The old Vasconia south of the Garonne: a duchy of Basque dukes, joined to Aquitaine, ruled by the kings of England for three centuries through Bordeaux and its wine fleets, planted with bastides, fought over in 1294, 1324 and 1337, and lost to France after Castillon in 1453.
Gascony was the land between the Garonne, the Atlantic and the Pyrenees, the Roman province of Novempopulania. Its name comes from the same root as Basque: Frankish writers called the Vascones the people who lived across the Garonne and around the Pyrenees, and the country Wasconia. It was a duchy under its own Basque dukes until 1032, was joined to the duchy of Aquitaine in the eleventh century, and from 1152 to 1453 was ruled by the kings of England as dukes.
It was the part of the Plantagenet lands in France that outlasted every French conquest before the fifteenth century, and for three centuries it bound Bordeaux, Bayonne and the wine country of the Garonne to London. Quarrels over the homage its dukes owed the king of France brought French confiscations in 1294, 1324 and 1337, the last of them the legal opening of the Hundred Years' War, which ended when Charles VII of France took Bordeaux for good in 1453.
The Merovingian kings created a frontier duchy of Vasconia in 602 to control the Basques, and a certain Genial was its first duke. His successors soon ignored their Frankish overlords. Felix, a Gallo-Roman patrician from Toulouse, held both Vasconia and Aquitaine from about 660, and Odo the Great beat an Umayyad army before Toulouse in 721. In 732 Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi destroyed Odo's army near the Garonne and stormed Bordeaux, and Odo had to accept the overlordship of Charles Martel to recover his lands. Odo's grandson Waifer fought Pepin the Short from 760 until he was murdered in 768, and Charlemagne then placed Frankish counts at Bordeaux, Toulouse and Fezensac to watch the Basques.
The Carolingian grip never held. Louis the Pious deposed the Basque duke Seguin of Bordeaux in 816 for failing to put down a rebellion, Viking fleets raided up the Garonne from the 840s, and from 864 a native dynasty beginning with Sancho Mitarra ruled Gascony with little reference to the Frankish kings. When Abbo, abbot of Fleury, came to the priory of La Réole in 1004, he boasted that he was more powerful there than the king, whom nobody obeyed; the monks dated their charters by the reign of the duke, and Abbo was killed in a brawl there that year.
Under these dukes the old province broke into the lordships that shaped Gascony for the rest of the Middle Ages: the counties of Armagnac, Fezensac, Bigorre and Comminges, the viscounties of Béarn and Dax, and later the lordship of Albret. Latin gave way to Gascon, a Romance language marked by a shift of f to h that is usually credited to the older Aquitanian speech, so that Latin fortia became Gascon hòrça.
The Basque line ended with Duke Sancho William in 1032. His nephew Odo, son of Duke William V of Aquitaine and Sancho William's sister, claimed the duchy, and after Odo was killed in 1039 it was contested between Bernard Tumapaler, count of Armagnac, and the House of Poitiers. By the 1060s Guy-Geoffrey, duke of Aquitaine, had forced Bernard to give up his claim, and from then on the dukes of Aquitaine were also dukes of Gascony, though the exact date of the settlement is disputed.
The union put a remote and mostly rural country under dukes who lived at Poitiers, and Gascon lords dealt with them at a distance. At Bordeaux a custom recorded in the cartulary of the church of Saint-Seurin required a new count to lay his sword on the saint's altar and take it up again only with the saint's banner, a ritual that made lordship over the city a gift of its patron saint rather than of the king in Paris. The notices may have been forged in the late twelfth century to strengthen the Plantagenet position.
The duchy that passed to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1137, and with her marriage to Henry of Anjou in 1152 to the future Henry II of England, was therefore two countries under one duke. When the French crown took Normandy, Anjou and Poitou from John of England and his son between 1204 and 1224, Gascony with a strip of Saintonge was what remained, and English documents used Gascony, Aquitaine and its French form Guyenne for the same shrinking territory.
Gascony stayed loyal for commercial as much as political reasons. In 1205 Alfonso VIII of Castile, claiming the duchy as the dowry of his wife Eleanor, King John's sister, invaded and won over much of the south, but Bordeaux, Bayonne and La Réole held out for John, who had married Isabella of Angoulême at Bordeaux in 1200. Henry III of England sent Simon de Montfort to govern Gascony in 1248, but Montfort's harsh treatment of the lords and of the factions of Bordeaux brought complaints, an inquiry and his dismissal in 1252. Henry came in person in 1253–1254, ended the Castilian claim by marrying his son Edward to Eleanor of Castile at Burgos, and granted Edward the duchy.
The Treaty of Paris of 1259 made the arrangement permanent and fragile: Henry kept Gascony and was promised lands on its borders, but held it as the vassal of Louis IX of France, so that any Gascon could appeal over the king-duke's courts to the Parlement of Paris. Edward I of England did homage to Philip IV of France in Paris on 5 June 1286 and spent the next three years in the duchy. Then a brawl between Bayonne and Norman sailors grew into a war at sea, and on 19 May 1294 the Parlement declared the duchy forfeit. French troops occupied most of it, Bordeaux included, until a second Treaty of Paris restored it in 1303.
The next crisis began with a planned town. In 1323 the French crown backed a new settlement at Saint-Sardos in the Agenais, on land the abbey of Sarlat claimed lay outside ducal jurisdiction. The night after a royal sergeant planted a stake bearing the French arms there, the Gascon lord of Montpezat burned the village and hanged the sergeant from his own stake. Charles IV of France declared the duchy confiscated, his uncle Charles of Valois overran the Agenais in the summer of 1324, and the Earl of Kent surrendered La Réole on 22 September. The settlement negotiated by Isabella of France left Edward II of England little more than the coast around Bordeaux and Bayonne.
The wine of the Bordelais made the English connection pay. Under the Plantagenets it became the ordinary drink of the English court and towns, paid for with English grain, cloth, hides and fish. The fleets sailed in two seasons, in autumn with the new wine and in spring with wine drawn off its lees, and were reckoned in tuns, casks of about 250 gallons whose number also became the measure of a ship's size. In the record year 1308–1309, by the reckoning of the historian Yves Renouard from the customs accounts, more than 100,000 tuns left the Gironde.
The citizens turned their loyalty into privileges. The jurade, the council of jurats that governed the city, won relief from customs on the burgesses' own wine, and the privilege of Bordeaux kept the wines of the high country upriver, from Bergerac, Cahors and Gaillac, from coming down to the port until the city's own vintage had been sold, a restriction that by the later Middle Ages ran until about Christmas. The king-duke's officers worked from the old ducal palace of the Ombrière by the river: the seneschal of Gascony, who governed the duchy, and the constable of Bordeaux, who kept its accounts. Their business was enrolled in London on the Gascon Rolls, which survive from 1242 to 1468.
Bayonne, the second port, lived from the sea. Its shipmen built and crewed ships for the English crown, hunted whales in the Bay of Biscay, and fought the Norman sailors whose quarrel started the war of 1294. When English rule ended the trade with England broke off for a generation, and Charles VII built two castles in Bordeaux, the Château Trompette on the river and the Fort du Hâ on the landward side, to hold a city that had shown where its loyalty lay.
Gascony and its borders were the heartland of the bastides, planned new towns founded between the 1220s and the 1370s by lords who wanted rents, markets and settlers. A founder, often the king-duke in partnership with a local landholder under a contract of paréage, laid out a grid of streets around a market square lined with arcades, gave each settler a house plot, a garden and a field, and granted a charter of customs that freed the inhabitants from many seigneurial dues.
Both crowns used them to stake claims. Alphonse of Poitiers, count of Toulouse and brother of Louis IX, founded Villeneuve-sur-Lot in 1264, and the English seneschals answered with towns named after themselves: Libourne on the Dordogne, founded around 1270 by Roger of Leybourne, and Hastingues on the Adour, founded in 1289 and named after the seneschal who planned it. Edward I founded Monpazier in Périgord in 1285 in partnership with the lord of Biron, and its square, arcades and market hall still keep the plan of a thirteenth-century bastide.
Because a bastide drew settlers and jurisdiction away from neighbouring lords, it could start a war, as Saint-Sardos did in 1323. When the Hundred Years' War began, many of the unwalled new towns were burned, and others hurried to build the walls their founders had left out.