There is no need here to dwell upon the perplexing details of the division of the kingdom of Clovis among his sons and grandsons. We perceive a tendency to regard the north-eastern portion of the realm, especially that conquered from Syagrius,[9] as the true kernel of the kingdom; and therefore, widely as the dominions of the brothers stretch asunder, their capitals, Metz, Orleans, Soissons, Paris, all lie comparatively near to one another, all probably within the ring-fence of the Syagrian kingdom. But there is also a tendency to fall asunder into four great divisions. Burgundy and Aquitaine, though they do not formally resume their independence, are often seen as separate kingdoms under a Frankish king. But the more important division, the more fateful rivalry separates the two northern kingdoms, which eventually receive the names of Neustria[10] and Austrasia. In Neustria, which contained the regions of Flanders, Normandy, Champagne, and Central France as far as the Loire, there was doubtless a very large Gallo-Roman population, though its numbers may not have so enormously preponderated over those of the Teutonic immigrants as in Aquitaine and Burgundy. The Roman language and some remains of Roman culture survived here in Neustria, and were preparing the ground for the formation of the mediæval kingdom of France. Austrasia, on the other hand, the territory of the Rhine and the Moselle, seems to have remained essentially German. The Latin speech in this country must have been confined to ecclesiastics and a few of the more cultivated courtiers; it can never have been the speech of the people. And though here we must speak rather by conjecture than by proof, it is probable that the old Germanic institutions of the hundred and the _gau_[11] survived here in greater vigor than on the alien soil of the Romanized Gaul. It was also through the rulers of Austrasia that the connection, frail and precarious as it often might be, was kept up between the Frankish monarchy and the great, semi-independent duchies of the Thuringians, the Alamanni, and the Bavarians. Thus already in the fissure between the western and eastern portions of the Merovingian kingdom[12] we see the rift, premonitory of that mighty chasm which now separates the great states of France and Germany. CHAPTER II. EARLY MAYORS OF THE PALACE.