Britons and Bretons

Everywhere through the wild, lonely land of Brittany are found scattered memorials of a vanished race--mysterious tokens of an epoch before history began--monstrous, misshapen blocks of stone placed in position by human hands, it may be before the Pharaohs built the Pyramids. The peasants call them "Memory Stones." They certainly remind them that Bretons were not the earliest inhabitants of the land. Legends, too, cling to the world-old granite rocks, telling of mighty physical convulsions by which whole cities of living men were swallowed up or swept into the sea. When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, 56 B. C., the name of this northwestern peninsula of France was Armorica, and the Armoricans claim very ancient descent. Some authorities claim that Gomer, the son of Japhet, settled in Armorica, and here begot the Celtic race which overspread Gaul and Brittany. But, tradition aside, it is known that in the year 55 B. C. Caesar found here a nation that he could not subdue, divided into tribes and able to send two hundred and fifty large galleys to contend with the Roman fleet. And in the fifth century, when the Saxons overspread Great Britain, the Britons fled to Armorica in such large numbers as to change its name to Brittany (Bretagne). It is well proven by philology that Britons and Bretons were anciently one people, for the Welsh can converse with the Bretons while they cannot understand a word of French, and the pathetic lament of the Bretons is still: "We are not French, we are the people of our own country." This conquered yet unconquered people, that maintained a nominal independence under rulers of their own until 1532, and who had a separate parliament until the French Revolution in 1789--a people who still regard the French as strangers in the land--makes Brittany a most interesting Department of France. Brittany is an unspoiled country, filled with memorials of a pre-historic race, the lineal descendants of a people who resisted Julius Caesar, whose Druid priests continued their heathen rites as late as the seventh century, and whose Christian rites are still overlaid with heathen superstition.