peers of the greater, and to have an equal voice in the royal courts. It is important for the reader to mark the rise of this feudal institution, and equally so to mark the difference of its fate and progress in France and in England. In the former country, the parliament became amalgamated with lawyers, and preserved to the last its judicial functions, whilst its legislative authority became but a shadow. In England, on the contrary, it guarded the more precious privilege of legislation, abandoning a considerable portion of its judicial rights. By the discomfiture of John, Philip Augustus united to the monarchy of France not only Normandy, but the provinces of Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou. Artois he had acquired as the dowry of his wife, Isabella of Hainault. The counties of the south remained still independent of his sway. They looked to the king of Aragon as their suzerain; and there existed far more congeniality of feelings and habits betwixt the Spaniards and Provençals, than betwixt the Provençals and French. Certain events of the reign of Philip, which we are about to relate, destroyed the independence of the people of the south, as well as their connection with the Aragonese, and extended the authority of the French monarch to the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees. THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE While Philip Augustus adroitly wrested Normandy and its dependencies from the hands of John, a series of events took place in Languedoc which had the effect of destroying its independence, and of bringing that fine region not only nominally, as it had hitherto been, but really under the dominion of the kings of France.[b] At this period the southern part of France held but distant relations with the north. Two powerful houses, that of Barcelona and that of Toulouse, shared dominion over it, with the exception of Aquitaine, which extended to the Pyrenees. This isolation naturally gave the south a separate existence, character, and interest. The tongue, that of the Limousin or of Provence, resembling more the Aragonese than the French of Paris, had become, thanks to the troubadours, a literary language. The cities contained a large bourgeois element, which had become wealthy through commerce. It was in the midst of this people, active, ardent, isolated from most of their neighbours by political as well as natural barriers, corrupted moreover by the refinements of an equivocal civilisation and by the enervating literature of the troubadours, that there broke forth, at the end of the twelfth century, the Albigensian heresy, a powerful one, that having long undermined the ground, ended by being a menace to Catholic beliefs, the church, and society itself.