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by one of his sons, the others had to fly from Armorica and take refuge in South Wales, where they were well received by Meurig, king of Morganwg, who gave to several of them his daughters in marriage. The Bretons pretend that this eldest son, who sent his brothers flying, was Llywel, or Hoel, "the Great". From Emyr proceeded some men of great mark, as S. Samson, S. Padarn, and, by a daughter, S. Cadfan and S. Winwaloe.

To the number may perhaps be added that of Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu, but it did not proceed beyond the second generation, and then only through daughters.

For centuries, due partly to the sneer of Bede, and partly to the proud contempt with which the Latin Church regarded all missionary work that did not proceed from its own initiative, the English Church has looked to Augustine of Canterbury as the one main source from whom Christianity in our island sprang, and Rome as the mother who sent him to bring our ancestors to Christ. That he did a good and great work is not to be denied; he was the Apostle of Kent, where the Britons had all been massacred or whence they had been driven. But Kent is only a corner of the island. And it was forgotten how much was wrought by the Celtic Church, even for the Teutonic invaders, far more than was achieved by Augustine.

It was the Church in Wales which sent a stream of missionaries to Ireland to complete its conversion, begun by Patrick, a child perhaps of the Celtic Church of Strathclyde, though Professor Bury thinks of South Britain. It was from Ireland that Columcille went to Iona to become the evangelist of the Picts. From Llanelwy went forth Kentigern with 665 monks and clerics to restore Christianity in Cumbria, which extended from the Clyde to the Dee. It was from Iona that the missioners proceeded who converted all Northumbria, Mercia, and the East Saxons and Angles. Honour to whom honour is due, and the debt of obligation to the Celtic saints in the British Isles has been ignored or set aside hitherto.

But they did more. To them was due the conversion of Armorica. Evidence shows that nothing, or next to nothing, was done for the original inhabitants of that peninsula by the stately prelates of the Gallo-Roman Church. They ministered to the city populations of Nantes and Rennes and Vannes, and did almost nothing for the scattered natives of the province. They were left to live in their heathenism and die without the light, till the influx of British colonists changed the whole aspect, and brought the people of the land into the fold of Christ.

In Wales, whenever the Norman prelates could, they displaced the

Celtic patrons from their churches, and rededicated them to saints whose names were to be found in the Roman Calendar. The native saints were supplanted principally by the Blessed Virgin, but in a number of instances by S. Peter. To take a few instances from one diocese only, that of S. Asaph. Llanfwrog (S. Mwrog), Llannefydd (S. Nefydd), and Whitford (S. Beuno), have been transferred to S. Mary. Northop (S. Eurgain), and Llandrinio (S. Trinio) to S. Peter; Guilsfield (S. Aelhaiarn), and Llangynyw (S. Cynyw) to All Saints. The two southern cathedrals have received rededications, S. David's to S. Andrew, and Llandaff to S. Peter. Bangor was rededicated to S. Mary, but S. Asaph has escaped.

In Cornwall, Altarnon has been taken from S. Non and given to S. Mary, S. Neot's at Menhenniot to S. Anthony, S. Finnbar at Fowey has been supplanted by S. Nicholas, S. Merryn by S. Thomas à Becket. At Mawnan, S. Stephen was coupled with the patron when the church was rededicated. S. Dunstan, on a like occasion, was linked with S. Manaccus at Lanlivery and Lanreath. S. Elwyn had to make way for S. Catherine, and S. Ruan for the apocryphal S. Christopher.

The same process has been going on in Brittany, as we shall see in the sequel.

The Celtic Saints may have employed methods which to us seem strange and uncouth, but they were in accordance with the spirit of their times; they were not free from the legal conceptions prevalent in their race, and these coloured their procedure, and carried them to commit acts hardly in accordance with the Gospel, but they were whole-hearted in their devotion to Christ, and with a fervour of zeal in their hearts which was a consuming fire. They accommodated themselves to superstitions, only that they might divest these usages of their evil accidents and direct them into harmless currents. They sacrificed themselves, their comforts, their everything that makes life sweet and joyous, for the sake of their Divine Master, and to win a barbarous people to the precepts of Christ. They were but human, fallible and sometimes faulty, but what they undertook to do, that they succeeded in doing. The Spirit of God, ever present in the Church, calls to action in different ways according to the needs of the time, and the habits of those among whom work has to be done. “There are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all." 66 Spiritus ubi vult spirat; et vocem ejus audis, sed nescis unde veniat, aut quo vadat: sic est omnis, qui natus est ex Spiritu.67

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II. LESSER BRITAIN

A KNOWLEDGE of the migrations to Armorica, and the colonisation of that portion of what is now called Brittany, is essential for the appreciation of the history of Wales and all south-western Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries.

The Armorican peninsula had been occupied from prehistoric times by a non-Aryan race, probably speaking an agglutinative tongue, a people that erected the rude stone monuments strewn broadcast over the land, a people whose dominating religious sentiment was the cult of the Dead. These were subjugated by the Gauls, moving into and occupying the Armorican peninsula in five invading clans, the Veneti, the Nanneti, the Redones, the Curiosoliti, and the Ossismi. These invaders did not exterminate the natives, they reduced them to servitude, and refused them the right to bear arms. That the religion and religious practices of the conquered race influenced the dominant Gaul is what we might expect. The influence of a conquered race never does die out so soon as the conquerors are established. It affects, moulds and modifies the religion and ritual of the conquerors. And the testimony of the sepulchres in Armorica proves that such was the case there.

Cæsar conquered Armorica, and well nigh exterminated the freeborn Gaulish Veneti. Thousands were massacred, and their wives and children were sold into foreign bondage.1

In B.C. 52, when Vercingetorix, besieged by Julius Cæsar in Alesia, appealed to all Gallic patriots to rise against the Romans, each of the Armoric tribes furnished a contingent of three thousand men, except the Veneti, too exhausted and broken, who were incapable of sending any."

The Gauls settled in Armorica as a dominant race rapidly assimilated the customs, religion, and adopted the language of their Roman conquerors. They seem even to have abandoned Celtic names for those of Rome, as among the inscriptions of the period recovered, hardly more than two preserved personal names of Celtic origin.

Under the later emperors, the fiscal exactions in the provinces became so intolerable that commerce and agriculture languished. Lactantius says:-"The number of those who received pay had become so greatly in excess of those who had to pay, that the colonials,

1 " Itaque omni senatu necato, reliquos sub corona vendidit." De Bello Gallico, iii, 16; Dion Cass., xxxix, 43.

2 De Bello Gallico, vii, 75.

crushed by the enormity of the imposts, abandoned the cultivation of their lands, and tillage reverted to forest." 3 He adds details. "The fields were measured to the last clod; the vine stocks and tree boles were all counted; every beast, of whatever kind, was inscribed, each man's head was reckoned. The poor people of town and country were swept together into the towns, the market-places were crowded with families. Every proprietor, together with the free-men of his household and his serfs, was registered; torture and the lash were applied on all sides. Sons were forced to give evidence against their fathers, and they were placed on the rack to extort this from them. The most faithful slaves were constrained by torture to testify against their masters, and wives in like manner against their husbands. In default of other evidence, men were themselves tormented to give evidence against themselves, and when at last they were overcome by pain, they were inscribed for goods they did not possess. No exception was allowed for age and infirmity. Sick and weakly men were all enrolled on the register as taxable. . . . And yet full confidence was not reposed in the tax-collectors. Others were sent in their traces to find out fresh occasion for imposts. Moreover, every time the tax was raised, not as if something had been discovered which had hitherto escaped the charge, but these new agents piled up the dues so as to give proof of their own activity. The result was that the cattle dwindled, men died, and yet payment was extorted for the dead as from the living, so that finally one could neither live nor die without being taxed." 4

These exactions became more oppressive as the Empire became feebler. The Gallo-Roman landed proprietors, the free-men, were constrained to abandon their villas, which they were no longer in a position to maintain, and to retire within the walls of Nantes, Rennes and Vannes.

The great towns of Aleth, Corseul, Carhaix, Vindana (Audierne), Vorganium, etc., fell into ruins. The bishops of the three cities absorbed the magisterial office, and became civic as well as ecclesiastical rulers. But their authority hardly extended beyond the walls of the towns; and if they attempted anything towards the conversion of the aboriginal inhabitants, it was in a half-hearted, desultory fashion that produced no lasting results. To add to the general misery, bands of sea rovers, described as Frisians, probably Saxons, descended on the coast, plundering, butchering and burning.

At length the tyranny of the Empire could be endured no longer,

De Mortibus Persecutorum, vii.

Ibid., xxiii.

and just as the wave of German invasion began to wash over Eastern Gaul, the Armoricans rose in the West, and expelled the Roman magistrates, inspired, as Zozimus informs us, by the example of the insular Britons.5 Rutilius, in his Itinerary, informs us that Exuperantius, prefect of the Gauls, succeeded in reducing the Armoricans in 415-20, but this success was temporary. Sidonius Apollinaris attributes the same success to Litorius, præfectorial lieutenant in 435 or 436,6 and to Majorian, lieutenant of Aetius in 446.7

The efforts of Aetius were by no means as successful as they are represented by Sidonius, for in the very next year, 447, the same Majorian, despairing of being able to reduce the Armoricans, invited the barbarous Alans to invade the country and to exterminate a people he was himself unable to subdue.8 This proposal would have been carried into effect but for the intervention of S. Germanus of Auxerre. "In 453," says Jornandes, "the Armoricans supplied a contingent to the confederation that defeated Attila on the plains of Châlons." 9 A little later, after 468, we hear of Britons in Armorica near the mouth of the Loire. In that year a certain Arvandus, prefect of Gaul, overwhelmed with debt and ripe for any expedient for recovering himself, intrigued with Euric, king of the Visigoths, and was arrested and tried for high treason in the ensuing year. At the trial a letter of his was produced, in which he exhorted Euric not to make peace with the Emperor Anthemius, but "as the Britons established upon the Loire" were the most able auxiliaries that the Empire possessed, he advised Euric to fall on them, and rid himself of them, before proceeding overtly to attack the imperial power." 10

Anthemius then called on these Britons (solatia Britonum postulavit) to make common cause with him against the Visigoths, and they responded by sending twelve thousand men, under their King, Riothimus, up the Loire to Bourges, to the assistance of the Count Paul, who was assembling an army against Euric. But the Roman general was leisurely in his proceedings, and Riothimus remained for nearly a twelvemonth at Bourges, during which time Sidonius Apollinaris entered into correspondence with him about some captives the Britons had taken.11

Riothimus, at last, impatient at his enforced inactivity, marched

5 Under the date of 408.

• Carmen VIII, v. 245 et seq.; Avitus, Panegyr., ii.

7 Carmen V, v. 211-2.

8 Prosp. Aquit., Chron., A.D. 442. Britannos supra Ligerim sitos

10

Sidon. Apollin., Epist., i, 7.

11 Ibid., iii, 9.

• De rebus Gothicis, xxxiii. impugnare oportere demonstrans."

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