A planned new town of the thirteenth century in south-western France, on the model of Monpazier: a rectangle of straight streets, equal house plots, an arcaded market square with its hall at the centre, the parish church on a block at its corner, and a wall with gates where the streets leave the town.
Between about 1220 and 1370 the kings of France and England, the counts of Toulouse and many lesser lords founded some three hundred new towns in the south-west of France. They called them bastides. A founder usually made a contract of paréage with the owner of the land (Monpazier, for example, was founded in 1284 by Edward I as duke of Aquitaine jointly with the lord of Biron), and then issued a charter of customs: each settler received a plot for a house at a fixed yearly rent, often with a garden plot and a share of fields outside, freedom from many lordly dues, elected consuls, and a weekly market and yearly fairs.
The charters rarely describe the plan, but the towns themselves show the rules: straight streets laid out with the cord, crossing at right angles; blocks divided into plots of equal frontage, so that every settler paid the same; narrow gaps between houses for drainage and against fire; and a square formed by leaving one block empty, lined with houses standing on arcades (the cornières), with a market hall in the middle. The church is placed on a neighbouring block, beside the square rather than in it. When Edward I planned a new town at Berwick in 1296 he summoned men who knew best how to “devise, order and array” one, treating town planning as a recognised skill.
This model follows Monpazier in its type and scale, not its survey. The plots near the square are built up; toward the walls, as in many real bastides that never filled, some plots remain gardens. The walls and gates came, as they often did, some years after the foundation.