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cities and the independent Britons who occupied the whole country round.

These latter were careful to keep on good terms with the Frank kings. We have seen how Rivold of Domnonia would not assume rule till he had received permission to do so from Clothair. The usurper Conmore obtained commission to rule in Armorica as lieutenant for that king. The bishops and abbots did not venture to accept grants of land till these were ratified by the King in Paris. Thus Withur sent S. Paul thither to have his concession of lands confirmed. Brioc in like manner had his ratified, so also had S. Samson. It was not till the battle of Vouillé in 507 that Clovis and his Franks became masters of Nantes and of the greater part of Aquitania, but he did not gain dominion over the Britons of Armorica. Procopius says, "The Franks, after their victory over the last representatives of Roman authority in Gaul, finding themselves incapable of contending against Alaric and the Visigoths, sought the friendship of the Armoricans and entered into alliance with them." 43

Not till 558, when Canao of Bro-weroc gave asylum to Chramm, son of Clothair, king of Soissons, did the Britons embroil themselves with the Franks. Hitherto they had been practically independent. and, at least till the death of Clovis in 511, under their own kings; after that they rendered acknowledgment of being feudatories to the Frank kings.

44

After the secular organisation came that which was ecclesiastical. Kinsmen of the settlers who were in the ecclesiastical profession came over, and were accorded patches of land on which to plant their lanns, and monastic institutions sprang up, that supplied missionaries to the natives who had hitherto been left in paganism, and ministered as well to the colonists, and served as schools for the education of the young. Every monastery had its minihi, or sanctuary, about it, to which runaway slaves, those pursued in blood-feud, and refugees in war, might fly and enter thereby the ecclesiastical tribe. Something like fifty-three of these minihis still bear the name in Brittany. 45

The Lann was the mother church, corresponding to the arnoit church of the Irish. Subject to these were the trefs, each with its chapel, and served from the mother church. Thus the vast parish of Noyala, in Morbihan, till 1790 comprised the trèves of Gueltas,

43 De Bello Gothico, i, 12.

44

Chanao regnum integrum accepit. Nam semper Britanni post mortem Chlodovechi regis sub potestate Francorum fuerunt, et duces eorum comites, non reges appellati sunt." Greg. Turon., Hist. Func., iv, 4.

45 P. De la Vigne-Villeneuve, in Mém. de la Soc. Arch. d'Ille et Vilaine, 1861.

Kerfourn, Croixanvec, S. Thuriau and S. Geran. That of Pluvigner consisted of a conglomeration about the mother church of nine trèves, Camors, Baud, Languidic, Landévant, Landaul, Brech, Plumergat, Brandivy and La Chapelle-Neuve. But here, owing to later colonisation of British on a plou that had been settled by the Irish, several of these trèves became independent lanns.

In many districts in Brittany the term lann has fallen away. This was due to the devastation caused by the Northmen in the ninth century, when the country was laid waste, and the inhabitants fled, some far inland into France, some to England, where they were afforded protection by Athelstan. When they returned the old order had changed. The lanns were no longer monastic churches with their trèves dependent on them, and the parish was organised on the Latin system, and was called after the founder simply, without the prefix lann.

But this was not all. Not every Armorican mother church bore the title of Lann, for the founders came with colonies and at once established tribes, and the place where each secular chief settled was not called a lann, for there was in the new lands no such a demand for "sanctuary as in the old, at least not at first, and the settlement took its name as a tribal centre, plou. Thus we have Ploermel, the plou of Arthmael. He was an ecclesiastic and a monk, and we might have supposed that his headquarters would have been designated a lann. But it was not so. In Wales, where the princes were tyrannous, and internecine feuds were habitual, there the llan, the sanctuary of refuge, was a most important feature of the ecclesiastical order, and it afforded a means to the saint for recruiting his tribe. But in Armorica, where the British colonists bore down the natives, and there was no resistance, and there was room at first for expansion without fratricidal war, there the plou became of more importance than the lann.

The monastic founders had each his loc, corresponding perhaps to the Irish cill. It was the place of retreat for Lent, and when the Saint desired to escape from the daily worry of management of a monastery and a colony. These locs were originally in very solitary places, in islands, or in the depths of the forest. But about a good many of them villages and even towns have

grown up.

As was the case in Wales, so in Brittany, in addition to the trèvial churches, there are numerous chapels in a parish. In that of Noyala, already mentioned, there are nine. In that of Ploemeur there were something like thirty-six.

The chapel was erected either to commemorate some event that had taken place on the spot, either in the life of a saint, or on the scene of a battle; or else it was erected in fulfilment of a vow made in a moment of danger; or, again, was due to a dream connected with the place; or to the finding there of an image; or, lastly, a chapel was erected for the accommodation of a noble family which had its château there. The chapel was not a part of the organism of the tribe or afterwards of the parish. It was an outcrop.

These chapels are extremely numerous in Brittany. They are for the most part opened only once or perhaps twice in the year, when Mass is said in them, on the occasion of the "Pardon " = Patronal Feast. Yet some of them are magnificent monuments of architecture, far surpassing the parish churches of the district in which they are situated.

It was due, probably, to the close and friendly relations maintained with the Franks, and association with them, that we hear of no strife engendered in Brittany over Celtic peculiarities in ecclesiastical matters. In the monasteries, indeed, the Celtic tonsure was employed till the year 890, and clergy, even bishops, were often married; but the difference in the time of the celebration of Easter does not appear to have existed. Apparently, the British Church in Armorica quietly accepted the Roman computation. Had it been otherwise, we should certainly have heard of the fact.46

One curious document has come to light that shows how strained were the relations between the Gallo-Roman bishops of the old cities at an early period and the clergy of the new colonies from Britain. Between 515 and 520 Licinius, Metropolitan of Tours, Eustochius, bishop of Angers, and Melanius, bishop of Rennes, issued a monitory letter addressed to a couple of British priests named Lovocat and Cathiern, requiring them to desist from certain practices that offended their ideas of what was seemly. "We have learned, by the report of the venerable priest Sparatus, that you do not desist from taking about certain tables into the cabins of your compatriots, upon which you celebrate the divine Sacrifice, in the presence of women called conhospita, and who, whilst you are administering the Eucharist, administer to the people the Blood of Christ. . . . And we have deemed it our duty to warn you, and supplicate you by the love of Christ, and in the name of the Unity of the Church, and of our common faith, to renounce this abuse of tables, which, we doubt not on your word, to have received priestly consecration; and these women,

46 See further, under S. Gwenael.

whom you call conhospitæ, a name which one cannot hear or pronounce without shuddering." 47

There was probably a good deal of exaggeration in this charge. The three prelates had only the word of Sparatus to go upon, and he bore these British priests a grudge. They had, as yet, no churches, or the churches were few and far between, and they went their rounds, ministering to their fellow immigrants the Bread of Life, as they were in duty bound. They carried with them portable altars. This was customary among the Celts, and was adopted throughout the Latin Church in the eighth century. S. Leonore, on his voyage to Armorica, carried his altar-stone with him. S. Carannog cast his into the Severn sea, and it was washed up on the Cornish coast. The custom of having portable altars was introduced from Iona into the Northumbrian Church, and the earliest known example is that of about 687, in Durham Cathedral. 48

But early in the sixth century these portable altars were novelties, and were accordingly condemned by the three bishops above named. As to the conhospita, they were doubtless the wives of Lovocat and Cathiern, for the Celtic clergy were usually married. Indeed, married bishops and priests appear in Brittany many centuries later. The first order of saints in Ireland, according to the often-quoted Catalogue of the Orders, "muliarum administrationem et consortia. non respuebant"; 49 it was later, when the Irish Church became monastic, that the women were excluded. The three bishops misunderstood the position of these women. They supposed them to be the mulieres subintroductæ who had given so much trouble from the Apostolic period. 50 That these British priests allowed the women to administer the chalice to communicants is perhaps a libel, a bit of spiteful gossip retailed by Sparatus.

Owing to the troubles in the South of Ireland at the close of the fifth century, when the Ossorians were expelled their land by Aengus MacNadfraich and Cucraidh, who gave it over to be peopled by the

47 Cognovimus quod vos gestantes quasdam tabulas per diversorum civium vestrorum capanas circumferre non desinatis, et missas, ibidem adhibitis mulieribus in sacrificio divino quas conhospitas nominatis, facere præsumatis, sic ut erogantibus vobis Eucharistiam, illæ vobis positis calices teneant, et sanguinem Christi populo administrare præsumant." Lovocat et Cathiern, par Duchesne, Revue de Bretagne et de Vendée, 1885, p. 6.

48 Smith, Dict. Christian Antiquities, i, 69; Darcel, "Les Autels portatifs," in Didron, Annales Archéologiques, xvi, 77-89.

49 Vita SS. Hib. Cod. Sal., col. 161.

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50 Gildas refers to the custom, Religiosam forte matrem seu sorores domo pellentes et externas veluti secretiori ministerio familiares indecenter levigantes vel potius . . . humiliantes." De Excid., ed. Williams, p. 164.

Southern Déisi, there would seem to have been an exodus of these dispossessed Ossorians, and they appear to have settled, some in West Cornwall and others in the west of Brittany. But it was not from Ossory alone that a migration took place. The Hy Bairrche were driven out of their territory between the Slaney and the Barrow by the Hy Cinnselach about the middle of the fifth century, and internecine war was chronic in Leinster to the close of that century.

We find settlements of Irish saints, all from Leinster and Munster, along the coasts of Finistère and Léon, with churches under the invocation of Conlaeth of Kildare, Senan of Iniscathy, Setna, Fiacc of Sletty, Ronan, Ciaran of Saighir, Ciannan, Brendan of Clonfert; and the cult of S. Brigid was widely diffused there.

But there is another curious phenomenon connected with the Irish settlements. A cluster of these is found in the department of Illeet-Vilaine. The mouth of the Rance and the Bay of Mont S. Michel were doubtless favourite places for landing. Up the Rance seven Irish bishops, with pious women accompanying them, plodded at the very beginning of the sixth century, planting churches all the way, and finally reached Rheims in 509, where they were received by S. Remigius.51 These came from the South of Ireland, and were quite independent of another settlement, unique in its way, made from Ulster.

S. Servan was founded by Serf, the Irish master of S. Kentigern of Glasgow; S. Maccaldus, bishop of Man, is venerated as founder at S. Maugand, near Montfort. In the twelfth century the church is entered as that of S. Magaldus. 52

Maccald or Maughold had been a robber chief; he was converted by S. Patrick, and in punishment for his crimes sent adrift in a coracle without oars, and with his feet chained.53 He drifted to the Isle of

51 See under S. Achebran and S. Germanus MacGoll.

52 De Corson, Pouillé de Rennes, t. vi, s. nom. S. Maugand.

53 The punishment of sending adrift on the sea was not uncommonly exercised. The criminal was clothed in a vile garment, his feet bound with an iron fetter, and the fetter-key was cast into the water. He was placed in a navis unius pellis, a coracle whose wicker framework was covered with hide only one fold deep, and without food, oar or rudder, committed to the winds and waves. Muirchu Maccu-Mactheni, in Tripartite Life, p. 288. In the case of aggravated manslaughter, according to the Senchus Mór, this was the punishment. When Fiacha, son of Domnall, was killed by the men of Ross, his brother Dormchadh asked advice of S. Columcille as to what punishment he should deal out to the people of Ross. S. Columcille sent two of his clerics to the spot, and they ordered that sixty couples of the men and women of Ross should in this manner be sent adrift on the sea. O'Curry, MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History, Dublin, 1861, p. 333.

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