of England still kept the duchy of Aquitaine with Gascony. ♦The Norman Islands.♦ They kept also the insular Normandy, the Norman islands which have ever since remained distinct states attached to the English crown. ♦Aquitaine.♦ Aquitaine was now no longer part of the continental dominions of a prince who was equally at home on both sides of the Channel. It was now a remote dependency of the insular kingdom, a dependency whose great cities clave to the English connexion, while its geographical position and the feelings of its feudal nobility tended to draw it towards France. ♦Sudden greatness of France.♦ The result of this great and sudden acquisition of territory was to make the King of the French incomparably greater on Gaulish ground than any of his own vassals. France had now a large sea-board on the Channel and a small sea-board on the Ocean. And now another chain of events incorporated a large territory with which the crown had hitherto stood in no practical relation, and which gave the kingdom a third sea-board on the Mediterranean. * * * * * ♦Fiefs of Aragon in Southern Gaul.♦ While north-western and south-western Gaul were united in the hands of an insular king, the king of a peninsular kingdom became only less powerful in south-eastern Gaul. ♦Counts of Toulouse.♦ Hitherto the greatest princes in this region had been the counts of _Toulouse_, who, besides their fiefs of the French crown, had also possessions in the Burgundian kingdom beyond the Rhone. But during the latter part of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth, the Counts of _Barcelona_, and the kings of Aragon who succeeded them, acquired by various means a number of Tolosan fiefs, both French and Imperial. _Carcassonne_, _Albi_, and _Nîmes_ were all under the lordship of the Aragonese crown. ♦The Albigensian War. 1207-1229.♦ The Albigensian war seemed at first likely to lead to the establishment of the house of Montfort as the chief power of Southern Gaul. ♦Simon of Montfort at Toulouse.♦ But the struggle ended in a vast increase of the power of the French crown, at the expense alike of the house of Toulouse and of the house of Aragon. ♦Settlement of Meaux.♦ The dominions of the Count of Toulouse were divided. ♦Annexation of Narbonne, 1229;♦ A number of fiefs, _Beziers_, _Narbonne_, _Nîmes_, _Albi_, and some other districts, were at once annexed to the crown. ♦of Toulouse, 1270.♦ The capital itself and its county passed to the crown fifty years later. By a settlement with Aragon, the domains of the French king were increased, while the French kingdom itself was nominally cut short. ♦Roussillon and Barcelona released from homage. 1258.♦ Two of the Aragonese fiefs, the counties of _Roussillon_ and _Barcelona_, were relieved from even nominal homage. The name of Toulouse, except as the name of the city itself, now passed away, and the new acquisitions of France came in the end to be known by the name of the tongue which