Brittany - the Marches

The Marches of Brittany – a relic from the last Ice Age

A series of Ice Ages in the Northern hemisphere culminated in one last icesheet covering the cap of the world, from North America over the north pole to Europe as far south as what is now the shores of the Mediterranean. The ice began to melt between 12,000 and 10,000 BC and the current Arctic ice-cap is all that now remains of it.

While the icesheet was at its fullest extent it extinguished all life in its area. In Europe two subsets of Old Stone Age humans survived by staying south of the ice; one group was holed up behind the Pyrenees mountains which stopped the ice moving into Spain, and another group survived well over to the east sheltering behind the Balkan mountains north of Greece.

The icesheet kept the two groups apart for over 6,000 years, and in that time small mutations to their DNA occurred. These mutations have allowed scientists to trace the movements of the two peoples when the ice began to melt.

In fact the DNA markers for the people living in Spain have also been found in the Amerindian tribes of Virginia. That’s simply explained – the icesheet covered the northern half of the North Atlantic ocean, and people who used boats for fishing, or to reach seal colonies on the icesheet for hunting, would eventually have discovered the land on the other side.

When the ice melted both groups of humans followed the edge of the icesheet as it moved north. One group sailed up the coast from Spain in their boats, the other group trekked overland through eastern Europe.

People who are today called Basques or Gascons (or in their language Evskara) moved north in boats on to the west coast of the Bay of Biscay. They also colonised the banks of the deep wide rivers Garonne and Dordogne.

A later group founded ports all round the coast of Brittany and on the banks of all the river they met, including the Loire and the Vilaine. These people were organised as different tribes under different chiefs, but by Roman times were habitually co-operating as a single body they named Ar Mor (“by the sea”). The Romans referred to them as Armoricans.

The Armoricans had arrived there while humanity was in the middle Stone Age, and their concentration on boats for fishing and trading meant that their principal settlements were on sea-coasts or rivers. Later breakaway groups ventured further north along the coasts of England and Ireland and Scotland – ancestors of the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots.

Later on farming spread from the middle east. Armoricans did clear land for farms, but essentially the centre of Armorica remained forested and the population lived on the boundaries. Then pressure came from an unexpected direction. The people from south of the Balkans had tramped as far as modern France, and the first Gauls came pouring in through the gaps in the eastern hills. Advancing westwards, they were brought to a halt by finding other people already established in the swathe of land along the western coast, and in the north-west corner of France.

The boundary of Armorica in the east was the river Vilaine, whose high western bank had permitted the Armoricans to found towns, and whose tendency to a marshy eastern bank usefully fended off the newcomers. Further north the river Couesnon, which rises near the source of the Vilaine and but runs northward fast and deep to Mont-Saint-Michel, also provided a physical boundary. Across these rivers the two groups of humanity met.

They looked similar to each other and each spoke enough of the original language to be understood by the other, but the differences were there. Put a modern Frenchman down in the Quebec town settled by his ancestors, or put a modern Englishman in the USA town settled by his ancestors, and their foreignness will be apparent to all the local inhabitants. It was the same in the Stone Age, and the boundary between Armoricans and Gauls was defined by  the line between their settlements. The Romans invaded and took over both Gaul and Armorica, but nevertheless recorded the line between the two.

When the Romans left Armorica changed radically. In the massive population movements of that time, Germanic tribes led by the Angles took over the southern part of the British Isles (renamed Angle-land, hence England), and many western people who called themselves British fled to the safety of their ancestral land in Armorica. There they cleared the forests, created a rich agricultural community and finally took over the government of the whole of Armorica. In those days educated men wrote in Latin, and they named this new kingdom Britannia using the Latin name for the land they’d left. In Breton this is called “Breizh”, in French “Bretagne”, in English “Brittany”.

Later on the Franks conquered Gaul, but the Brittany boundary held and despite a face-saving treaty Charlemagne didn’t manage to exert authority in Brittany. More population movements meant that Vikings invaded Frankish lands and founded Normandy. They also tried to take over Brittany but also failed. Brittany remained independent until 1491 when the heiress Duchesse Anne married the King of France to stop the war between their two countries. Her grandchildren held the separate titles of King of France and Duke of Brittany, and Brittany still had a separate Parlement, a separate judiciary, different laws and its own language. It took the French Revolution to amalgamate the two countries.

The line between the two realms was known as the Marches of Brittany. In the middle ages it was marked with castles – on the Breton side Dol, Fougères, St Aubain-du-Cormier, Vitré, La Guerche, and Chateaubriant facing similar castles in the French counties of Normandy, Maine and Anjou, with the fortified ducal town of Rennes only just behind the line. To the south the Bretons pushed their boundary below the Loire with castles at Machecoul, La Bénate, Clisson, Oudon and Ancenis, facing the French (later English) county of Poitou with the strong ducal castle of Nantes in reserve.

Crossing the boundary of Brittany in either direction meant changing law, language and loyalty; it meant taking on a different understanding of history. To some extent it still does. As a language Breton is still in daily use. Breton culture is enthusiastically lived. And it has been estimated that 60% of French laws include at least one clause stating different rules for Birttany.

It’s now far too late to change the effects of something that happened in the Stone Age and has been passionately supported ever since.