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Rh conception of a State divided into administrative districts over which the king placed counts who were merely his representatives, had been completely obliterated. The practice of commendation, as it became general, had turned the counts into local magnates, the immediate lords of each group of inhabitants whose fealty they thenceforth transmit from one to another by hereditary right. After 888 not a single legislative measure is found emanating from the king, not a single measure involving the public interest. There is no longer any question of royal imposts levied throughout France; even when the buying off of the Northmen by the payment of a tribute is concerned it is only the regions actually in danger which contribute their quota.

Once entered on this path, the kingdom was rapidly frittered away into fragments. Since the king no longer protected the people they were necessarily obliged to group themselves in communities around certain counts more powerful than the rest, and to seek in them protectors able to resist the barbarians. Besides, the monarchy itself fostered this tendency. From the earliest Carolingian times it had happened more than once that the king had laid on this or that count the command of several frontier counties, forming them under him into a "march" or duchy capable of offering more resistance to the enemy than isolated counties could do. From being exceptional and temporary this expedient, in the course of years, had become usual and definitive. The kingdom had thus been split up into a certain number of great duchies, having more or less coherence, at the head of which were genuine local magnates, who had usurped or appropriated all the royal rights, and on whose wavering fidelity alone the unity of the kingdom depended for support.

In appearance, the sovereign in the tenth century ruled from the mouths of the Scheldt to the south of Barcelona. Some years before the final overthrow of the dynasty we still find the Carolingian king granting charters at the request of the Count of Holland or the Duke of Roussillon, while we constantly see the monasteries of the Spanish March sending delegates to Laon or Compiègne to secure confirmation in their possessions from the king. From Aquitaine, Normandy, and Burgundy, as from Flanders and Neustria, monks and priests, counts and dukes are continually begging him to grant them some act of confirmation. This was because the traditional conception of monarchy with its quasi providential authority was thoroughly engrafted in men's minds. But the actual state of things was very different.

The Gascons, never really subjugated, enjoyed an independent existence; though they dated their charters according to the regnal year of the king of France, they no longer had any connexion with him.

To the east of Gascony lay the three great marches of Toulouse, Gothia and Spain. The latter, dismembered from ancient Gothia (whence