Month: May 2016

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.

Caroline Brett gave one of the two keynote lectures at the ‘Ancient Abbeys of Brittany’ Colloquium held on 5-6 May at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and Toronto, Canada (http://aabp.info.yorku.ca/). The theme of the colloquy was ‘Monasteries, convergences, exchanges and confrontations in the west of Europe in the Middle Ages’.

Caroline’s contribution was titled ‘Monasteries, Migration and Models for the Early Medieval Breton Church’. In it, she addressed the problem of how to characterise Christianity in early medieval Brittany, now that the model of the western Insular Churches as ‘Celtic’ and ‘monastic’, as opposed to ‘Roman’ and ‘episcopal’, has been discarded as over-simplified and misleading.

She argued that Brittany’s Christian establishment, rather than being classed as an offshoot of either the Insular or the Merovingian Church, should be seen as unique in some respects. In the sixth and seventh centuries, the whole of Britain, Ireland and Francia apparently experienced a wave of lavishly endowed monastic foundations as post-Roman rulers and the new elites surrounding them entered into a mutually supportive ‘concordat’ with the Church. Celtic Britain was in the forefront of this development, but Brittany does not seem to have shared in it to any great extent, to judge by the lack of both physical and written evidence for wealth being channelled into religious foundations. The only such foundations to be evidenced before the Viking Age are a group in the eastern border zone that benefited from early interaction with the Frankish Church – Dol, Alet, Saint-Méen, and somewhat later, Redon – and two in the far west, Saint-Pol-de-Léon and Landévennec, the second of which seems to have become a quasi-national, rather than an aristocratic or even a royal establishment. An enormous area of central Brittany remained without any important early monasteries, unless one makes the unwarranted assumption that they disappeared without trace during the Viking period or other upheavals.

The evidence of place-names, and of the Cartulary of Redon, suggests that Breton Christian organisation was of a different kind: extremely localised, with a well-developed proto-parochial system and large numbers of small monasteries and hermitages that probably had a rapid turnover (no less than seventeen such establishments are mentioned in the Redon charters). This kind of monasticism pre-dated, and probably co-existed with, higher-profile aristocratic monasteries in France and Britain also, but has received much less scholarly attention. It was suggested that the reason why Brittany had so few rich monasteries was that no stable kingship or really dominant elite evolved there during the early Middle Ages. Politically isolated from both the Insular and the Continental power systems, Breton churchmen were able to share the less tangible aspects of their neighbours’ culture – such as saints’ cults, texts and script types – but not artefacts that depended on large-scale wealth, such as elaborate sculpture, lavish burials and large buildings. The Insular Celtic social system was ‘lost in migration’, and the result was a decentralised, ‘do-it-yourself’ Christianity that shocked Carolingian observers in the ninth century, but provides a highly interesting alternative for historians to study in the twenty-first.