Maximus crossed the Channel and went first to the kingdom of the Armoricans, which is now called Brittany. . . . He summoned Conan to him, out of hearing of his troops, and said to him with a smile: ‘We have captured one of the fairest kingdoms of Gaul. . . .
I will raise you to the kingship of this realm. This will be a second Britain, and once we have killed off the natives we will people it with our own race.’
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain
{c. 1136)
The only remaining Celtic-speaking region on the European continent today is Brittany in north-west France. Brittany today preserves its Celtic identity not only in its language - Breton - but also in its folk culture and popular festivals. The survival of Celtic language and identity in Brittany is truly remarkable. While in the British Isles Celtic speakers remained the majority of the population well into the Middle Ages, the Bretons were from the outset greatly outnumbered by their Romance-speaking neighbours. For much of its history, Brittany has had more in common with south-west England and south-west Wales than it has had with France. All are peninsulas of ancient rocks pushing out into the Atlantic Ocean. All, too, display a rampart of cliffs to the sea, are hilly inland and have temperate, if sometimes stormy, climates, dominated by the proximity of the surrounding Atlantic. Even the place names are similar. To the modern mind, used to fast transport by land, the sea separates the three peninsulas, but, until comparatively recent times, it was a high road between them - travelled in turn by megalith builders, merchants, settlers, saints and pilgrims. These maritime links to Britain have been central to the survival of a Celtic Brittany.
The Gauls knew Brittany’s wild coastline as Armor, ‘the land facing the sea’, from which the whole region was known in ancient times as Armorica. Iron Age Armorica prospered by its strategic position on the main trade route between the Mediterranean and Britain. Few Mediterranean merchants were prepared to risk the wild Atlantic and sail direct to Britain, so Armorican tribes, such as the Veneti, became middlemen, selling British tin to the Romans and Roman wine to the Britons. Trade helped push the Armoricans towards statehood. Around 100 bc the first oppida were built and native rulers began to mint spectacular gold coins, which were used for official payments to retainers and warriors. Armorica’s Atlantic orientation was abruptly ended by the Roman conquest in 57-56 bc. The Romans deliberately broke Armorica’s links with Britain by shifting trade away from the Atlantic towards the Rhone-Rhine corridor. At the same time the Romans’ roads linked Armorica more closely with the rest of Gaul than it had ever been before. The local tribal territories were organised into civi-tates and planned towns replaced the old tribal centres. Villas and other Romanised buildings sprang up in the countryside and fish salting centres developed along the coast to supply the Romans’ craving for piquant fish sauces. But, although Armorica became administratively and economically integrated with the empire, its cultural integration was much more superficial. The vast majority of personal names known from dedications and graffiti are Celtic, and outside the towns knowledge of Latin spread slowly. Even in the fifth century, when in the rest of Gaul local dialects of Latin had developed and were beginning their long evolution into the modern French language, Armorica remained mainly Celtic speaking. Yet this was a moribund Celtic society. Such elements of Celtic culture as survived did so solely by virtue of the region’s isolation and the innate conservatism of farming peoples. In time Armorica would have become as Romanised as the rest of Gaul: what prevented this from happening was the collapse of Roman power in the fifth century and an influx of confident, expansionist, Celtic-speaking Britons which followed hard on its heels. It was these newcomers who transformed Armorica into Britannia Minor - ‘Little Britain’ - from which the modern name Brittany (Breton Breizh, French Bretagne) is derived.
World History
