“Yet no regime could afford to alienate its supporters, and it was unwise to take too many castles and tolls into royal or ducal possession. By 1294 five-sixths of the castles within the duchy of Aquitaine were held by the nobility: thus, of 130 fortresses in the Agenais, only six were in ducal hands. The price of loyalty was high. A small ducal domain - Edward I held only twenty castles in Aquitaine in the 1290s - ensured the survival of his regime and the Plantagenets consciously and purposefully alienated most of their Gascon assets, with the important exception of the wine customs collected at Bordeaux. The principal beneficiaries of these grants were the middling and lesser nobility.”
- Malcom Vale, The Origins of the Hundred Years War.
The benefit of this policy of decentralisation was shown in 1294, when the French invaded Gascony. Of the 112 Gascon nobles summoned to arms by Edward I, about 90 responded. Most of those who defected to Philip IV were concentrated in the Agenais on the northeast frontier of the duchy. Edward had only acquired the Agenais a few years earlier, so these men had in effect reverted to their ‘natural lord’, the king of France.
Pictured are the castles of La Réole and the Château de Foix, which lay inside the old duchy of Gascony, also called Guyenne or Aquitaine.
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| Château de Foix |
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| La Réole |
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