Welsh Journals

The Case of Brittany. By Pierre Mocaer. IT is with great pleasure that I have accepted the pleasant duty of putting before our Welsh friends the case of Brittany, a country with which their own has so much in common, since the same blood runs in the veins of both Welshmen and Bretons. Brittany, which is the great peninsula which advances boldly into the Atlantic Ocean on the Western French Coast, has a population of about three and a quarter millions, about one million and a half of whom speak a Celtic language of the Brittonic Branch. These figures show the comparative importance of Brittany and also that, at the present time, she is the premier Celtic speaking country of the world. The fact that Breton (Brezoneg) is confined to the western half af the peninsula (west of a line drawn from the west of St. Brieuc to the east of Yannes) does not mean that Celtic has lost ground to any great extent, as the following brief historical sketch will explain. As is well-known, at the time of the commence- ment of the Germanic invasions, Great Britain was, at least predominantly, inhabited by Celts of the Brittonic stock, and the Gaulish peninsula of Armorica was inhabited by the Romanized descendants of the Gaulish tribes. Owing to various causes, and amongst them Roman mal- administration, only the eastern half of Brittany, that is to say the districts of Rennes, Nantes and Vannes were really, comparatively speaking, thickly populated, and partook of the latter-day Roman civilisation. The inhabitants of the west- ern portion were few and far between, and left more or less to their own devices. Now, under the pressure of the Anglo-Saxon invaders, the Celts of Great Britain had to give way to the incoming barbaric tide, and a great many of them, declining to be conquered, I referred to become conquerors in their turn, and chose a country where they could safeguard their freedom. They accordingly took to sea, and for a great many years an trickle of emigration took place between Great Britain and what was then Armorica. The settlers established themselves peacefully in the regions of St. Malo, Nantes and also further west, where they had a still better chance owing to the scarcity of the population. The conse- quence of that emigration was a bloodless but intense struggle between the Romanized civilisa- tion and speech of the Armoricans and the Celtic civilisation and speech of the newcomers. In the greater part of Armorica the Brittonic language got the better of the neo-Latin language of the Armoricans, and local names still show distinct traces of that long drawn-out struggle; it was not only the Brezoneg (Brythonaeg) that prevailed but also the Celtic manners and ideals in their entirety. It is fairly evident that a great many of the Western Armoricans were still pagans to a large extent, but they were converted by the Christian invaders. It was then that Armorica, after all those changes, took the name of Brittany v Breiz) after the national name of the Bretons. The names of the petty kings of that period have practically all been consigned to oblivion by the Breton peasants of to-day, but those peas- ants tenaciously remember those of their olfi national saints, and it is interesting to point out that, although most of the invaders came from other regions than Wales, the greater part of those saints were Welsh or, at least, had a great deal to do with Wales. The study of Breton hagiography is, indeed, a hopeless task for the student who is not well versed in Welsh, Cornish and Irish hagiographies, especially the first; even the names of saints that have never crossed the stormy seas of the Channel are carefully preserved in Brittany and are simply all over the place. This is a point which I cannot labour here at any length, of course, but which is extremely illuminating. The new nation, after many vicissitudes, had to submit to the sway of the mighty French Occi- dental Empire founded by Charlemagne; but the Bretons chafed under the yoke of the foreigner, whom they called "Gall," a word which to-day means French, just as "Saozon" means English- man. A Breton nobleman, Nominoe, finally threw off the French yoke, defeated the French King, Charles the Bald, and set up a Breton king- dom which included the districts of Rennes and Nantes. In those districts, the Breton speech had been unable to gain a foothold owing to the small number of the Celtic settlers and the relative density of the Gaulish Romanized population. The Norman invasion which took place soon afterwards proved a misfortune of the first mag- nitude for Brittany. The country was pillaged, its inhabitants decimated, the treasures of its con- vents and the bones of the old saints scattered far and wide. All who could left the country, and when, at the end of twenty years, in 936, they returned from exile under the leadership of Alain Barbe-Torte and turned out the Normans, they had lost touch with Celtic civilisation and ideals and had become Frenchified. The old customs were discarded and the Celtic speech given up by the new nobility; as for the new rulers, they assumed the title of dukes in stead of that of kings. However, Western Brit- tany, or rather Lower Brittany (Breiz-Izel) to give it its real name, remained faithful to its language, although there also its so-called superior classes adopted French as a medium of expression and the linguistic frontier had receded to an appre- ciable extent. Breton became a peasants' language, which precluded the possibility of developing a written literature worthy of the name, but as it remained the universal language