bastides

Noun

bastide (plural bastides)

1. A mansion in Provence.
   • This gorgeous, well-restored eighteenth-century bastide is close to perfection. Nathalie runs the house as a brilliant mix of home and guest-wing.2003 March 16, Alastair Sawday, “Scent from heaven”, in The Observer, →ISSN, archived from the original on 10 Sep 2014
2. (historical) A new town built in medieval Languedoc, Gascony, and Aquitaine during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
   • Special circumstances or special men have called it into brief activity. The ‘bastides’ and the ‘villes neuves’ of thirteenth-century France were founded at a particular period and under special circumstances, and, brief as the period was and governed by military urgencies, they were laid out on a...1913, Francis J. Haverfield, Ancient Town-Planning, Oxford University Press