Brittany and the Atlantic Archipelago

Caroline Brett visited conferences at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and at Landévennec Abbey to speak on the Cartulary of Landévennec and the evidence it provides for western Brittany’s external contacts in the tenth and eleventh centuries.  Her report:

Landévennec was the leading monastery of western Brittany from at least the early ninth century, and a centre of literary and manuscript production. The so-called Cartulary of Landévennec is a small collection of property-records appended to a collection of Lives of Landévennec’s local saints in a manuscript dated 1047 × 1055. Most of the records lack any authenticating charter-protocol; about half of them claim to record gifts from the legendary King Gradlon of Brittany to St Winwaloe, the monastery’s founder, and a further substantial subset consist of narratives in which local saints offered their church-foundations and property to St Winwaloe. The cartulary has often been dismissed as a feeble forgery, in spite of Wendy Davies’s partial rehabilitation of it thirty years ago. I argued that in view of its early date, it should not be judged against the classic cartularies of the twelfth century but rather as a commemorative work closer to hagiography or abbatial and episcopal Gesta, a genre which antedated the cartulary in western Francia. It may also have been directly inspired by Tirechán’s Collectanea in the Book of Armagh (807): a sort of ‘hagiographized cartulary’ in which narratives of St Patrick’s missionary travels as Ireland functioned as validations of Armagh’s seventh-century control of ‘his’ churches. Out of the many possible combinations of charter and hagiography, I suggested that the reproduction of hagiographical narratives as ‘charter’-texts is particularly characteristic of Brittonic and Gaelic sources.  A similar overall construction and relationship between hagiography and charters can be seen in three somewhat later Breton and Welsh charter-collections, which may, in their turn, have been inspired by the Landévennec cartulary: the Cartulary of Quimperlé (1118 × 1127), Lifris’s Life of St Cadog with its appended charters (late eleventh/early twelfth century), and the Book of Llandaff (1130s).  An example of a ‘hagiographical charter’ is also found in the twelfth-century notes in the gospel-book of Deer from north-eastern Scotland.  Landévennec’s place in the evolution of this form of document indicates that it was well connected within the Atlantic Celtic-speaking world.

https://www.dias.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Celtic_Hagiography_Programme.pdf

https://www.univ-brest.fr/digitalAssets/68/68694_Programme-colloque-Landevennec.pdf

The project conference was held on 1-2 December 2017 at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge. Over forty participants came to hear papers by a dozen international speakers. For those who could arrive the evening before, a bonus was the opportunity to attend the annual E. C. Quiggin Lecture by Pierre-Yves Lambert on ‘The Glossed Manuscripts of Early Medieval Brittany’. The following morning, proceedings began with opening remarks by Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards and an introduction to the project by Fiona Edmonds and Caroline Brett, and ended at 1 p.m. on Saturday 2 December with an admirable summing-up by Professor Wendy Davies.

To our regret, three speakers were unable to travel because of illness or accident, but fortunately members of the ASNC Department were able to step into the breach. The paper by John Hines (Cardiff University) was read by Alison Bonner. Karen Jankulak’s projected paper on ‘Breton authorship of the Lives of Welsh Saints in the Pre-Norman period: texts, transmissions, legends, and a look at St Cadog and Llancarfan’ was replaced by a related talk by Ben Guy, ‘Explaining the origins of Brittany: St Cadog’s solution’; and Joëlle Quaghebeur’s paper on Alain Barbetorte was replaced by Paul Russell’s on ‘Names of Bretons in Francia: the Prum charter and the case of Uurgonezlo’. We owe many thanks to all three replacement speakers for stepping in at short notice and in two cases providing original talks which thoroughly fitted the theme of the conference, focusing respectively on twelfth-century Welsh genealogical theories about the settlement of Brittany, and on some points of linguistic interest raised by the reproduction of Breton names in writing by non-Breton speakers.

Several papers addressed the application of archaeology to the question of contact between Brittany and the Insular world. One dilemma perceived by the initiators of the project was the impasse that archaeology seemed to have reached in explaining, or providing evidence for, the ‘Breton migration’ of the fifth and sixth centuries. The opening papers by John Hines and Patrick Galliou ably summed up the dilemma and set it in the context of the evolution of understanding of the ‘migration period’ in early medieval history generally. Those by Magali Coumert and Isabelle Catteddu, placed with a nice balance at the close of the conference, suggested new directions, in the developing understanding of geographical space in the Middle Ages, and in the availability of new evidence on settlement archaeology which, to an extent, displaces the earlier preoccupation with migration and ethnic identity and suggests instead an emphasis on local social evolution and continued external contact, sometimes in surprising directions. Isabelle Catteddu’s exceptionally clearly presented, wide-ranging paper based on recent rescue archaeology introduced material which was new to most of the audience and ended the conference in a mood of excitement at the possible imminent transformation of our evidence base.

Other speakers gave excellent summings-up of the current state of knowledge in their respective disciplines. Oliver Padel provided an overview of the potential for comparison between the place-name elements of Brittany, Cornwall and Wales. Joseph-Claude Poulin dealt with the ‘Celtic’ element (which he was inclined to minimise) in the hagiography of ninth-century Brittany. David Dumville gave an entertaining survey of loci for progress in Breton manuscript studies, and Katharine Keats-Rohan an analysis of Breton monastic interactions with the rest of France as seen in libri memoriales and other liturgical evidence, a complex and less-explored field where there are still considerable gains in knowledge to be made.

The conference dinner took place at ‘La Margherita’ on the snowy evening of Friday 1 December and was very much enjoyed by all present. We ended the conference impressed and grateful at how much care and thought the contributors had put into their presentations, and with renewed confidence in the sound scholarly footing on which the study of early medieval Brittany now stands.

It is intended to publish the conference proceedings and negotiations with a publisher and with the contributors are moving forward.

 

The programme is now available for the project’s conference, which will be held at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge, on 1-2 December 2017. Further information about speakers and bookings may be found here:

https://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/news/2017/07/07/2140/

Paul Russell, Fiona Edmonds and Caroline Brett devoted a session to the project at this year’s Leeds International Medieval Congress. The session was chaired by Professor Julia Smith and attracted a full house. The papers were as follows: Caroline Brett ‘The Life of St Malo: Covering All the Bases’; Fiona Edmonds ‘Brittany and the Insular World: Contacts and Confrontations During the Viking Age’; Paul Russell: ‘Rustica Imbecillitas: The Rhetoric of the Otherness of Breton Personal Names in Charters’.

On 27-29 April 2017, Caroline Brett presented a paper at a conference on ‘Familles, pouvoirs et foi n Bretagne et dans l’Europe de l’Ouest, Ve-XIIIe siècle’ (Family, Power and Faith in Brittany and Western Europe, 5th to 13th centuries), held at the Université Bretagne Sud, Lorient and at Landévennec Abbey.

Judicaël, King and Saint: The Growth of his Family and Cult
Judicaël, ‘king of the Bretons’ according to two contemporary seventh-century Frankish historical sources, is not only one of the best-attested rulers of early medieval Brittany but also one whose reputation continued to evolve from the ninth century to the later Middle Ages. Within Brittany, he was claimed as an ancestor by a family of the Saint-Malo region in 869, and was depicted as an ideal king in the Life of St Malo by Bili (ca 865 x 872), a portrayal which may have been intended as a criticism of Salomon, the unrelated ruler who then held power in Brittany. In England and Cornwall, Judicaël was named in litanies and lists of saints from the early tenth century onwards. In northern France, he was presented as the brother of two émigré Breton saints, St Judoc and St Winnoc: these traditions suggest a real and continued Breton role in the seventh-century expansion of monasticism in the region. The eleventh-century Lives of these two saints included a genealogy which gathered together rulers’ names from a wide range of north Breton hagiography, and, for the first time, claimed a definite date and political leadership for the ‘coming of the Britons’ to Brittany. I suggest that the compilation of this genealogy was undertaken in the interests of the ducal dynasty of Rennes, whose first notable member, Judicael Berenger (fl. ca 940-50), took the saint’s name, and which subsequently re-founded and patronised his cult centre at Saint-Méen. The composition of a biography of Judicaël by a monk of Saint-Méen may have followed in the early eleventh century, although the transmission of this work makes its authenticity very difficult to determine. The ‘Viking Age’ seems to have been the moment for the Bretons to shake off their earlier reputation as ‘barbarians’ and ‘heretics’ and for their secular ‘heroic’ traditions to receive a degree of acceptance among their neighbours. The figure of Judicaël, a saintly king who formed a dynastic fixed point between the first arrival of the Bretons and their revived tenth-century rulership, was pivotal in this process.

Fiona Edmonds visited the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth, in order to deliver a seminar about the project. The seminar began with a discussion of the key concepts underpinning the project and a summary of the work conducted to date. Fiona then gave a more detailed exposition of her thoughts about contact between Britain and Brittany during the Viking Age. She highlighted the political reorientations of the period, including new connections with England. Nevertheless, she argued for the persistence of the concept of the pan-Brittonic world ‘o Vynaw hyt Lydaw’ during this complex period.

Fiona Edmonds delivered a talk about the project to sixth-formers studying History at Winstanley College near Wigan. The project touches on some of the themes that the students cover in the Angevin component of their A-level. The talk provoked some interesting questions about Geoffrey II, duke of Brittany, and about the circulation of Arthurian material between Brittany and Britain.

On Thursday and Friday 20-21 October Caroline Brett attended a conference ‘Migrations et territoires celtiques’ at the University of Rennes 2, Brittany, and presented a 20-minute communication on ‘An Invisible Migration? The Origins of Brittany’. She sought explanations for the paucity of archaeological evidence for migration from Britain to Brittany in the late fourth to sixth centuries A.D., contrasting with the abundance of archaeological material in Brittany from most periods of prehistory.  The only really promising category of evidence for illuminating the migration process at present is metalwork in ‘Quoit Brooch Style’, a style associated with a Romano-British military identity in south-east Britain in about 430-470, some examples of which have recently been discovered in a cemetery near Vannes.  Features of the material culture that emerged in western Britain from the late fifth century onwards, such as imported pottery, inscriptions on stone, decorative metalwork and hillfort reoccupation – the culture of the elite that is usually credited with the colonisation of Brittany – are conspicuous by their absence there.  Possible explanations might include an inability on the part of British migrants to Brittany to extract resources from the local population in the same way as they could in Britain itself, and a readiness or compulsion to adapt to local Gallo-Roman and Frankish material culture.

https://mitecelt.sciencesconf.org/

On Monday 17 October 2016 Caroline Brett and Paul Gazzoli gave a joint talk at the Department of ASNC, Cambridge, as part of the annual Cambridge University Festival of Ideas. Their subject, chosen to fit in with the festival’s overall theme of ‘movement’, was ‘We the Migrants, They the Invaders?’, an investigation of how some population movements of the early Middle Ages were seen by migrants and their ‘hosts’, and also in modern historiography and popular culture.  Caroline discussed the migrations that coincided with the end of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries, homing in on the creation of Brittany.  Paul provided a discussion of the Vikings, under the heading ‘Terrorists or Migrants?’  The talk, chaired by Professor Paul Russell, was very well attended by between 50 and 60 members of the public who enjoyed a lively question and answer session at the end.  34 feedback forms were returned at the end of which five gave us a three-star, fifteen a four-star and fourteen a five-star rating.  http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/we-migrants-they-invaders

On 4 May 2016, Caroline Brett gave an occasional lecture, ‘Keeping Up With The Neighbours? Wales and Brittany and their Saints After the Norman Conquest’, at the invitation of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto. This was a discussion of the evidence for the mutual dependence of hagiographical texts composed in Wales and in Brittany in the late eleventh and the first half of the twelfth centuries. This interdependence has been noticed in the past, but the political and cultural implications have not been fully explored. Hagiography from Dol in Brittany became known in Wales soon after the Norman Conquest and the claims of Dol to be the seat of an archbishop – which had their greatest success in the 1080s – were quickly imitated, or resisted, in writings produced for the southern Welsh churches of Llandaff, St Davids and Llanbadarn Fawr. Monmouth Priory, founded by a Breton and under the control of the seigneurs of Dol-Combour, who monopolised the bishopric of Dol, was probably the centre from which Dol texts were disseminated. Equally important was a link between Llancarfan (Glamorgan) and Quimperlé, the most favoured monastery of the counts of Cornouaille in Brittany. The Life of St Cadog of Llancarfan by Lifris (ca 1091 x 1104), and the Life of St Gurthiern in the cartulary of Quimperlé (1118 x 1127), reveal an exchange of information between the two centres, Quimperlé providing topographical detail on the cult of St Cadog in Brittany, while the Welsh provided a royal British genealogy for the little-known Gurthiern. Probably through this connection, the Cornouaille dynasty’s legendary past was taken up and elaborated in the Lives of Sts Teilo and Eudoggwy in the Book of Llandaff in the 1130s. The climax of all this activity was the production in 1138 of the ‘History of the Kings of Britain’ by Geoffrey of Monmouth, an associate of the Llancarfan circle. Although Geoffrey presented the history of Brittany in a more secular framework than ever before, there was little in his account of it that had not been foreshadowed in the hagiography of Llancarfan and Llandaff.

The fact that most of the material relating to Breton saints in Welsh hagiography has identifiable sources and clear motives for its inclusion, relating to post-Norman-Conquest politics, casts doubt on the idea that there was a pool of shared Welsh and Breton tradition stretching back through many centuries. In the present paper it was argued that cultural contacts between the two regions, doubtless present before the Conquest, acquired a much higher profile thereafter due to the status of the Bretons as conquerors and carriers of ‘chivalric’ culture and reformed churchmanship into Wales, and the ability of Welsh scholars, in turn, to provide Breton rulers with royal and genealogical traditions that allowed them to hold their own among the newly historically conscious rulers of twelfth-century northern France.