For Gregory of Tours the city of Angers was above all a city outlined by its Gallo-Roman walls. Outside these walls there also existed a ‘suburbium civitatis’, an area difficult to define but one in which the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste (close to the present Place du Ralliement) is mentioned as existing by the yth century. It is not until the 10th and 11th centuries that we become aware of the creation of considerable numbers of distinct suburban settlements, initially to the east of the river Maine, subsequently above its west bank.

We know virtually nothing about the first of these orbital small towns — the ‘burgus Andegavensis’ of 924. However, the creation of the ‘burgus Sancti Albini’ on the part of the abbey of Saint-Aubin in 976, along with its extension, is well documented up until the 13th century, and is the only extra-mural ‘bourg’ vouched for by a charter of Angers.

Excepting the chapters of canons of Saint-Maurille and Saint-Mainboeuf, the collegiate churches (descendants of the funerary basilicas of the early Middle Ages) did not create any known subordinate ‘bourgs’, perhaps because they were concentrated in areas which were already becoming urbanised. By contrast, the great monastic foundations of the 11th century (Saint-Nicolas, Le Ronceray, l’Esvière) did give rise to several suburban settlements.

Until the early 13th century Angers was a multipolar city, a walled centre surrounded by a ring of small ‘agglomérations’ which rarely benefited from any protection. The scale of these peripheral towns is little known, but they often seem to have been limited to a main road and a few small blocks of housing, Saint-Etienne being the smallest. After the construction of a new and expanded city wall under Louis IX, the old orbital towns are mentioned as residual inner-city districts, and only three (l’Esvière, Saint-Nicolas and Saint-Serge) remained extra-mural, becoming the first faubourgs. Nearly all the orbital small towns which existed outside either the Gallo-Roman or the 13th-century walls of Angers bear the names of the religious establishment on which they depended.