 By the 8th century, the situation was very different.During the late 8th century, Charlemagne, holding that "Latin of his age was by classical standards intolerably corrupt", successfully imposed Classical Latin as an artificial written vernacular for Western Europe.Unfortunately, this meant that parishioners could no longer understand the sermons of their priests, forcing the Council of Tours in 813 to issue an edict that priests needed to translate their speeches into the "rustica romana lingua", an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of the Romance languages as separate languages from Latin.