Half and half

A coule of pictures of the old bastide town of Castillones, just south of Bergerac in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, southwest France.

The bastide was founded by Henry III in 1260, shortly after the Treaty of Paris (1259) which established the duchy of Aquitaine - otherwise known as Guienne or Gascony - as a fiefdom held by the Angevin kings as vassals of the Capetian kings of France. This awkward arrangement gave rise to a host of problems, not least tenurial rights. Castillones was shared between the Angevins and the Capets, and the frontier of the border district of the Agenais ran right through the middle of the town: effectively this meant that subjects of the English crown lived in one half, subjects of the French in the other.

 

The problem was finally resolved in the peace of 1303, whereby Philip IV restored Gascony to Edward I and permitted the Anglo-Gascons to have Castillones all to themselves.