If, therefore, they are neither temples, nor town-halls, nor even sepulchres, we are driven back on the only remaining group of motives which, so far as I know, ever induced mankind to expend time and labour on the erection of perfectly unutilitarian erections. They must be trophies—the memorials of some great battle or battles that at some time or other were fought out on this plain. The fact of the head of each division being a tomb is in favour of this hypothesis; but if it is considered as the principal part, it is like drawing a jackdaw with a peacock's tail—an absurdity into which these men of the olden time would hardly fall.
It is more difficult to answer the questions, Are Carnac and Erdeven parts of one great design, or two separate monuments? Is Carnac the march, St.-Barbe the position before the battle, Erdeven the scene of the final struggle for the heights that gave the victory, and the tombs scattered over the plain between these alignments the graves of those who fell in that fight? Such appears to me the only feasible explanation of what we here find; but the great question still remains, What fight?
There is, probably, no single instance in which the negative argument derived from the silence of the classical authors applies with such force as to this. If these stones existed when Cæsar waged war against the Veneti in this quarter, he must have seen them, and as it may be presumed that the monument was then more complete than it is now, he could hardly have failed to be struck with it, and, if so, to have mentioned it in his 'Commentaries.' Even, however, if he neglected them, the officers of his army must have seen these stones. They must have been talked about in Rome, and some gossip like Pliny, when writing about stones, must have heard of this wonderful group, and have alluded to it in some way. The silence, however, is absolute. No mediæval rhapsodist even attempts to give them a pre-Roman origin. Such traditions as that of St. Cornely, or Cornelius the Centurion, though absurd enough, point, as such traditions generally do, to the transition time between paganism and Christianity, when, apparently, all mediæval chroniclers seem to have believed that all these rude-stone monuments were erected. Till, therefore, some stronger argument than has yet been adduced, or some new analogy be suggested, the pre-Roman theory must be set aside; and if this is so, we are tolerably safe in assuming that no battle of sufficient importance was fought which these stones could be erected to commemorate during the time when the Romans held supreme sway in the country.
If this is so, our choice of an event to be represented by these great stone rows is limited to the period which elapsed between the overthrow of the Roman power by Maximus, A.D. 383, and the time when the people of the country were completely converted to Christianity—which happened in the early part of the sixth century.[433] But if the history of England is confused and uncertain during that century and a half, that of Brittany is even more so, and has not yet been elucidated by the French authorities to the same extent as ours has been.
No one, I believe, doubts that Maximus, coming with an army from Britain, landed somewhere in Brittany, where he fought a great battle with the forces of Gratian, whom he defeated, and that afterwards, in a second battle near Lyons, he expelled the legitimate government of the Romans from Gaul.[434] I also see no reason for doubting that he was accompanied by a British prince Conan Meriadec, who afterwards settled in the country with thousands of his emigrant countrymen, over whom he was enabled to establish his chieftainship on the ruins of the Roman power.
If this is so, the battle which destroyed the Roman power, and gave rise to the native dynasty, would be worthy of such a monument as that at Carnac; but so far as local traditions go, the place where Maximus and his British allies landed was near St. Malo, and the battle was fought at a place called Alleth, near St. Servan.[435] If this is so, it was too far off to have any connection with the Carnac stones. Two other wars seem to have been carried on by Conan, one in 410 against a people who are merely called barbarians,[436] a second against the Romans under Exuperantius in 416;[437] but we have no local particulars which would enable us to connect these wars with our stones. A war of liberation against Rome would be worthy of a national monument, and it may be that this is such a one, but I know of nothing to connect the two together, though local enquiries on the spot might remove this difficulty.
On the whole, however, I am more inclined to look among the events of the next reign for a key to the riddle. Grallon was engaged in two wars at least: one against the Roman consul Liberius in 439,[438] in which he succeeded in frustrating the attempts of that people to recover their lost power; the other against the "Norman pirates;"[439] and it is to this, as connecting the stone monuments with a Northern people, that I should be inclined to ascribe the erection of the Carnac alignments. From Grallon being the reputed founder of Landevenec, it might seem more probable that the alignments at Crozon marked the position of this battle, and I am not prepared to dispute that it may be so. The question is not of importance; if either group marked a battle-field of this period, the other certainly did so also, and I would prefer to refrain from offering any opinion as to what particular battle these stones commemorate. That must be determined by some local antiquary with much more intimate knowledge of the history and traditions of the province than I possess. All I wish to show here is that there was a period of a century and a half between the departure of the Romans and the time when the Bretons were so completely converted to Christianity as to abandon their old habits and customs, and that during that period there were wars with the Romans and the Northern barbarians of sufficient importance to justify the erection of any monuments within the competence of the people. If this is so, and we are limited to this period, enough is established in so far as the argument of this work is concerned, and the rest may fairly be left to be discussed and determined by the local antiquaries. All that it is necessary to contend for here is, that the alignments at Carnac are neither temples, nor tombs, nor town-halls, and that they were not erected before the time of the Romans. If these negative propositions are answered, there will not, probably, be much difficulty in admitting that they must be trophies, and that the battle or campaign which they commemorate was fought between the years 380 and 550 A.D.—in fact in the Arthurian age, to which we have ascribed most of those in this country.
The monuments in the cemetery at Locmariaker are probably older, but some of them extend down to the time when Carnac "closed the line in glory."
Number of Dolmens in Thirty-one Departments of France according to
M. Bertrand, 1864.[440]