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.