of Europe. The establishment of bastides was a way for rulers to bring the population together in centres which could be more easily controlled and defended than isolated farmsteads or hovels, while helping to develop trade and other activities associated with the town. The bastides, by promoting economic activity, also allowed the lords who founded them to raise more taxes, while ensuring a better standard of living - and also more importantly the status of freemen rather than serfs - for the people who moved into them. Since they were built at a time of relative peace and prosperity, before the start of the Hundred Years' War, the early bastides were not fortified; however once Anglo-French relations deteriorated into a state of on-off conflict, many bastides were fortified either on the initiative of individual occupants, who built walls at the outer end of their properties, or by the coordinated building of town walls. It is sometimes said that bastides were established in a fairly arbitrary manner, often on greenfield sites; but in actual fact, most were set up on the sites of existing villages or at the intersections of routes. It seems unlikely that any bastides were built in areas where nothing existed before; in a sense they were "new towns", but their rationale was very different from that which inspired the new towns of the twentieth century in Britain, France or other counties. They were built in order to put some order into society, not to accommodate a rapidly