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.