was common to them with Aquitaine and Imperial Burgundy. ♦Province of Languedoc.♦ Under the name of _Languedoc_ they became one of the greatest and most valuable provinces of the French kingdom. The great growth of the crown during the reign of Saint Lewis was thus in the south; but he also extended his borders nearer home. ♦Purchase of Blois and Chartres. 1234. | Escheat of Perche. 1257.♦ He won back part of the old French duchy when he purchased the superiority of _Blois_ and _Chartres_, to which _Perche_ was afterwards added by escheat. ♦Annexation of Macon, 1239.♦ Further off, he added _Macon_ to the crown, a possession which afterwards passed away to the House of Burgundy. * * * * * ♦Southern advance of the Crown.♦ Thus, during the reigns of Philip Augustus and his grandson, the royal possessions had been enlarged by the annexations of two of the chief vassal states, two of the lay peerages, annexations which gave the French King a sea-board on two seas and which brought him into immediate connexion with the affairs of the Spanish peninsula. ♦Marriage of Philip the Fair, 1284, with the heiress of Champagne and Navarre.♦ Later in the thirteenth century, the marriage of Philip the Fair with the heiress of _Champagne_ not only extinguished another peerage, but made the French kings for awhile actually Spanish sovereigns, and made France an immediate neighbour of the German kingdom. The county of _Champagne_ had for two generations been united with the kingdom of Navarre. These dominions were held in right of their wives by three kings of France. ♦Separation of Navarre. 1328. | Union of Champagne, 1335; incorporation, 1361.♦ Then Navarre, though it passed to a French prince, was wholly separated from France, while Champagne was incorporated with the kingdom. This last annexation gave France a considerable frontier towards Germany, and especially brought the kingdom into the immediate neighbourhood of the Lotharingian bishoprics. These acquisitions, of Normandy and the states connected with it, of Toulouse and the rest of Languedoc, and now of Champagne, were the chief cases of incorporation of vassal states with the royal domain up to the middle of the fourteenth century. ♦Appanages.♦ The mere grants and recoveries of appanages hardly concern geography. We now turn to two great struggles which, in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Kings of France had to wage with two of their chief vassals who were also powerful foreign princes. In both cases, events which seemed likely to bring about the utter humiliation of France did in the end bring to it a large increase of territory. * * * * * ♦The Hundred Years’ War with England.♦