#Map of dordogne and gascony free

Generally, it lies outside the main street (the axis) which carried the traffic. The square is also used to divide the city into quarters. Saint-Lys and Albias are different because they have two squares, one for the market and one square for the church. A typical square, (which was probably a model for other bastides), can be found in Montauban. It was used for markets, but also used for political and social gatherings. The main feature of all bastides is a central, open place, or square. Central square The Aquitan Design of a Bastide The region of the bastides had been one of the last outposts of Late Antiquity in the West. The Roman model, the castrum with its grid plan and central forum, was inescapable in a region since Roman planning precedents survived in medieval cities such as Béziers, Narbonne, Toulouse, Orange and Arles. The market square often provided the module into which the bastide is subdivided. They included a central market square surrounded by arcades ( couverts) through which the axes of thoroughfares passed, with a covered weighing and measuring area. Most bastides were developed with a grid layout of intersecting streets, with wide thoroughfares that divide the town plan into insulae, or blocks, through which a narrow lane often runs. They are now generally described as any town planned and built as a unit, by one founder. Scholarly debate has taken place over the definition of a bastide. After the bastide was established, they were replaced by structures of stone. The bastide hall and the church were often first constructed of wood. Residents were granted a houselot, a kitchen garden lot ( casale), and a cultivable lot ( arpent) on the periphery of the bastide's lands.

Feudal rights were invested in the sovereign, with the local lord retaining some duties as enforcer of local justice and intermediary between the new inhabitants- required to build houses within a specified time, often a year, and the representatives of the sovereign. Responsibilities and benefits were carefully framed in a charter, which delineated the franchises ('liberties') and coutumes ('customs') of the bastide. The landholder might be a cartel of local lords or the abbot of a local monastery. The legal footing on which the bastides were set was that of paréage with the local ruling power, based on a formal written contractual agreement between the landholder and a count of Toulouse, a king of France, or a king of England. The lord taxed dwellings in the bastides and all trade in the market. The new inhabitants were encouraged to cultivate the land around the bastide, which, in turn, attracted trade in the form of merchants and markets.

#Map of dordogne and gascony free

Farmers who elected to move their families to bastides were no longer vassals of the local lord and became free men and the development of bastides contributed to the waning of feudalism. Landowners supported development of bastides to generate revenues from taxes on trade rather than tithes (taxes on production). When the Capetian Alphonse of Poitiers inherited, under a marriage stipulated by the treaty, this ' bastide founder of unparalleled energy' consolidated his regional control in part through the founding of bastides. History īastides were developed in number under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1229), which permitted Raymond VII of Toulouse to build new towns in his shattered domains but not to fortify them. Almost 700 bastides were built between 1222 ( Cordes-sur-Ciel, Tarn) and 1372 (La Bastide d'Anjou, Tarn). He encouraged the construction of others to colonize the wilderness, especially of southwest France.

Some of the first bastides were built under Raymond VII of Toulouse to replace villages destroyed in the Albigensian Crusade. Rebuilding of various epochs in the bastide of Monpazier has preserved the market square couverts of the first planning.īastides are fortified new towns built in medieval Languedoc, Gascony, Aquitaine, England and Wales during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although some authorities count Mont-de-Marsan and Montauban, which was founded in 1144, as the first bastides. For other uses, see Bastide (disambiguation).