How the Count of Montfort seized the land of Brittany after the death of his maternal half brother and found great wealth at Limoges.

I've taken a little break from my main theme; now I'll return to the noble history of the worthy King Edward of England and continue where I left off, at the raising of the siege of Tournai in the month of August in the year of grace 1340. The siege was ended thanks to a truce agreed between the two kings; but it wasn't well observed, especially by those in distant parts such as gascony and Saintonge and the Toulousain, where supporters of the King of France and the King of England kept fighting and winning cities and strongholds from each other, and there were often great feats of arms and prowess performed, as you'll hear in due course.

What happened next was this. After the truce was signed and sealed before Tournai, all the lords and all the ranks on both sides struck camp and headed for home. King Philip of France and his barons and lords went to Paris before going their separate ways to their own lands. Among them was the Duke of Brittany, who'd brought a greater contingent to the French army than any of the other princes, and he was heading back to his country when he fell so seriously ill that he passed from this world before he was half way home.

Of all the kingdoms which emerged from the wreckage of the western Roman empire, that of the Franks was the most successful and the most enduring. However, neither Merovingians nor Carolingians ruled a homogeneous society. The heart of their kingdom was the Roman province of Gaul, where centuries of Roman rule had established administrative conventions and provided the environment within which Christian worship had spread, above all in urban areas. This large and rich province was unevenly Romanised, and everywhere ancient traditions of agricultural exploitation were adjusted to the local climate and relief. The collapse of the pax Romana induced dislocations in trade, settlement patterns, and land use, and the uneven distribution of immigrants of various Germanic peoples strengthened the regional diversities of early medieval Gaul and helped forge new ethnic identities within it.

Over this rich and variegated kingdom, Merovingian rule ebbed and flowed. Dynastic infighting, the competence or incompetence of individual kings, the lure of resources to be won beyond the frontiers all played their part in shaping the ever-fluid geography of power and authority. The sea-bed over which this tide washed was at some times accepting, at others resistant. Entrenched regional interests – churches, cities, aristocratic families – set up eddies, but more often grew by accretion than decayed through attrition. Relicts of Roman administrative machinery gradually corroded and crumbled in this changed environment.

THE INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF SOCIAL CONTROL

The distribution of political power in early modern Brittany followed closely the distribution of economic resources. The province, like all French provinces of the Ancien Régime, had a superficial society of orders structure. This structure formed part of the system of political and moral authority; most importantly, it strongly influenced the perception of power and authority. The language of political discourse in seventeenth-century France was the language of tradition, of respect for custom and, by extension, of an ordered society. While contemporaries certainly thought in such a manner, they often acted according to different systems of societal organization. The Estates of Brittany invariably protected those privileges that had significant economic meaning to provincial elites.

In Brittany, as in Languedoc, the great power of the entire panoply of monarchical institutions – Sovereign Courts, Estates, town governments, seigneurial systems – meant that the limitations on the monarchy's actions retained their efficacity throughout the Ancien Régime. The contract between the Estates and the Crown provides the best symbol of those limitations. This contract placed the king's obligations to the province precisely in the sphere in which contemporaries felt he had the least freedom of action. Although Brittany had no specific constitution, a network of contracts provided Breton elites with guarantees, similar to those of a constitution, against arbitrary behavior.

The lower classes received, in these contracts, some protection from arbitrary royal behavior, but this protection came at the cost of a freer hand for local elites. When the lower classes received real benefits from the contracts, as in the case of defending Bretons from non-Breton jurisdictions, such as the gabelle courts, these benefits usually worked to the advantage of local elites as well.

Who benefited from this system? That question is easily answered: the king and the local elite, especially noble landlords. Who paid for it – the reverse side of the issue – is a more complex question. The contribution per feu and the number of feux had both become fixed in custom by the middle of the sixteenth century, so that any increases in direct taxation had to come from immediate military necessities. The king often levied military taxes between 1562 and 1598, peaking in the period 1589–97, but in the seventeenth century, save for local levies between 1614 and 1617 and again in 1628, he rarely did so.

Brittany had some 35,000 feux but the forced sales of feuxin 1577, 1638, and 1640 sharply reduced that number. In 1577, the sales did not include the western part of the province – no sales took place in Léon, Tréguier, and Cornouaille – so the sales of 1638 fell disproportionately there. We can compare the evolution of the number of feux between 1577 and 1640 in table 22. The example of the lawsuits over the tax assessments of Gévezé (see chapter 3) indicates that, by the seventeenth century, Bretons believed that a feu represented a given amount of cultivable land, rather than a fixed number (three) of actual households. Such an interpretation may have existed from the start, because a ménage could well have been interpreted to mean a manse, defined as a given area of land, rather than as an actual household. However one chooses to define the feu, it is clear that a feu bore no relationship to population after 1550.

The literary precursors of Surrealism include the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), Victor Hugo (1802–85), Gérard de Nerval (1808–55), Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), the Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918). The social origins of the movement lay, first and foremost, in the French experience of the First World War (1914–18). The cataclysm of the ‘Great War’ made the values and culture of the nineteenth century, with its proud belief in progress and reason, God and patriotism, seem meaningless. The very concept of ‘civilization’ was thrown into question; civilization was a sham, and this meant that art could no longer be a celebration of it. The disillusion of the younger generation of artists and intellectuals was reflected in the aggressive antiart antics of the literary movement known as Dada or Dadaism (see above, p. 176). The aim of the Dadaists was to expose the culture of the past for the nonsense the war had proved it to be. The Dadaists' leader, the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), chopped up newspaper articles, pasted them in random order and called them poems. When he arrived in Paris in 1919, he was warmly welcomed by a group of young poets: André Breton (1896–1966), Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), Robert Desnos (1900–45), Paul éluard (1895–1952) and others. These young men, some of whom had served in the war, rejected outright the civilization that seemed to have betrayed them. Within a few years Dada had burnt itself out, but its spirit of shock and provocation carried over into the more positive concept of avant-garde art which was to become Surrealism (the word was borrowed from Apollinaire, who coined it in his 1917 programme note for the ballet Parade). Surrealism was arguably the most influential avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, international in scope and extending to every form of artistic practice from poetry and prose narrative to painting, photography, film and theatre.

The migration of noble Bretons to England cannot be documented before the eleventh century. The story starts, as is well known, with Radulfus Anglicus - Ralph the Englishmen - who was the first known lord of Gaël in the county of Rennes. He is interesting for severaI reasons. He occurs in a Breton document of c. 1031 as Radulfus Anglicus, during the reign of the Danish Cnut's son Hardecanute in England. His cognomen Anglicus means that he was part English by birth. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says as much, and we know from Domesday Book of other members of his family bearing English names such as Godwin and Ailsi. Perhaps his unknown father had gone first to Normandy with Judith of Rennes, who manied Richard II of Normandy, and then a few years later to England with Richard's sister Emma, wife of Aethelred II and then of Cnut. Although before 1042 Ralph the Englishman was still associated with Brittany, thereafter the evidence concerning him shows him to have been an influential figure in the circle of Emma's son King Edward the Confessor, for whom he acted as staller or constable. The land that Ralph held was located in eastern England, in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk, as well as Lincolnshire. This was the region contralled in 1066, when Harold son of Godwin became king, by Harold's brother Gyrth. Ralph supported William when he invaded in October of that year, and was rewarded by the grant of the earldom of East Anglia. Within a short time, probably by 1069, he was succeeded by his son Ralph of Gaël. This second Ralph married a Breton and had probably lived in Brittany until 1066. In that year he joined the Norman expedition, in the company of Nigel of the Cotentin, who had been an exile in Brittany for some time between 1047 and 1050. Within a few years of his father's death, in 1075, Ralph of Gael quarrelled with the king and went into revolt. An earlier revolt in the north of England had been savagely repressed by the Conqueror in 1070. So serious had the situation been that it entailed a radical change of policy by the Normans.

1. Roma Sancta

In 1580, nearly four hundred years after Pope Innocent III ended Welsh and Breton ecclesiastical independence by denying the archiepiscopal claims of St David's and Dol, Pope Gregory XIII followed in his predecessors’ footsteps by again quashing Welsh and Breton dreams of spiritual freedom from England and France. Yet, unlike their forbears, the Welsh and Breton diasporas in Rome during the 1570s did not advocate the ecclesiastical independence of Wales and Brittany from England and France, but rather sought to shield their influence over two pious establishments in Rome: the first, the English College of Rome located on the Via di Monserrato near the Piazza Farnese, which contained a significant number of Welsh students headed by a Welshman from 1565 to 1579; and the second, the church of Saint-Yves-des-Bretons, located on the Vicolo della Campana, which catered specifically to the needs of Bretons in Rome since its establishment in 1455. In both cases, the Welsh and Breton émigrés in Rome employed the sacred history of their provinces in order to defend their influence over these establishments. Like the previous chapters, their use of sacred historiography conveyed divergent representations of Welsh identity as ‘assimilationist’ and Breton identity as ‘differentialist’.

Saint-Yves-des-Bretons was not the only ‘national’ institution of France represented on the streets of Rome; others included the Purification des Transalpins (or Quatre-Nations: France, Bourgogne, Lorraine and Savoie), Saint-Nicolasdes-Lorrains, and Saint-Claude-des-Bourguignons. However, while the others maintained their independence until the Revolution, Saint-Yves-des-Bretons merged with Saint-Denis and Saint-Louis-des-Français in 1582 to form an officially sanctioned natio gallicana.