We are all familiar with the transfer of place-names from the United Kingdom to its colonies in the last few centuries. There are hundreds of examples, and many are very well known, such as Newcastle in New South Wales, Boston in Massachusetts, and East London in South Africa. It has to be remembered that some of these city-names are actually from the surnames of prominent people, and therefore are only indirectly from British toponyms; examples are Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. But it is less well known that in the thirteenth century a comparable process resulted in several places in French receiving transferred English place-names. In France quite a few other names are known which are transferred from Spain, Italy, Germany, and Flanders, and this makes the explanation of the names below as transferred from England plausible. Though some of these English names are listed in dictionaries of French place-names, they are rarely treated as a group.
The part of south-west France commonly called Gascony (though it included other regions beyond Gascony proper) was a possession of the English kings since the time of Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1189. After the loss of Normandy under King John in 1204, it was isolated and difficult to administer. Edward I thus implemented in the 1270s and 1280s a policy of building planned fortified towns, called bastides. These he hoped to populate with English burgesses, that is, townspeople imported from England, or from other parts of France. Such a policy had been used with some success in north Wales, the main examples being Conwy, Caernarfon, and Beaumaris. But there the towns incorporated very substantial castles as part of the defences. Some of the French bastides had town walls and gates of stone, but none had any defences as strong as the Welsh towns.
