Rambles in Brittany

by M. F. Mansfield

The Province of Léon forms the northern part of the Department of Finistère. The name was a development from Pagus Legionensis, a large military colony having been quartered there in Roman times.

In the south the ancient Breton Province of Bro-Waroch became the county of Vannes, the counts being in reality dependents of the Duke of Brittany; their people spoke, and retain even to-day, a distinct dialect, greatly varying from that of the rest of Brittany.

In the earliest times, both Nantes and Rennes were the seat of important administrative governments, but the Counts of Nantes ceded their fiefs to the Bretons in the eleventh century. Chief of these were the fiefs of the Baron of Retz, the Seigneur de Clisson, who defended the southern frontier against Poitou, and the Baron of Ancenis, who was the bulwark between Brittany and Anjou.

In the north, the ancient Breton kingdom of Domnonée was, in the twelfth century, divided into two counties, that of Penthièvre and Tréguier.

It was Duke Geoffrey who introduced feudalism of the Anglo-Norman and French variety. In earlier times, when a nobleman died, his children divided his lands and goods in equal parts among them, but in Normandy and France the estate went to the eldest of the line.

It was only in the twelfth century that the Bretons went outside their own domain. Previously, they were decidedly an untravelled race, but under Philip the Fair Paris came to know Breton well, though chiefly through the poorer classes.

They went to the schools and seminaries of Orleans to become clerics; sold their cattle and horses in the markets of Paris, and their wheat in Maine and Anjou, and their feudal lords, it is perhaps needless to say, bought their dress in the capital of fashion, and their wines in Gascony. From this time, Brittany may be said to have been opened to the world.

Not always were the Bretons a peaceful, law-abiding race, at least they did not always appear in such a light to their contemporaries. According to Bouchart, Duke Francis II. received a letter wherein his brother-in-law, the Count of Foix, said: “Monseigneur, I declare to God, I would rather be the ruler of a million of wild boars than of such a people as are your Bretons.”

In 1460, Francis II. founded the University of Nantes, thus doing away with the necessity of the young Breton’s going to Paris, Orleans, or Angers for his education.

Printing was discovered in Germany, and all in good time it appeared in Brittany, at Lannion, and at Tréguier. There were establishments devoted to the art even before they existed in such important places as Lyons or Montpellier. One of the first books printed in Brittany was a French-Breton dictionary, published in 1499, and known as the Catholicon of Jean Lagadeuc.