(Feels like a bit of a sprint to keep the posts more or less current. So this will be another short one.)
The weather was again uncertain, but we decided to take a walk anyway. It worked out. We walked without a plotted randonnee however, and looped back to our starting point earlier than planned.
So in the afternoon, we decided to drive into Villefranche de Rourgue. We arrived late in the afternoon, so it was very quiet. Villefranche is a bastid, and consisted of a central square and very gridded streets -- right angles and no meandering narrow paths.
Bastides were planned communities -- thus accounting for their regular layouts -- established by nobles to encourage commerce and produce new tax revenues. Taxes were collected on trades, rather than production, which I imagine made them similar to sales taxes. Peasants were encouraged to move into the bastide, and develop goods for trade, though they also kept their land for crop production, which was also was used in trade.
I've been trying to sort out how a bastide differs from a villefrance, but without success. This is the first time wikipedia has come up short.
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