Gascony/Aquitaine

North of the Pyrenees in what we now think of as southwestern France is an area the Romans called Aquitania from the Latin aqua, "water," because of the many rivers flowing from the Pyrenees. We think. The people living there were the Ausci, mentioned by Caesar (whose men conquered it in the 50s BCE), and so the name of the land might have come about to mean "the land of the Ausci."

Skipping a few centuries and some Roman name and border changes, we find the Royal Frankish Annals refer to the "Wascones" in the area. The w=g linguistic link (William=Guillaume, warranty=guarantee, warden=guardian) that we find suggests that the Wascones turned into Gascons; hence the name Gascony.

In 1152, Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine. Aquitaine was by this time a much larger area that included the Duchy of Gascony, and was now in the hands of the kings of England. Henry's grandson, Henry III, personally went to the Duchy of Gascony to look into mismanagement by the not-always-faithful-to-Henry Simon de Montfort. While in the area, Henry arranged the marriage of his son Edward (later King Edward I) to Eleanor of Castile, half-sister of Alfonso X who had been making claims on Gascony, since it was adjacent to his own territory. Alfonso renounced his claims as part of the marriage contract, and aided Henry in dealing with rebels living in the Pyrenees.

Even today Gascony is France's most rural area; then it was so little populated that Edward I decided it needed peopling, and he sent his men to create villages called bastides so that the land was not going to waste.

In 1328, when King Charles IV of France died, his nearest male relative was the son of his sister Isabella, King Edward III of England. Having the English king inherit the throne of France—although perfectly legal according to Salic Law—did not sit well with France, and so they ruled against it. Edward objected, the Hundred Years War began, and in 1453 Gascony became permanently French.

I want to offer a brief biography of Edward I next.

Bastides!

Diagram of the layout of a bastide. [source]

Say you are a king who has conquered a wide territory. Most of it is uncultivated, unused, and therefore is not generating income for anyone from whom you can demand taxes. It is wilderness, home to wild animals and lawless men. How do you turn this to an advantage?

That was the situation faced by King Edward I in southwest France when he controlled Gascony: hundreds and hundreds of square miles with no one in sight. His solution was bastides. A bastide was, quite simply, a village.

Villages don't just spring up from nowhere. Over time they spontaneously develop at sites where it was advantageous to be: where two roads crossed, or at a ford in a river, or a natural harbor on the coast, etc. But if you wanted to fill the wilderness with villages, you had to spend money. Edward created one bastide, Baa (now vanished, but named at the time for the Bishop of Bath), by buying the land from the lord of Blaye for £547 in 1286.

Edward would assign one of his trusted men to oversee the building and layout of a bastide. They were generally built around a central marketplace, constructed with sturdy and attractive arcades. The town surrounding the market was laid out to form a square. Defenses were not necessarily a part of the initial architecture, although Edward II and Edward III added defenses to some later.

The creation of bastides had several benefits. Not only did settlers create the opportunity for rents and taxes, but also the town was a local administrative center where laws could be disseminated and enforced. Not all bastides were initially welcome, however: one called Sauveterre de Guyenne was delayed because other towns nearby feared the loss of revenue caused by a new town generating its own market supply and demand.