Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 241

This book is the published version of the author’s doctoral thesis prepared under the direction of J.B. Marquette at the University of Bordeaux III. It deals with the agricultural landscape of the medieval new towns and villages (‘bastides’) which were founded in south-western France (Gascony) during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. According to the author, his main achievement is to show that the foundation of the bastides entailed the laying out of planned field systems according to a coherent set of measures based on three fundamental units (16.41 metres, 21.09 metres and 37.5 metres) which have a common denominator of 9.375 metres (though only after being multiplied by four!).

Lavigne uses vertical aerial photographs, topographic maps and cadastral plans, applying the filtering and other techniques to identify metrological regularities developed by the Centre d’Histoire Ancienne at the University of Besançon in the course of their studies of Roman centuriations. This work on centuriations was designed to discover the periodicity of road layouts on very large surfaces of land, and was carried out at a scale of 1:25,000. A technique developed to function at this scale cannot provide a proper basis for the metrological analysis of field boundaries at the scale of 1:2500, and neither of these scales can allow measurements to be made with the precision alleged by Lavigne. Moreover, the basic documents used by Lavigne, the nineteenth century cadastral maps, are not accurate enough for his purpose. Obviously, he should have checked them on the ground with modern topographical instruments, or assessed their standard of accuracy against present-day cadastral maps.

Although Lavigne starts with a list of 255 bastides located in eleven départements, the actual metrological analysis was applied only to a small portion of the commune of Barcelonne-du-Gers, which was the subject of his MA at the University of Bordeaux III. From the results of this single analysis, he creates templates which are then used to analyze and compare the land parcel measurements of thirteen other bastides. Postulating that the same coherent system was used for each of them, the author then jumps to the conclusion that it must be based on the arpent and the journal, these being the most common units of land measurement in the bastides’ foundation charters. His next step is to infer that whenever the arpent and the journal are mentioned, it implies the creation of planned field systems.

Overall, there is little to recommend in this book. The metrological analysis is fraught with errors, and is carried out on a very narrow sample. The dating of the field systems relies exclusively on written sources. The notion that planned field systems were laid out during the middle ages is anything but new, and there is no need to challenge the allegedly common view that medieval planned field systems were circular in shape, there being no such common view. The author, who presents his book as the first significant contribution to the study of medieval field systems since Marc Bloch in the 1930s, seems unaware of the huge amount of work which has been done on medieval agrarian landscapes in various parts of Europe.