Time was when France was more thickly bestrewn with great monasteries and abbeys than now. They were in many ways the rivals of the palatial country houses of the seigneurs, and their princely _abbés_ and priors and prelates frequently wielded a local power no less militant than that of their secular neighbours. Great churches, abbeys, monasteries, fortresses, chateaux, donjons and barbican gates are hardly less frequently seen in France to-day than they were of old, although in many instances a ruin only exists to tell the tale of former splendour. This is as true of Burgundy as it is of other parts of France; indeed, it is, perhaps, a more apt reference here than it would be with regard to Normandy or Picardy, where many a mediæval civic or religious shrine has been made into a warehouse or a beet-sugar factory. The closest comparison of this nature that one can make with respect to these parts is that some Cistercian monastery has become a "wine-chateau" like the Clos Vougeot or Beaune's Hospice or Hotel Dieu, which, in truth, at certain periods, is nothing more nor less than a great wholesale wine-shop. Mediæval French towns, as well in Burgundy as elsewhere, were invariably built up on one of three plans. The first was an outgrowth of the remains and débris of a more ancient Gaulish or Roman civilization, and purely civic and secular. The second class of community came as a natural ally of some great abbey, seigneurial chateau, really a fortress or an episcopal foundation which demanded freedom from molestation as its undeniable right. It was in such latter places that the bishops and abbés held forth with a magnificence and splendour of surroundings scarcely less imposing than that of royalty itself, though their domains were naturally more restricted in area and the powers that the prelates wielded were often no less powerful than their militant neighbours. The third class of mediæval settlements were the _villes-neuves_, or the _villes-franches_, a class of communities usually exempt from the exactions of seigneurs and churchmen alike, a class of towns readily recognized by their nomenclature. By the sixteenth century the soil of France was covered with a myriad of residential chateaux which were the admiration and envy of the lords of all nations. There had sprung up beside the old feudal fortresses a splendid galaxy of luxurious dwellings having more the air of domesticity than of warfare, which was the chief characteristics of their predecessors. It was then that the word _chateau_ came to supplant that of _chastel_ in the old-time chronicles.