up, one in the northern lands beyond the Loire, in the Western Francia, which became the French tongue, the other in Gaul south of the Loire, v.hich became the Pro- ven^al tongue. Perhaps men hardly distinguished them as yet, for no books were then written in either. Now the kingdom of Karolingia did not take in all who spoke Romance even in Gaul, for it did not take in Provence or the other Burgundian lands between the Rhone and the .'lps. But it was, as was just now said, mainly a Romance-speaking kingdom. But the kings were still German, and their head city was Laon in the north-eastern corner towards Germany. But now many
