Every time you drive to the market in Eauze — fifteen minutes east of the château — you are driving to a place that was once the capital of a Roman province, the seat of a cardinal, the centre of an ancient brandy trade, and a stopping point on one of the great pilgrimage routes of medieval Europe. The road has different names too, depending on which century you're standing in.
Guests staying at the château sometimes ask us: "So are we in Gascony? Or the Gers? Or Armagnac? What do you actually call this place?" The honest answer is: all of them, and each name tells a different layer of the same story.
This corner of south-west France has been inhabited and named and renamed by Romans, Visigoths, Basques, Frankish kings, English monarchs, French revolutionaries, and the bureaucrats of the Fifth Republic. Each name stuck around — which is why the same gentle landscape of rolling hills, limestone farmhouses, and vine-covered valleys can legitimately be called by half a dozen different things depending on what you want to emphasise.
Here is how the layers built up.
Novempopulania — "The Province of Nine Peoples"
Before any of the names we use today, this land was known to the Romans as Novempopulania — the province of nine peoples. When Caesar conquered Gaul in the 1st century BC, he encountered in the south-west an indigenous population he called the Aquitani: a people ethnically and linguistically unlike the Celts to the north, with more in common with the Iberians across the Pyrenees. In Caesar's Gallic Wars, he notes their distinctiveness explicitly.
As the Roman Empire reorganised its provinces in the 3rd century AD, the Emperor Diocletian carved out a new administrative unit from southern Aquitania — the Aquitania Tertia — named for the nine major tribes that inhabited it. Its capital was Elusa, which is modern-day Eauze. That magnificent Thursday market town, 15 minutes from our door, was once the administrative heart of a Roman province covering most of what is now south-west France.
The name Novempopulania persisted through the late Roman period and into the early medieval era. When you walk through the Musée Archéologique d'Eauze and see the Trésor d'Eauze — that extraordinary hoard of 28,000 Roman coins and jewels discovered in a field in 1985 — you are looking at the buried wealth of Novempopulania. The ground here truly is full of the past.
Vasconia — How the Basques Named a Kingdom
With the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the carefully named provinces dissolved. Visigoths passed through. Vandals passed through. The Franks arrived from the north. And from the south, over the Pyrenees, came the Vascones.
The Vascones were an Iberian people who had inhabited the mountains of what is now the Basque Country and Navarre — culturally and linguistically distinct from both the Celtic peoples to their north and the Latinised Romans. By the 6th century they had spread north across the Pyrenees into the old Novempopulanian territory, and by 602 the Frankish kings formally recognised a new political entity: the Duchy of Vasconia.
The name Vasconia — also written Wasconia by Frankish scribes who struggled with the 'V' — gives us directly the words Gascon and Gascony in English, and Gascogne in French. The very same etymology, by a different phonetic path, also gives us the word Basque. Gascon and Basque are, at root, the same word — a reminder that this landscape was shaped by a people whose culture and language straddled what we now call the Franco-Spanish border.
Gascony / Gascogne — A Duchy, a Province, an Idea
The Duchy of Gascony (602–1453) was one of the great territories of medieval France — and for much of the medieval period, it was not French at all. In the 12th century, through the inheritance of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Gascony passed to the English crown. For over three hundred years, what is now south-west France was the heartland of English royal power on the continent. The Gascon wine trade — ancestors of what we now call Bordeaux — flowed north to English ports. English administration and English laws shaped the towns.
This is why you will find so many bastides — planned medieval towns built on a grid, with covered arcaded squares — throughout Gascony. Many were founded jointly by the English crown and local lords during the 13th and 14th centuries: Montréal-du-Gers, Valence-sur-Baïse, Fourcès with its famous circular square. When you sit under the arcades of Eauze or Lectoure or Condom, you are sitting in a form of town planning that was partly an English project.
The Hundred Years' War ended this arrangement definitively. By 1453, the French crown had reconquered Gascony, and the territory was merged with Guyenne into the gouvernement of Guyenne-et-Gascogne, administered from Bordeaux until the Revolution. The term Gascony became increasingly cultural rather than political — evoking a people known for their pride, their humour, their passion, and their loyalty. D'Artagnan, Cyrano de Bergerac, the Cadets de Gascogne — the literary Gascon is bold, impetuous, and fundamentally himself.
Armagnac — When the Brandy Became the Name
Running through the heart of Gascony, the County — and later the Duchy — of Armagnac was one of the most powerful feudal territories in medieval France. The Counts of Armagnac were significant players in French politics for centuries, sometimes allied with the English, sometimes against them, always fiercely independent.
Their name attached itself indelibly to the brandy produced on their lands — and as that brandy's reputation spread across Europe from the 14th century onward, the name Armagnac became inseparable from the spirit. Today, Armagnac is simultaneously a historical territory, an appellation of origin, a style of brandy, and — in the form of Ténarèze, Bas-Armagnac, and Haut-Armagnac — a set of geographical sub-regions that have been producing the same spirit by essentially the same method for over seven hundred years.
When Cardinal Vital du Four of Eauze wrote of "Armagnac" in 1310 and listed its forty medicinal virtues, he was describing the local brandy that was already famous enough to warrant a written testimonial. The land and the drink had become one word.
The Gers — A Department Named After a River
The French Revolution swept away the old provinces and duchies in 1790, replacing them with a new, rational system of départements — administrative units of roughly equal size, named after rivers or geographical features rather than feudal history, to prevent any revival of regional power. Gascony was divided. Most of the old heart of the territory became the département of the Gers, named after the river that flows through Auch on its way to the Garonne.
The Gers has around 190,000 inhabitants — making it one of the least densely populated departments in France. It is entirely rural. It has no motorway. Its capital, Auch, has a population of around 22,000. From one angle, this looks like obscurity. From another, it looks like one of the last corners of France to have largely escaped the 20th century.
We live in the Gers. The département number is 32 — which is why our local road signs carry the number, why our car registrations used to begin with 32, and why the postcode for Séailles is 32190. The Gers is the bureaucratic name, the administrative reality. But when we say where we live to anyone who knows France, we say Gascony.
Gascony Today — A Region That Exists in Culture More Than on the Map
Here's the slightly paradoxical truth: Gascony does not officially exist. It is not a région, not a département, not any administrative unit in the French state. The territory it once covered is split between the modern administrative regions of Nouvelle-Aquitaine (which includes Bordeaux) and Occitanie (which includes Toulouse and the Gers). Neither of these regions is Gascony.
And yet Gascony is everywhere. It is in the name of the wines (Côtes de Gascogne), the tourist literature, the restaurant menus, the festival programmes. The Gers département markets itself as Gers Gascony. The local tourism board is the Comité Départemental du Tourisme du Gers, but its website calls the region "Gascony." Armagnac appellation maps use the word constantly.
Gascony survives because it names something real: a landscape, a culture, a food tradition, a way of talking and eating and living that is genuinely distinct from Provence, from the Loire, from Brittany, from Paris. The rolling hills, the market towns, the foie gras, the Armagnac, the bastides, the Via Podiensis pilgrims, the Pyrenean horizon — these things belong together, and Gascony is the word that holds them.
So what do we call it?
We call it all of these things, depending on what we mean:
- The Gers — when we mean the administrative département, the postcode, the département number 32.
- Gascony — when we mean the culture, the landscape, the food, the people, the historical sweep of things.
- Armagnac country — when we mean the brandy, the estates, the Ténarèze terroir under our feet.
- Novempopulania — when we're standing in Eauze on a Thursday morning looking at the 28,000 Roman coins, and someone asks us what this town used to be.
- South-West France — when we're talking to people who've never been here and need a compass bearing.
- Home — the rest of the time.
Each layer of naming is a layer of history. To live here is to live inside a palimpsest — a landscape written over and over by different hands, in different languages, for different purposes, all of the previous versions still faintly legible under the current one.