noun

• 1 historical A town or village under the shadow of a castle.

  ‘The settlers were moving out on their own, creating new social units - manors, lordships, abbeys, bourgs - where none had existed before.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Only in very special circumstances could either castle or bourg flourish in the absence of nearby manors to sustain them.’
  • ‘The city achieves its own administrative union in 1423, by the ‘Union privilege’, which puts an end to a long history of internal problems between the civitas and the two bourgs.’
  • ‘The generations before 1100 were the 'century of imagination', ... when local exchanges revived especially in the bourgs growing up at castle gates.’
  • ‘The traders, shops, money changers and such were allowed to deal outside of the gates of the bourg or castle compound, in an area called a Faubourg.’

  1. 1.1A French market town.
     ‘In contrast, most southern industry was artisanal and centred in small towns: in the bourgs around Brignoles, for example, there were perfumeries, soap and paper works, and tanneries (fifteen in Barjols alone).’
     More example sentences

     • ‘Armed mobilizations usually originated in small towns or market bourgs and involved large numbers of rural communes, while unarmed crowds gathered mainly in cities and towns.’
     • ‘Furthermore, rebels in the towns and market bourgs planned the mobilizations of nearby rural communes and they organized regional gatherings in their own localities.’
     • ‘But the clear-cut idea of the city was subverted by the rise to power of the class tellingly named (after the fortified ''bourgs'' of medieval France) ''people of the town.''’
     • ‘The rue Mouffetard was the main street of the bourg of St. Me dard, which until the eighteenth century lay outside the city of Paris.’