Does a Common Language Mean a Shared Allegiance? Language, Identity, Geography and their Links with...

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Does a Common Language Mean a Shared Allegiance? Language, Identity, Geography

and their Links with Polities: The Cases of Gascony and Brittany

Guilhem Pépin

Since the nineteenth century, the use of a single language has tended to be associated with a single political entity.1 Just as those attempting to create or strengthen so-called ‘nation-states’ in Western Europe have often pressed for linguistic homogeneity in their territories, historians have tended to believe that the use of a single language also has direct links with belonging to a single specific political entity using this language, and that, at the very least, some sort of solidarity exists between speakers of the same language living in different states. Not all modern voices have concurred regarding the necessity of linguistic unity for political unity: Ernest Renan, in his famous Sorbonne talk in 1882 What is a Nation?, drew a distinction between the German nation as essentially created around German language and culture, and the French nation which was constituted by a common will emerging from a common history, ‘a daily plebiscite’ according to him.2 However, the Third Republic promoted and imposed French as the only language admitted in the public sphere, with the aim of achieving the same degree of linguistic unity as in Germany. In this context a language was deemed to correspond to a polit-ical unit and vice versa, but did this notion also exist in the Middle Ages? Thomas Polton, Henry V’s ambassador at the Council of Constance, asserted in May 1417 that a ‘nation is understood as a people, distinct from another by blood relationship and association or by difference of language, which is the chief and surest proof to be a nation’.3 Using the examples of Gascony

1 I would like to thank Chris Ford for the significant help he gave me in correcting this article.2 E. Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation? (Paris, 1882).3 C. M. D. Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, 1378–1460 (London, 1977), p. 120. For context, J.-P. Genet, ‘English Nationalism: Thomas Polton at the Council of Constance’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 28 (1984), pp. 60–78.

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and Brittany we will consider whether or not the use of a common language linked its speakers within the same polity, and whether the use of two or more languages within a polity was prejudicial to its unity and survival. This will permit us to question the commonly assumed confluence of linguistic, ethnic and political boundaries. A longue durée perspective, of the sort advocated by Fernand Braudel, is necessary to approach such a complex matter. As the existence of languages is related to the territories where these languages were in use, a historical geographical approach is also necessary. This study will eventually challenge some assumed ideas developed both by state national-isms and regional nationalisms since the nineteenth century which are often unfairly projected back onto the Middle Ages.4

Gascony: One Linguistic Entity Politically Divided in the Late Middle Ages

In a description written in Bordeaux in the first half of the fourteenth century, Gascony had precise boundaries5 that curiously corresponded to the linguistic boundaries of the Gascon language defined by linguists in the late nineteenth century,6 in addition to the current ‘French’ Basque Country whose language for writing and oral communication in the late Middle Ages was Gascon.7 This description of Gascony is preceded by a description of Aquitaine according to

4 On post-1789 European nationalisms, among the abounding literature written on it, see A.-M. Thiesse, La création des identités nationals. Europe XVIIIe – XXe siècle (Paris, 1999); E. J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990); B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991). However, these accounts are based on the idea that nations were essentially modern artificial artefacts created by elites, a ‘modernist’ view criticised by Anthony D. Smith who dubbed this approach ‘social constructionism’: we roughly follow his views on this matter. See A. D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 52–62. On these historiographical debates, see the recent synthesis of P. Hoppenbrouwers, ‘The Dynamics of National Identity in the Later Middle Ages’, in Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650, ed. R. Stein and J. Pollmann (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2010), pp. 19–41, as well as the introduction by Robert Stein, pp. 1–18.5 Livre des coutumes (Bordeaux, Archives municipales de Bordeaux, 1890), pp. 607–9 and pp. 610–14.6 Borders of the Gascon language defined in 1895 by Édouard Bourciez. The results are published, with a linguistic map in H. Lartigue, Les racines de la langue gasconne (Pau, 1998).7 R. Cierbide, ‘Notas gráfico-fonéticas sobre la documentación medieval navarra’, Príncipe de Viana, 59/214 (1998), pp. 523–4.


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Map 3. The borders of Gascony in the Middle Ages / © Guilhem Pépin and Hugues Labarthe


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its pre-twelfth century boundaries (between the rivers Garonne and Loire). These descriptions end with this peremptory sentence: ‘And everything must be the possession of the king [of England], our lord duke [of Aquitaine] and of his resort.’ Yet, even if the link between Gascony and its language was here implicit, such a definition of Gascony depended not only on linguistic differ-entiation. In order to unravel what led to this description, we must examine the long ethnogenesis of the Gascons.

Several historians have already remarked upon the striking territorial continuity between Gascony and its predecessors Vasconia, Novempopulania and Aquitaine. Julius Caesar and the Greek Posidonius (via Strabo) explained in the first century BC that the Aquitanians, roughly situated between the river Garonne and the Pyrenees, were linguistically and physically distinct from the Gauls (Celts).8 We know that they spoke a language strongly related to modern Basque.9 At the beginning of the fourth century AD, the Aquita-nians obtained from the Emperor administrative separation from the Gauls within a province called Novempopulania.10 Incorporated into the realm of the Franks in the first half of the sixth century, Novempopulania gradually distanced itself from this kingdom with the political and military domina-tion of the Vascons. The latter originated from Navarre and West Aragon and shared many cultural traits with the inhabitants of Novempopulania: with the southernmost of these inhabitants, they even shared the use of a Basque language.11 Around 630, Novempopulania changed its name to the Latin Vasco-nia.12 Under different guises and with some short interruptions, a principality of Gascony loosely connected to a Frankish monarchy existed from the end of the seventh century until 1032, when its native dynasty died out.13 This period is often overlooked by historians but it helps to indicate the strength of the idea of a united Gascony in the later Middle Ages and thereafter. Indeed, it is striking that, even in the thirteenth century, the geographical boundaries for customary military service to the duke of Aquitaine in several regions of Gascony (the valley of Ossau in Béarn, the city of Dax, the regions of the Landes, Armagnac and Bazadais) were the passes of the Pyrenees in the south

8 Cesar, Guerre des Gaules, vol. I: Livre I–IV, ed. L.-A. Constant (Paris, 1926), pp. 2–3 and Strabo, Géographie, vol. II: Livres III et IV, ed. F. Lasserre (Paris, 1966), p. 120.9 See J. Gorrochategui, Estudio sobre la onomástica indígena de Aquitania (Bilbao, 1984).10 G. Fabre and J.-P. Bost, ‘Aux origines de la province de Novempopulanie: nouvel examen de l’inscription d’Hasparren’, Aquitania, 6 (1988), pp. 167–78.11 M. J. Pérez Agorreta, Los Vascones: el poblamiento en época romana (Pamplona, 1986) and J. Sayas, Los Vascos en la antigüedad (Madrid, 1994).12 See Fredegar, Chronique des temps mérovingiens, ed. and trans. O. Devillers and J. Meyers (Turnhout, 2001), pp. 146–7.13 See M. Rouche, L’Aquitaine des Wisigoths aux Arabes: 418–781 (Paris, 1979) and R. Mussot-Goulard, Les princes de Gascogne, 768–1070 (Marsolan, 1982).



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and the river Garonne in the north, usually considered to be the schematic borders of Gascony.

From the eleventh century onwards, the sources reveal that the Latin term Vascones became Bascons (Basques), referring to the populations of the duchy of Gascony speaking Basque, a non Indo-European language, while the term Gascon designated the populations of the same political entity who spoke a romance language (Gascon).14 The name Vasconia was thereafter no longer applied to Navarre15 and the Basque speakers were designated Bascones and their language lingua basconea.16 This common origin of the Gascons with the Basques explains why the Gascon language has a Basque substrate as does, to a lesser extent, Spanish.17 According to the Song of Sainte Foy, Basque was still spoken in the Val d’Aran (now in Spain) around the year 1000 and this was also probably the case in all the most southern regions of Gascony situ-ated next to the Pyrenees.18 This also explains why, for centuries, southern Gascons shared the same succession law as Basques: absolute primogeniture.19 The eleventh-century Book of Miracles of Sainte Foy, probably written around 1010 by Bernard d’Angers, mentions a Gascon pilgrim to Conques: ‘This

14 The first testimony of this distinction is in the eleventh-century Song of Sainte Foy that mentioned the Basconia and the country of the Gascons. This Basconia, also called later la terra de Bascos in Gascon and la tierra de Bascos in Spanish, corresponded only to the modern ‘French’ Basque Country. In the twelfth century, Bayonne, capital of the vicomté of Labourd, was also seen as the capital of Basconia. 15 See J. J. Larrea, La Navarre du IVe au XIIe siècle (Paris and Brussels, 1998), p. 131, no. 76.16 See Documentación medieval de Leire. Siglos IX a XII, ed. A. J. Martin Duque (Pamplona, 1983), p. 173, no. 117 and p. 97, no. 60. The Basque speakers named themselves as Euskaldunak and called the linguistic zone where the Basque language (Euskara, first mention in 1545) was spoken Euskal Herria (first mention in 1564). The Basque speakers of Spain were named in Spanish from at least the sixteenth century with the adjective vascongado(s), the language was called vascuence, and the provinces of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa and Álava were called Provincias Vascongadas until the late nineteenth century (and even beyond). From this period onwards, Basque nationalism has helped spread in Spain the use of the gallicized words of Vasco(s) and País Vasco which were used before only to name the ‘French’ Basques and their region.17 G. Rohlfs, Le gascon, étude de philologie pyrénéenne, 2nd edn (Tübingen and Pau, 1970), pp. 38–100.18 La Chanson de Sainte Foy, ed. E. Hoepffner (Paris, 1926), verse 384: ‘Cisclaun.l Bascon qe son d’Aran’ (The Basques who are from Aran whistle). Aran means valley in Basque (written haran in modern standard Basque). The latter medieval name ‘Val d’Aran’ means in fact ‘Valley of the valley’ and this tautology demonstrates that the local population, who spoke Gascon then as today, did not understand Basque anymore.19 J. Poumarède, Les successions dans le Sud-Ouest de la France au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1972), pp. 241–334.


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Garcia [who] has such a name typical of the Gascons’.20 Yet this name was also used by the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula who shared several other anthroponyms with the Gascons such as Sancho (Spanish)/Sans (Gascon), Aznar (Spanish)/Aner (Gascon) or Lop (Spanish and Gascon).21 The Gascon warriors shared with the Navarrese and the Basques a fearsome reputation as footmen javelin throwers at least during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and perhaps beyond. The Castilian chronicler Alfonso de Palencia wrote in his chronicle (c. 1480):

[The Vascones] are very similar to the inhabitants of Cantabria,22 Guipuzcoa and Biscay in language, dress and habits […]. The Vascones inhabit the northern side of the Pyrenees where the ridges of the Pyrenees extend towards the east. In the east, the river Garonne divides the plain of Aquitaine, with the city of Toulouse on the other bank, and the remaining parts are girdled by the Ocean and by the same river, which has acquired the name of Gironde and grown larger at the gate of the Ocean; for it is called Garonne at its rising, Gironde at its final setting free.23 The inhabitants however differ in language and customs, for those who are closest to the roots of the Pyrenees resemble the inhabitants of Cantabria and Vizcaya, but those who inhabit the banks of the Garonne or Gironde and the plains of Aquitaine resemble the French.24

In the thirteenth century, the Englishman Gervase of Tilbury, then residing in Arles, underlined the similar appearance of the Gascons and the Spanish: ‘the people of the [ecclesiastical] province of Narbonne, men and women alike, wear very tight clothes in the style of the Spaniards and the Gascons’.25 According to Arnold von Harff, in 1499 the women of Gascony living between the bank situated in front of Toulouse and Sauveterre-de-Béarn26 wore a very

20 Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis, ed. L. Robertini (Spoleto, 1994), bk. iv, ch. i, p. 224 and Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis, ed. A. Bouillet (Paris, 1897), p. 176.21 B. Cursente, ‘Aspects de la “révolution anthroponymique” dans le Midi de la France (début XIe – début XIIIIe siècle)’, in L’anthroponymie. Document de l’histoire sociale des mondes méditerranéens médiévaux (Rome, 1996), pp. 48, 56–61. 22 This probably refers to the region we would call Navarre.23 In the late Middle Ages, ‘Gironde’ described not only the estuary as today, but also the part of the Garonne extending up to La Réole which is the tidal limit. La Réole, chef-lieu de canton (ch.-l. c.), arrondissement (arr.) Langon, département (dép.) Gironde. 24 A. de Palencia, Gesta hispaniensia ex annalibus suorum dierum collecta, vol. I : Libri I–V, ed. B. Tate and J. Lawrance (Madrid, 1998), p. 154. Here the (medieval) name Vascones only groups together the Basques of the ‘French’ Basque Country and the Gascons. I thank Shelagh Sneddon for her help with this text.25 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), pp. 298–9.26 Sauveterre-de-Béarn, ch.-l. c., arr. Oloron-Ste-Marie, dép. Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Sauveterre marked the limit of Gascony with the Basque country. Béarn began to be distinguished from the rest of Gascony, for political and religious reasons, from the



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characteristic bent cone-shaped headgear that other testimonies extending from the same period to the early seventeenth century reported also being in use in Labourd (in the ‘French’ Basque Country), Guipúscoa, Vizcaya, Álava, Navarre, Cantabria and Asturias.27 Despite this closeness in customs – the Gascons were for instance dubbed ‘quasi brothers’ by a Spanish general in 1544 – 28 the gap deepened more and more between the Spanish and Gascons partly because of their opposition during the wars between France and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although Gascons (above all the southern ones) for centuries had much in common with the Basque speakers, the use of two different languages meant that they increasingly considered themselves to be two different populations. Indeed, a latent xenophobia existed, at least during the early modern period: in the seventeenth century the Gascons attributed to the Basques the habit of launching unprovoked attacks.29 However, this latent mistrust did not prevent Gascons and Basques of the English party from fighting together, without serious difficulty, against the ‘French’ throughout the Hundred Years War. In any case, these strong links of Gascons with Basques, and more generally with northern Spaniards living close to the Pyrenees, illustrate the long-term influence of the former common ethnicity on these peoples over the centuries: most strikingly, such a sense of commonality transcended their different political and linguistic identities.

Indeed, in medieval writings, linguistic and perceived ethnic identity tended to trump political allegiances: the Gascons were always described as a unique and distinct people. Politically, after Gascony became a possession of the dukes of Aquitaine (also counts of Poitou) in the second half of the elev-enth century (c. 1063), eastern Gascony fell increasingly under the influence of Toulouse: when this town became the ‘capital’ of the southern territories of the kings of France (from 1271 onwards), eastern Gascony followed this alle-giance while western Gascony remained faithful to the kings of England, who were the direct descendants of their former overlords, the dukes of Aquitaine.

Despite this political division which culminated in the Hundred Years War, the Gascons still considered themselves to be a single people. This was under-

sixteenth century onwards. They continued to speak Gascon as asserted by Julius Justus Scaliger, in Scaligerana (Cologne, 1695), p. 51.27 See A. von Harff, The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, trans. M. Letts (London, 1946), p. 264 (with an engraving); J. Caro Baroja, ‘El tocado antiguo en las mujeres vascas’, last edition in idem, Sobre la religión antigua y el calendario del pueblo vasco (San Sebastian, 1984), pp. 139–83.28 Brantôme, ‘Rodomontades espaignolles’, in Œuvres complètes de Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, ed. L. Lalanne, 11 vols (Paris, 1864–82), VII, p. 93.29 G. Hanlon, ‘Les rituels de l’agression en Aquitaine au XVIIe siècle’, Annales, 40 (1985), p. 256, no. 24; quotation from J. Baiole, Histoire sacrée d’Aquitaine (Cahors, 1644), p. 28.


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lined in June 1415 by Bertran VII, count of Armagnac, chief of the French party in Gascony, in a letter to his uncle by marriage, Galhart de Durfort, seneschal of Aquitaine for the king of England. He complained that many Gascon families of the English party had helped his local enemy, the count of Foix, against him: ‘It is a strange and hard thing that our own kinsmen and friends of our same nation30 help the men of a foreign nation [...] with the help of God and our lords and friends, we will not see in Gascony a man of a foreign nation who will dare to say and do such things against the count of Armagnac without fear.’31 This is a curious accusation as the count of Foix was also lord of Gascon territories such as Béarn, Marsan and Gabardan, but the count of Armagnac used this argument because the title of count of Foix was, unlike his own, linked with a town and a county historically and linguis-tically situated just outside Gascony. This testimony indicates that medieval Gascons had a very clear idea of their identity and of the borders of Gascony: the count of Armagnac was trying to instrumentalise such a concept in order to prevent other Gascons from fighting against him.

This idea of a unique Gascon people living in one country named Gascony survived well into the sixteenth century, as exemplified by the writings of the Gascon captain Blaise de Monluc (c. 1500–1577) and several contempo-rary authors from France, Italy and Spain. Monluc, captain for the king of France during the Italian wars and the French Wars of Religion, wrote in his Commentaires, describing a military company fighting in Italy in 1554, that ‘his company was very good, being formed for the most part of French and Gascons’. Reporting an incident that took place in 1536 in which he feared failure in an attempt to seize a mill situated near Marseille and occupied by some troops of Emperor Charles V, he upheld the same distinction, this time hinting at the rivalry that might be felt between Gascon and French soldiers despite their common allegiance at this point: ‘… telling him that I was Gascon and if I did not succeed, the French will laugh at me’.32

30 The idea of nation, surely closer to the idea of an ethno-linguistic gens (people) than to the modern so-called ‘nation-state’, existed already since the early and central Middle Ages. See R. Davies, ‘Nations and National Identities in the Medieval World: An Apologia’, Revue belge d’histoire contemporaine, 34 (2004), pp. 567–77. In this enlightening paper, Rees Davies rightly explains: ‘The medieval historian will also want to insist that we should attempt to understand past societies on their own terms and through the language and concepts they deployed to construct their worlds rather by our own a priori and time-bound criteria’ (p. 570).31 Registres de la Jurade. Délibérations de 1414 à 1416 et de 1420 à 1422 (Bordeaux, 1883), p. 183 (Vic-Fezensac, 14 June 1415).32 B. de Monluc, Commentaires, 1521–1576, ed. P. Courteault (Paris, 1964), pp. 275 and 66.



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In almost all the medieval documents emanating from what is now termed southern France, ‘France’ referred to the territory roughly situated north of the river Loire, sometimes only the Ile-de-France,33 but rarely the entire kingdom.34 For the inhabitants of Aquitaine-Guyenne, Gascony, Languedoc, Auvergne, the French were the inhabitants of this territory situated north of the Loire. Indeed, whilst the majority of them were subjects of the king of France and members of his kingdom, they were not culturally and linguistically ‘French’ and did not feel themselves to be such. From at least the sixteenth century, the Gascons pejoratively called the northern French speakers Francimans (mentioned from the early thirteenth century in Languedoc), a term still in use among the last natural speakers of Gascon. The Gascons of the Bordelais pejoratively termed the French speakers who settled in their region after 1453, Gabaches (foreigners).35

The Gascons were perceived similarly by non-Gascons, and even the Gascon subjects of the king of France were seen as foreigners by the French. The Valencian knight Aznar Pardo de la Casta, serving King Charles VI of France, wrote to the King of Aragon Alfonso V in 1418 that the Burgundian partisans had resisted an offensive of the Armagnac partisans of the dauphin and ‘spread throughout the city and slaughtered without cease those they believed were members of the Armagnac party, and to achieve it more easily one spreads the rumour that all the foreigners had to die, that is to say the Bretons, the Gascons, the Castilians, the Catalans, the Lombards and the Genoese, with the result that there were four thousand deaths or more’.36 Outside the kingdom of France, the Gascons were also not distinguished from the French in descriptions of the jousts at the coronation of King Alfonso XI of Castile in 1332: ‘there came there many Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans and Gascons’.37 In 1547, Matteo Dandolo, the Venetian ambassador in France could still write to the Venetian senate about the Gascon troops enlisted in

33 The medieval Ile-de-France extended roughly from Senlis in the north to Orléans and the borders of Berry in the south. 34 ‘Dans les textes écrits en langue vernaculaire, jusqu’au XIVe siècle, le mot “France” désigne plus souvent les régions septentrionales du royaume que l’ensemble de celui-ci’, in M. Pastoureau, Les emblèmes de la France (Paris, 1998), p. 140; ‘le terme “France” reste longtemps ambigu. Au Moyen Age, il désigne aussi bien l’Ile-de-France que le royaume entier ou seulement les terres situées au nord de la Loire’, Colette Beaune interviewed by M. Weisfred, L’Express (12 July 2007).35 See the recent synthesis of J. Dubourg, Les Gavaches (Bordeaux, 2007).36 J. Vielliard, ‘Les Journées parisiennes de mai-juin 1418 d’après les documents des Archives de la Couronne d’Aragon’, Annuaire-Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de France (1941), p. 143 (Bourges, 26 juin 1418).37 Crónica del rey Don Alfonso el onceno, in Crónica de los reyes de Castilla, ed. D. C. Rossell, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 66 (Madrid, 1875), I, ch. xcix, p. 234.


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the armies of the king of France in the Italian wars: ‘It is possible to say some-thing on the Gascon infantry: this armed force cannot be called French.’38

However, this perceived existence of a Gascon people never corresponded to political or administrative unity in the late Middle Ages. Yet from at least the sixth century, the common use of the romance language later called Gascon, ab initio clearly distinct from other related languages or dialects of Oc, was a strong bond between Gascons and was easily recognisable both within and outside Gascony.39 Already in the seventh century, the Irish Virgil the Gram-marian, then living in Toulouse, underlined the curious form of Latin spoken in Bigorre, a southern region of Vasconia. And Claudius, bishop of Turin (817–27) wrote that: ‘Latin, though one language, is linguistic mistress to many peoples, like the famous and noble ones of our time: the Franks, the Gauls, the Italians (also called Romans), the Lombards, the Spanish, the Afri-cans, the Asturians and the Vascones.’40 As argued above, the name Vascones referred to both Gascons and Basques in this period, but the context indicates that this remark concerned above all those Vascones who were fully latinised.41

The use of the Gascon language may explain why some regions situated outside original Gascony like the Bordelais, South Agenais or the region situated west of Toulouse (later called the Gascogne toulousaine) have been described as Gascon from the twelfth century onwards. In the case of the Bordelais (diocese of Bordeaux), some testimonies of the late eleventh century show that the Bordelais people still distinguished themselves from the Gascons. And the Poitevin author of Book IV of the Codex Calixtinus (before 1134) still clearly separated ‘the land of the Bordelais people’ from the ‘Gascon land’.42 However, in 1169, Henry Plantagenet located Saint-Macaire, a locality

38 Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato, ed. E. Albèri, 1e sér., II (Florence, 1840), p. 174.39 J.-P. Chambon and Y. Greub, ‘L’émergence du protogascon et la place du gascon dans la Romania’, in La voix occitane, Actes du VIIIe Congrès de l’Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes, Bordeaux, 12–17 octobre 2005 (Bordeaux, 2009), pp. 787–94. According to our own research the first mention of the word ‘Gascon’ to name this language is in 1313. The label ‘Occitan’ was not used in the Middle Ages: it is a creation of the 1880s and was spread by the Occitanist movement from 1895. For detailed explanations, see J. Lafitte and G. Pépin, La ‘langue d’oc’ ou les langues d’oc? Idées reçues, mythes et fantasmes face à l’histoire (Pau, 2009).40 Ibid., pp. 80–3; M. I. Allen, ‘The Chronicle of Claudius of Turin’, in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. A. C. Murray (Toronto, 1998), pp. 305–6, no. 86. The mention of Africans can throw doubt on Claudius’s list, but there were, for example, still some speakers of a romance language in what is current Tunisia as late as the fourteenth century. See M. A. Handley, ‘Disputing the End of African Christianity’, in Vandals, Romans and Berbers, ed. A. H. Merrills (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2004), p. 304.41 Lafitte and Pépin, ‘Langue d’oc’ ou les langues d’oc?, pp. 195–6.42 Le guide du Pèlerin de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, ed. J. Vielliard (Mâcon, 1969), p. 18.



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of the Bordelais, within Gascony. Since this latter date, all the medieval docu-ments locate the Bordelais and Bordeaux within Gascony and it is probable that it was considered as a part of Gascony because its people already spoke Gascon. Indeed, a small region of the Bordelais called from at least the early thirteenth century the terra gasca (the ‘Gascon land’) was probably deemed Gascon before the others. This territory extended along the left bank of the river Garonne from the border with the diocese of Bazas (in Gascony before the twelfth century) to the outskirts of Bordeaux.43 Its name of ‘Gascon land’ can only have been given when the rest of the Bordelais was not considered as Gascon, but we do not know whether it was perceived as ‘Gascon’ because it was populated by Gascons or by gasconised people, or even if the Gascon language was then spoken.44

By the end of the twelfth century, the Provençal troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras distinguished Gascon from his own language in his multilin-gual poem Eras quan vey verdeyar, placing Gascon alongside foreign languages such as Northern Italian, French and Galician-Portuguese.45 The specificity of Gascon was also explained by the Toulouse poetic society of the Gay Saber in its laws written between 1341 and 1356 (date of its final version). For this society, Gascon was a language different to that spoken in Toulouse, Languedoc, Limousin and Auvergne (called ‘Roman’), and alongside French, English, Spanish and Lombard its use in the poetry presented to the society was proscribed. As the version written before 1341 states:

[…] we use foreign languages in our writing in Roman in the way we explained above, and we call foreign languages the languages of French, English, Spanish, Gascon and Lombard. And as we consider as foreign the language of Gascony, we should not use such words, even if they are in use in Gascony, because Gascons often use bad words, such as when they say nagalhard and naguiraude, pay, fray and several others.46

It should be underlined here that since Gascony (in its ethno-linguistic sense) then began on the left bank of the river Garonne, in front of Toulouse itself, perceptions of the ‘bad’ influence of Gascon on the Toulousain language can be

43 This small region, later named in French ‘terre gasque’, corresponded to the archpriestry of Cernès. See the map of the ‘Anciens diocèses de Bordeaux et de Bazas’ at the end of B. Guillemain, Le diocèse de Bordeaux (Paris, 1974).44 For the author of Book IV of the Codex Calixtinus (‘the Gascon land’), this small region had the same name as Gascony.45 The Poems of the Troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, ed. J. Linskill (The Hague, 1964), pp. 191–8.46 Monumens de la littérature romane, ed. M. Gatien-Arnoult, 4 vols (Toulouse, 1841–9), II, p. 388.


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easily understood.47 The famous scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), born in Agen on the right bank of the Garonne,48 later confirmed this view in one of his texts.49 This linguistic difference and a distinct mentality could perhaps explain why Catharism developed in some regions neighbouring Gascony (county of Foix, city of Toulouse, the Agenais situated north of the Garonne), but never in Gascony itself.50 When there were tensions between Anglo-Gascon Aquitaine and France, the French language was surely an easy tool with which to target subjects of the king of France within the duchy: witness the Normans who were killed in 1294 in Bordeaux and Bourg because they spoke French.51

All these examples demonstrate a strong link between the use of a shared language and the consciousness of being a single people. This strong ethnic and linguistic unity did not prevent Gascons from following different polit-ical allegiances. Strikingly, Gascons fought on both sides during the Hundred Years War, or during ‘private wars’ like the one that between 1293 and 1415 (with interruptions) opposed the counts of Armagnac and Foix with their Gascon vassals and allies. In the formation of loyalties, the feudal ties and the feelings of fidelity towards what was called the ‘natural lord’ (legitimate lord) played the most important role. In this sense, Gascons of this period could perhaps be compared to the Welshmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

47 The fact that Gascony started immediately in front of Toulouse on its left bank is explained, for instance, in the twelfth century by the author of Book IV of the Codex Calixtinus, in 1499 by Arnold von Harff and in 1532–4 by an anonymous Portuguese clerk. On the borders of the Gascon language with Languedocian at Toulouse and its surroundings, see J. Allières, ‘La bipartition de Toulouse entre gascon et languedocien: le problème des Tolosates’, Mémoires de l’Académie des Jeux Floraux (1995), pp. 387–404, particularly the map on p. 400. I thank Vincent Poudampa for this reference.48 As with the case of Toulouse, Gascony (and the Gascon language) started just in front of Agen, on the left bank of the Garonne. Hence Blaise de Monluc considered he was going to Gascony when he crossed the Garonne at Agen to go to its left bank: De Monluc, Commentaires, pp. 753–5. Scaliger wrote that the South Agenais, corresponding to the diocese of Condom (created in 1317), was in Gascony while the Agenais was situated north of the Garonne was not (Scaliger, Scaligerana, pp. 9–10). He also underlined the great difference of mentality existing between the populations living on either side of the Garonne (p. 164).49 In Joseph Scaliger, Opuscula varia antehac non edita (Paris, 1610), pp. 123–6. The text was also published (with an imperfect French translation) in C. Anatole and J.-C. Dinguirard, ‘Joseph-Juste Scaliger: Diatriba de hodiernis Francorum linguis’, Via Domitia, 20–21 (1978), pp. 139–43 (141–2 for this passage).50 See Y. Dossat, ‘Catharisme et Gascogne’, in id., Eglise et hérésie en France au XIII siècle (London, 1982), no. 16 and B. Guillemain, ‘Le duché d’Aquitaine hors du Catharisme’, Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 20 (1985), pp. 51–71. 51 Complaint of King Philip the Fair of France to Edward I, in Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae…, ed. T. Rymer, I.2 (London, 1816), p. 800.



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who were repeatedly divided by princely successions, despite strong cultural and linguistic cohesion.52

Our narrative of the long ethnogenesis of the Gascons clearly shows that they had a very clear consciousness of their existence as a people distinct from their neighbours, despite a concomitant awareness of similarities with these neighbours, particularly those who shared a former common ethnicity with them. It is very likely that the use of a shared language (Gascon) greatly contributed to the perception of the ethno-linguistic borders of Gascony from the twelfth century onwards. Yet the feeling of being a single people never superseded political and ‘feudal’ loyalties and almost never generated in the late Middle Ages the idea of an united political Gascony under a single lord. In fact, the political boundaries of the Anglo-Gascon duchy of Aquitaine have never been drawn, and never coincided with the ethno-linguistic boundaries of the Gascon people.

Brittany: One United State with Two Linguistic Countries

While Gascony provides an example of a single language failing to shape political boundaries, the contrasting case of Brittany counterpoints with a single polity characterised by the use of several languages.53 We will examine whether the use of at least two languages within a single polity limited its political sustainability by examining the case of the late medieval duchy of Brittany where two regions of equal size each spoke a different language. From at least the fourteenth century western Brittany was called Brittany bretonnante because the Celtic Breton language was spoken there, while eastern Brittany was called Brittany gallo because French or Oïl dialects were in use there.54 Yet, if the strong difference of language between the two popu-lations of Brittany was well known both within and outside Brittany until the mid-twentieth century, it seems it did not prevent the ‘creation’ of a modern state of Brittany by the Montfort dynasty between 1365 and 1488. To under-stand this, it is again necessary to go back in time in order to understand the ethnogenesis of the Bretons.

A large part of the Armorican peninsula was populated between the third and the seventh centuries by populations originating from Britain (Britannia) who gave the name of their country to their new land, hence the name Brittany

52 See R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987). The Welsh also shared a common legal system.53 I would like to thank Michael Jones for all the information he gave me on this topic.54 For a (not complete) table with mentions of these terms with dates, see G. Le Menn, ‘Les Bretons bretonnants d’après quelques récits de voyage (XIVe–XVIIe siècles)’, Mémoires de la société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, 61 (1984), pp. 108–10.


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(la Bretagne in French, Breih or Breiz in Breton). They had been forced to leave Britain under the double pressure of the Saxon advance and the Irish raids, but they kept many contacts with their compatriots in the areas that would become Wales and Cornwall. For instance, until the twelfth century, the Welsh still used the same names as the Bretons and Gerald of Wales commented in 1194: ‘In both Cornwall and Brittany they speak almost the same language as in Wales. It comes from the same root and it is intelligible to the Welsh in many instances, and almost in all.’55 From the sixth to the eighth century, Brittany was divided into two or three kingdoms, two of them

55 Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales, trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1978), p. 231.

Map 4. Brittany in the Middle Ages: The political and linguistic borders / © Guilhem Pépin and Hugues Labarthe



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sharing the names of their cross-Channel counterparts: Devon (Dumnonia) also existed in northern Brittany (named Domnonée), and Cornwall (Corn-ouailles) also designated the south-west of Brittany (Cornouaille).56

Common origins and linguistic proximity permitted the maintenance of a certain sense of community between Britons living on either side of the Channel. Linguistic and cultural historians use the neologism Brythonic (or Brittonic) to name their shared language and culture. In fact, all the descend-ants of Britons (Welsh, Cornish, Cumbrians and Bretons) shared this same designation of Britons for centuries after they had been geographically sepa-rated by the advance of the Anglo-Saxons and the emigration to Armorica. The shift to naming Wales Cymru in the twelfth century reflected the growing distance between the regional ‘Briton’ identities and the earlier united Briton identity, a process exacerbated by the ninth- and tenth-century Viking inva-sions. Still in the tenth century, a Welsh poem, the Armes Prydein (‘The Prophecy of Britain’) incited all the Britons – Welsh, Cornish, Cumbrians57 and Bretons – to unite their forces to drive the Anglo-Saxons from Britain.58 Yet, even if Welsh and Bretons continued throughout the Middle Ages to call the Englishmen ‘Saxons’, a term still in use today (Welsh: Saeson, Breton: Saozon),59 their political interests were no longer connected and, though they still had some xenophobic feelings against the English, the Bretons were far more concerned about the Franks, their closest neighbours, than by their more distant ones. The consciousness of being a single people faded with time and seems to have disappeared in the eleventh and the twelfth century. The perception that all the descendants of Britons spoke the same language still existed in the ninth century as shown by the Book of Llandaff which tells the story of the Welsh Prince Guidnerth sentenced to do penance to Dol in

56 M. Dylon and N. Kershaw Chadwick, The Celtic Kingdoms (London, 1967). These similar names and some historical evidence have led some historians to suppose that at this time there existed a double ‘Breton’ kingdom stretching across the Channel.57 The Britons of the Kingdom of Alt Clut, called Strathclyde after 870. Alt Clut, their capital, was called by the Gaelic Scots Dunbreatan (now Dumbarton) which means ‘fort of the Britons’. Govan, which is now south-west of Glasgow, was their second most important site, and became their capital after 870. These Britons merged with Scots from the twelfth century after they had been politically united in the previous century.58 Armes Prydein: The Prophecy of Britain from the Book of Taliesin, ed. I. Williams (Dublin, 1972).59 ‘Les Anglais [. . .], en fait les Britanniques toutes nations confondues, sont désignés [de nos jours] par le mot Saoz, pluriel Saozon, connu surtout par les gens de la côte nord [de la Bretagne], qui le font suivre automatiquement de l’adjectif brein ‘pourri’ ou milliget ‘maudit’, souvenir de vieilles rivalités maritimes!’, in Y. Le Berre and J. Le Dû, ‘Ce que nomme “Breton”’, in Le nom des langues, vol. I: Les enjeux de la nomination des langues, ed. A. Tabouret-Keller (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997), p. 104. In Cornish the Englishmen were called Sawsen, Sowsen or Zowsen, see F. W. P. Jago, An English-Cornish Dictionary (London and Plymouth, 1887), p. 52.


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Brittany: ‘Guidnerth himself and the Bretons and the archbishop [of Dol] of this land were of the same language and of the same nation although they were separated by distance.’60 As we have seen with the testimony of Gerald of Wales, this linguistic perception was almost the same at the end of twelfth century, even if Cornish was further differentiated from Breton during the same century,61 but it implied even less than before any perspective of political union.

A distinctively Breton identity was reinforced by growing hostility with the Merovingian Frankish kings. The praise poem (gorchan) of Judicaël, the king of Domnonée, who fought against the Franks before he made peace with King Dagobert in 636 indicates the extent of such hostility: ‘Thus Judicaël, king of the Armorican Bretons, supple and agile, hard fighter in the war, hastened in the battlefield in the middle of the enemies who stood against him. And he did above all a great carnage of Franks, and he often laid waste to their provinces because the Franks wanted to subjugate Brittany.’62 In fact, the Merovingian kings and the first Carolingians were wholly unable to subdue the Bretons. Totally independent de facto under the reign of Charlemagne, Brittany was subdued with much difficulty by his son Louis the Pious who forced Breton unification from c. 831 under the authority of the Breton Nominoe. During the succession difficulties following the death of this Emperor, Nominoe conquered the counties of Nantes and Rennes in 850, then not part of Brit-tany and essentially populated by a population of Gallo-Romance speakers. His successors, the princes of Brittany, Erispoe and Salomon, retained these regions in the treaties of peace they signed with the King of the Western Franks Charles the Bold (in 851 and 863) and they succeeded in being acknowledged by this latter as kings (in 851 and 867). Despite the Viking invasions and occupation of Brittany between 913 and 936, the Breton dukes restored their power in establishing their capital first at Nantes (in 936), then at Rennes (in 979/990) permitting eventually a shift of power towards the romance part of the duchy.63 Old Breton was the court language of the kings and princes of Brittany of the ninth century and we learn that in 866, King Salomon had theoretically restored some Breton bishops deposed by his predecessor Nominoe because ‘he recognised they were from his people

60 The Text of the Book of Llan-Dav, ed. G. Evans (Oxford, 1891), p. 181.61 L. Fleuriot, ‘Breton et cornique à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Annales de Bretagne, 1 (1969), p. 706.62 Documents de l’histoire de la Bretagne, ed. J. Delumeau (Toulouse, 1971) for a French translation of this passage on p. 158.63 On all these events, see the synthesis of A. Chédeville and H. Guillotel, La Bretagne des saints et des rois, Ve–Xe siècle (Rennes, 1984). For the problem of the linguistic borders between Breton and Gallo-Romance and the pockets of Breton and Romance on both sides of the border, ibid., pp. 103–12, and map on p. 105.



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and language’.64 The last Breton-speaking (bretonnant) duke is usually said to be Alan Fergant who ruled from 1084 to 1112.65 Unsurprisingly, given their frequent (if not necessarily permanent) residence in the east of their duchy, Fergant and some of his predecessors appear to have been more or less bilin-gual and had at least some notion of Romance (besides Latin). After Fergant’s reign, it seems that no dukes of Brittany ever knew or learned the Breton language. They probably only knew the local romance language (Gallo) and increasingly the standard French, which was the only vernacular language used by the dukes and their court as well as in public documents from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.66 Curiously enough, a similar linguistic and geographic shift started to happen a bit later in Scotland.67 However, the political union with Brittany of the so-called Frankish Romance-speaking populations of the dioceses of Nantes and Rennes did not automatically make them into Bretons. For instance, a man of a Romance-speaking area, probably from the village of Jangland (Jeneglina),68 said in 851 to Frankish soldiers who were looking for some Breton warriors trying to hide from them: ‘If you are looking for some Bretons, they are there hidden under the straw.’69 Even by the period 1084–1103, the inhabitants of the county of Nantes were clearly distinguished from the Bretons in a charter of Duke Alan Fergant.70 The famous scholar Abelard, a native of a village situated south of Nantes, said

64 Chronique de Nantes, ed. R. Merlet (Paris, 1896), p. 55 and Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. Dom M. Bouquet, vol. VII (Paris, 1870), p. 587 D: ‘quos suae genti et lingae esse noverat’ (letter of the synod of the province of Tours to Pope Nicholas I).65 Fergant was a Breton nickname meaning ‘the perfect-brave’. See Histoire littéraire et culturelle de la Bretagne, vol. I: Héritage celtique et captation française, ed. L. Fleuriot and A.-P. Ségalen (Paris and Geneva, 1987), p. 14. The chapters written by Léon Fleuriot in this book are highly pertinent to the topic of this essay.66 See M. Jones, ‘L’usage du français dans les archives de la Bretagne ducale’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne, 89 (2011), pp. 365–90.67 The kings and elites of Scotland (then known under its Gaelic name Alba) spoke the same Gaelic as the Irish in this period. But during the twelfth century, the kings were strongly influenced by their links with the Norman kings of England and there was the start of a gradual process that eventually led to the predominance in this kingdom of the Lowlands and of the English language of Scotland (then known as ‘Inglis’ and now as Scots). See D. Broun, ‘Defining Scotland and the Scots before the Wars of Independence’, in Image and Identity: The Making and Re-Making of Scotland Through the Ages, ed. D. Broun, R. J. Finlay and M. Lynch (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 9; see also D. Broun, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scot in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Woodbridge, 1999).68 Jangland (in commune of Grand-Fougeray, ch.-l. c., arr. Redon, dép. Ille-et-Villaine).69 Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l’histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Bretagne, ed. Dom Morice, 4 vols (Paris, 1742–6), I, col. 239: ‘si Britones quaeritis, ecce latitant in paleis’.70 Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Sainte-Croix de Quimperlé, ed. L Maitre and P. de Berthou, 2nd edn (Rennes and Paris, 1904), p. 173, no. 35.


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of the abbey of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, situated in the Breton-speaking area, that when he became its abbot in 1125 ‘the land was barbarous and its speech was unknown to me, the population was violent and wild’.71 If we believe the Arab geographer al-Bakrî (eleventh century), the relations between Bretons and Franks were quite tense. His description is evidently exaggerated and likely reflected an earlier period such as the ninth century; but it seems true nevertheless that he transmitted the assumed ideas of the Franks, speakers of a romance language, as they faced their strange neighbours who spoke an incomprehensible tongue: ‘On the Bretons. They have a language grazing the ears. They are ugly and bad. They have brigands who attack and plunder the Franks. These latter, when they catch one of them, they crucify him.’72

Yet it is during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that all the inhabitants of the duchy became known under the name of Bretons, despite their linguistic differences. Hence, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach ascribed in his Parzival the war cry ‘Nantes!’ to the Bretons.73 The terms Brittany and Bretons were now applied to all the territories and inhabitants under the authority of the dukes of Brittany, and now the Romance-speaking area – future Brittany gallo or Upper Brittany – was clearly the dominant part of the duchy both politically and linguistically. It is striking to note that the same phenomenon happened in Scotland. Origi-nally, only the Gaelic speakers considered themselves and were considered as ‘Scots’ until c. 1260 when the other linguistic communities politically united with this kingdom (English speakers, North ‘Welsh’ speakers, etc.) also began to be named and to name themselves as ‘Scots’.74 The ‘French’ part of Brittany was now the leading part of the duchy, and, revealingly, the medieval custom composed for the whole duchy c. 1300 (La très ancienne coutume de Bretagne) was written in French and never translated into Breton.75 Consequently, the Breton speakers who needed to go outside Brittany bretonnante or had an activity that implied contacts with Bretons gallos and/or foreigners absolutely needed to learn French. They were usually sent to a family of Brittany gallo in order to do so.76 Jean Froissart even met a ‘Breton bretonnant originating

71 Documents de l’histoire de la Bretagne, French translation on p. 103. Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys (c. Sarzeau, arr. Vannes, dép. Morbihan).72 F. Clément, ‘La perception de l’Europe franque chez Bakri (XIe siècle)’, Le Moyen Âge, 5e sér., 1 (1987), p. 16.73 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. C. Edwards (Cambridge, 2004), p. 122.74 D. Broun, ‘Becoming a Nation: Scotland in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century’, in Nations in Medieval Britain, ed. H. Tsurushima (Donington, 2010), pp. 86–103.75 La très ancienne coutume de Bretagne, ed. M. Planiol (Rennes, 1896).76 There is the example of a young man from Brest learning French in the Pays de Retz (diocese of Nantes) in c. 1440: G. Bataille, Le procès de Gilles de Rais (Paris, 1965), p. 312.



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from Vannes [who] knew well at least three or four languages: Breton, French, English and Spanish’.77 However, not everybody was as gifted as this man and most of them were not totally at ease with French, as Alain Bouchart, himself originating from a bretonnant region, explained in 1514 to the readers of his Grande Chroniques de Bretaigne: ‘I beg them to be lenient if they find any language badly embellished by lack of elegance or pleasant style, because he is a native of Brittany. Breton and French are two languages which are very challenging to pronounce easily by one mouth.’78 More than a century later (1637), Albert le Grand would write almost exactly the same remark for the readers of his Vie des saints de la Bretagne.79 There is no serious reason to believe that the Bretons bretonnants of the Middle Ages were more gifted than their descendants! After all, even a great monarch like the Emperor Charles V (1500–58), famous for his multilingualism, in reality mastered above all the French language in which he talked to his family and wrote his letters.80

If we follow the history of the Montfort Breton state (1365–1488), both linguistic communities were equally supportive of the policy of autonomy led by their dukes. However, the Bretons bretonnants seem to have still kept a clear consciousness of their distinctiveness within the duchy and we should underline here that gallo came from the Breton word gall originally meaning ‘foreigner’ and thereafter by extension ‘French’. In 1544 the navigator Jean Fonteneau expressed in these terms the specificity of the Bretons bretonnants: ‘All this sea coast […] is called Lower Brittany and is a nation of people withdrawn on themselves who have no friendship to any other nation.’ 81 He also mentioned briefly and without any further comment ‘the Upper Brit-tany, where one speaks French’.82 So, according to Fonteneau, the Bretons bretonnants were perceived and probably felt themselves to be very isolated in Western Europe, a feeling of separateness and identity which surely stemmed

77 A. Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), p. 159. This Breton bretonnant was probably a mariner and we have to underline here that we do not know his real proficiency in all these languages. Vannes, ch.-l. dép., dép. Morbihan.78 A. Bouchart, Les Grandes croniques de Bretaigne (Paris, 1514), fol. 241v and É. Port, ‘Alain Bouchard, chroniqueur Breton’, Annales de Bretagne, 36 (1924), p. 508.79 A. Le Grand, Les vies des saints de la Bretagne armorique, ed. A.-M. Thomas, J.-M. Abgrall and P. Peyron (Quimper, 1901), p. xii. Morlaix, ch.-l. arr., dép. Finistère.80 See L. de Grauwe, ‘Quelle langue Charles Quint parlait-il ?’, in Charles V in Context: The Making of a European Identity, ed. M. Boone and M. Demoor (Ghent and Brussels, 2003), pp. 147–62.81 In J. Fonteneau, known as Alfonse de Saintonge, La cosmographie, ed. G. Musset (Paris, 1904), p. 155. 82 Ibid., p. 159.


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from their language, even if it was never written in the late Middle Ages.83 This is confirmed more than one century earlier by the Castilian Gutierre Díez de Games (first half of the fifteenth century) when he asserted: ‘We call Breton bretonnants the Bretons without the admixture of another nation or of language, and we call Bretons gallos those who are on the other side of Brit-tany mixed with France. These are not considered such pure Bretons as the others nor as noble.’84 Díez de Games was a follower of Pero Niño, a Castilian mariner and corsair who fought against the English alongside some Bretons bretonnants like Guillaume du Chastel. His remark probably represents the opinion of certain Bretons bretonnants mariners and not of the Bretons gallos.

In reading the Breton chroniclers of this period prior to 1488, it seems that the Bretons originating from the bretonnant area were the most nationalistic,85 as can be seen in the writings of Guillaume de St-André86 and especially those of Hervé le Grant, the likely bretonnant author of the Latin Chron-icle of St-Brieuc.87 This latter is well known for his xenophobia against the French and above all against the English whom he called Saxons, following the practice of the Bretons bretonnants.88 This feeling was probably rooted in the prophetic poems, both oral and written, that circulated in the ‘Brittonic’ world for centuries. Logically, this latent xenophobia was essentially revived by the war of succession to the Breton ducal throne (1341–64) where both

83 Though links still existed between Brittany and Cornwall, the difference between Breton and Cornish deepened in the fifteenth century. See L. Fleuriot, ‘Breton et cornique’, p. 706.84 G. Díez de Games, El Victorial, ed. R. B. Llavador (Madrid, 1994), p. 367 and idem, El Victorial, crónica de Don Pero Niño, conde de Buelna, ed. J. de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1940), p. 195.85 The main contemporary historians of late medieval Brittany (such as Michael Jones, Jean Kerhervé, or Jean-Christophe Cassard) use nationalistic terminologies for the Montfort Breton state without any problem. The Breton state of the Montfort dynasty developed an ideology which supported the existence of a quasi-sovereign Breton state opposed to the French kingdom.86 G. de Saint-André, Chronique de l’État breton: Le Bon Jehan et Le Jeu des Échecs, ed. J.-M. Cauneau and S. Philippe (Rennes, 2005). Saint-André probably originated from the region of Guérande (ch.-l. c., arr. Saint-Nazaire, dép. Loire-Atlantique) which was a Breton-speaking area in the fourteenth century, but it seems he did not know this language (p. 41, no. 163).87 As demonstrated by Michael Jones in Le premier inventaire du Trésor des Chartes des ducs de Bretagne (1395), ed. M. Jones (Rennes, 2007), pp. 69–84.88 Chronicle published in Mémoires, ed. Dom Morice, I, pp. 8–102. Summarized in French in P. de Berthou, ‘Analyse sommaire et critique de la chronique de Saint-Brieuc’, Bulletin archéologique de l’association bretonne, 19 (1901), pp. 3–110. On the Breton chroniclers of this period, see Chroniqueurs et historiens de la Bretagne du Moyen Age au milieu du XXe siècle, ed. N.-Y. Tonnerre (Rennes, 2001).



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English and French fought in Brittany to back their candidate. It has been often noticed that the Brittany gallo and its high nobility (who had posses-sions in France) were more inclined to support the ‘French’ candidate Charles de Blois while his opponent Jean de Montfort was more supported by the Brittany bretonnante and its low nobility. This perception is supported by the testimony of an author from this latter area who wrote in 1357: ‘Little Britannia, be happy, your glory grows. Do not be afraid because France does not know how to lead fights.’89 This specific culture of the Bretons breton-nants is likely to have paired up with the political nationalism developed by the Montfort dukes after 136490 while the Bretons gallos largely only knew nationalism in a political sense. There is no surviving evidence of conflicts between Bretonnants and Gallos,91 even if the linguistic consciousness remains acute up to the present time with what are probably the last natural speakers of Breton and Gallo.92 It seems to demonstrate that political constructions can come and go, but as long as a language is still spoken in a territory, it is a very obvious and strong identity marker.

The case of Brittany presents similarities and yet stark contrasts with the Gascon case. Like Gascony, Brittany was for centuries part of a larger ethno-linguistic community crossing the then current political state boundaries, and in the early Middle Ages, the Bretons got their name from overseas as the Gascons derived theirs from the other side of the Pyrenees. The ethnogenesis of the Bretons bretonnants resulted, as for the Gascons, in a strong conscious-ness of being a single people, sharing the same language, distinct from all their neighbours. But in 850, the Bretons annexed the regions situated to the east of the ethno-linguistic Brittany and this political union explains why from the twelfth century onwards, the terms of Brittany and Bretons were applied to these regions and its populations despite the fact that these latter did not speak Breton and did not feel ethnically Breton. Despite these differ-ences, these two populations were led to support a united duchy of Brittany

89 In Colophons des manuscrits occidentaux, IV (Fribourg, 1976), p. 62, no. 13367. Mentioned in G. Le Menn, ‘Les Bretons bretonnants’, p. 114, no. 14.90 On the Montfort state, see among the several works of Michael Jones on the late Middle Ages: M. Jones, The Creation of Brittany (London, 1988) and Between France and England: Politics, Power and Society in Late Medieval Brittany (Aldershot, 2003). On the kind of intentional political ideology of state created and spread in the late Middle Ages, see C. Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985).91 There was however a certain sense of community vis-à-vis French speakers, as some Bretons bretonnants sometimes spoke Breton in presence of French speakers to keep their conversations secret: in 1489 the lord of ‘Ancremel’ spoke in Breton at Bruillac in presence of French speakers in order to keep things secret (Archives départementales du Finistère, 1 E 504). I owe this reference to Michael Jones.92 Le Berre and Le Dû, ‘Ce que nomme “Breton”’, p. 100.


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under the authority of the Montfort dynasty (1364–1488), which deliberately created a nationalistic ideology not dependant on ethno-linguistic criteria. This was an intentional creation, and not a simple ‘national’ consciousness without concrete political purposes resulting from a long ethnogenesis, as was the case for the Gascons and the Bretons bretonnants before and after the Montfort state.

To conclude, it is certain that languages were, like today, the easiest tool to quickly place persons within a people or an area, and linguistic markers often engendered assumptions about political allegiances. But, like today, these assumptions were just rapid reactions and often inaccurate. Certainly, the use of a similar language was often closely connected with a strong sentiment of being a common people (gens in Latin) or community; language functioned in a similar way to memories of shared origins. But that was not enough to replace the political boundaries, particularly those linking a population with its ‘natural lord’. Thus, populations sharing the same language could also be regularly opposed to each other because of their political allegiance like the inhabitants of the borders of Scotland and England.93 Furthermore, states encompassing several linguistic groups were not at all rare during the Middle Ages: polities averaged two or three main vernacular languages with one perhaps dominant as a lingua franca. If, of course, there was sometimes some incomprehension between speakers of different languages, this was not suffi-cient to imperil the future of such states. It is indicative that Thomas Polton could assert with pride in 1417 that five languages were spoken within the English or British nation (the crown of England) – English, Welsh, Gaelic, Gascon and Cornish – and that none of them permitted the understanding of the others, he just described a situation common to many medieval polities.94 That was not considered a major political problem as Michel de L’Hospital, chancellor of France, expressed it before the French General Estates of Orléans (13 December 1560): ‘The diversity of languages does not bring the partition of kingdoms.’95 And in fact, according to all the testimonies we have gathered on this topic, both for Gascony and Brittany as well as for other cases, it clearly appears that, if linguistic and ethnic divisions were well-known and

93 See for instance an interesting anecdote on a fight between Southern Scots and Northern English who spoke the same language (1296), A. King, ‘Best of Enemies: Were the Fourteenth-Century Anglo-Scottish Marshes a “Frontier Society”?’, in England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives, ed. A. King and M. A. Penman (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 116.94 Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, p. 121.95 L. Petris, La plume et la tribune. Michel de L’Hospital et ses discours (1559–1562) (Geneva, 2002), p. 400: ‘La division des langues ne fait la separation des royaumes’.



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perceived in the Middle Ages, they were never used as a political tools to draw boundaries between kingdoms and principalities. Finally, we could say that the current position of Belgium, a state threatened to be divided along two or three along linguistic boundaries, was hardly conceivable in the Middle Ages.


Does a Common Language Mean a Shared Allegiance? Language, Identity, Geography and their Links with...

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