the Treaty of Verdun, following the Oath of Strasbourg. The oath is in itself a monument of the division between Romance and Teutonic languages, a linguistic difference which soon joined itself to other differences of race and circumstance. At Verdun Louis the German took most of the imperial lands in which a Teutonic tongue was spoken: Charles took mainly lands in which Romance prevailed. This difference was to grow, to become more acute and to pass into rivalry as years went by, and the rivalry was to make the old Austrasia into a debateable land; so that, for the later France and Germany, the year 843 may be taken as a convenient beginning in historic record of their separate national lives. Henceforth we have to follow separate histories, although the process of definite separation is gradual and slow.
At Tribur in 887 rebels deposed Charles the Fat, and next year the Eastern Kingdom proclaimed Arnulf; when his son Louis the Child died in 911, election and recognition by Frankish, Saxon, Alemannian (or Swabian), and Bavarian leaders made Conrad the first of German kings. In this process, unity, expressed by kingship, and disunion, expressed by the great tribal duchies which shared in later elections, were combined. And through many reigns, certainly throughout our period, the existence of these tribal duchies is the pivot upon which German history turns. To the king his subjects looked for defence against outside enemies: the Empire had accepted this task, and Charlemagne had well achieved it. But his weaker successors had neglected it, and as they made default, local rulers, and in Germany, the tribal dukes, above all, took the vacant place. But the appearance on all hands of local rulers, which is so often taken as a mere sign of disunion, as a mere process of decay, is, beneath this superficial appearance, a sign of local life, a drawing together of scattered elements of strength, under the pressure of local needs, and, above all, for local defence. If on a wider field of disorder the appearance of great kings and emperors made for strength and happiness, precisely the same was afterwards the case in the smaller fields. Here too the emergence of local dynasties also made for strength and happiness. Local rulers, then, to begin with, accepted the leadership in common local life. And they did so somewhat in the spirit with which Gregory the Great, deserted by Imperial rulers, had in his day boldly taken upon himself the care and defence of Rome against barbarians. So for Germany, as for France, the national history is concerned as much with the story of the smaller dynasties as with that of the central government.
But a distinction is to be noted between the course of this mingled central and local history in Germany and France. In France the growth of local order was older than it was in Germany; towns with Roman
