According to the monk Gildas, writing in Britain c. 540, the Britons who migrated to Armorica were refugees from the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain. Though this explanation meshes well with the hoary tradition of presenting the British Celts as the persecuted victims of the English, it does not really hold water. As we have seen, Gildas’s purpose in writing was not to record history but to excoriate the Britons for their sinfulness. If we believe Gildas, the Britons were too feeble to defend themselves against the Anglo-Saxons, yet they managed to win control of a large part of Gaul (which was itself subject to invasion by other Germanic peoples), and then maintain their independence against powerful neighbours for nearly a thousand years. This does not sound like the achievement of a beaten people. And these Britons had not been beaten; they came from areas that had driven off the Anglo-Saxon invaders. In reality, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fanciful tales are probably truer to the spirit of the British settlers than Gildas’s gloomy jeremiad. The British settlement of Armorica was a self-confident expansionist movement, intended to take advantage of the yawning power vacuum left by the collapse of Roman power to seize land in a sparsely populated region. We should not underestimate the ambitions of the Britons - after all. King Arthur himself was said to have conquered Gaul.
Not long after the first Britons began to settle unnoticed in Armorica, the Franks, a Germanic people, began to infiltrate across the Roman empire’s Rhine frontier and settle in what is now Belgium. The Romans had more pressing problems elsewhere on their long frontiers and they agreed to recognise the Franks’ settlements in return for their providing recruits for the army. The Romans probably saw this as a temporary expedient, but there was always some new problem facing the declining empire and as, by and large, the Franks kept their side of the bargain, they stayed. Only after
Roman power entered its terminal decline in the 470s did the Franks begin the aggressive territorial expansion that had made them masters of most of Gaul by the early sixth century. There is no evidence for Frankish settlement in Armorica, but they apparently laid claim to it from the time of King Clovis (r. 481-511), who defeated an army of Britons on the Loire around 490. The Britons may have established a garrison as far east as Orleans in 530, but by the end of the century the Franks had pushed them back roughly to the line of the river Vilaine. This remained the Frankish-Breton frontier for the next 200 years.
Although Domnonee was briefly forced to accept vassal status in 635, the Franks generally left the Bretons, as we can now call them, in peace until the reign of Pippin 111 (r. 751-68), the first of the Carolingian kings. The Bretons seem to have tested the strength of the new dynasty by raiding Frankish territory and Pippin retaliated by occupying Vannes. To contain the Bretons, the Franks created a military frontier, the Breton March, based on the counties of Vannes, Nantes and Rennes: its earliest known count was the French hero Roland who was killed when the Basques attacked the rearguard of Charlemagne’s army at Roncesvalles as it crossed the Pyrenees in 778. The emperor Charlemagne (r. 768-814) and his son Louis the Pious (r. 814-40) between them launched six campaigns to conquer Brittany but the result was always the same. In the face of overwhelming Frankish force, the Bretons submitted, bided their time and at the first opportunity rebelled and won back their independence. The Franks found the Bretons’ light cavalry and guerrilla tactics hard to deal with, but the main reason for their failure lay, paradoxically, in the Bretons’ lack of unity. As the Breton leaders, usually described by the Franks as counts (comes), were independent of one another, there was no central authority to negotiate with or enforce a peace agreement.
World History
