The featured nations at this year’s Australian Celtic Festival are Brittany, Cornwall and Wales. These three nations share a bond of language. Breton, Cornish and Welsh are closely related, known collectively as the Brittonic languages. This sets them apart from Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, where the languages are classified as Goidelic, or Gaelic, languages.
Wales, Cornwall and Brittany have more in common than their ancestral languages, however. Before the rise of the Roman Empire, most of Europe was occupied by Celtic peoples. When the Roman Empire collapsed at the beginning of the 5th century, the Celtic regions we know today started to develop their identities.
In the southern part of the island of Britain, the local Celtic inhabitants were worried about attacks from Ireland, Scotland and further abroad, so invited people from what is now Germany to help defend them. These people became the English, and they soon expanded to control a great deal of the island. The Celtic people of Wales and Cornwall were soon separated by English territory, and began to develop separate languages and cultures.
Around the same time, emigrants from Britain, particularly Cornwall, settled in Brittany, giving it the name which essentially means ‘Little Britain’. There is even a region of Brittany called Cornouaille, which is the same word as Cornwall.
Saints
The sixth and seventh centuries saw a blossoming of the Christian church in these regions. Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, and Saint Piran, the patron saint of Cornwall, were both almost certainly Irishmen who travelled to Britain and set up important churches there. It is said that a disgruntled Irish king tied a millstone around St Piran’s neck and tossed him into the ocean. He miraculously rode the millstone all the way to Cornwall, like a surfboard!
Cornwall and Wales both shared their saints with Brittany. One of Brittany’s most popular early saints was Samson of Dol, who was Welsh. Saints clearly travelled back and forth regularly.
The patron saint of Brittany, though, is from a later period. St Youenn (his Breton name: better known by the French Yves or the English Ives – as in St Ives in Cornwall) was a 13th-century lawyer and priest who worked tirelessly for the poor.
Languages
The Breton, Cornish and Welsh languages have all faced difficulties over the centuries. Cornwall had already been subsumed into England by the Norman invasion of 1066. Wales formally became subject to the English Crown in the first half of the 16th century. Brittany was incorporated into France around the same time.
In all three cases, the language of the rulers was privileged over the local languages. Welsh and Cornish were given a temporary and unexpected boost by Protestantism. This new religious movement expected people to form their own relationships with God, without priests in between. That meant the Bible had to be available in their own language, not just the Latin which only priests could read.
Cornish was nonetheless officially declared a dead language in the late 18th century – around the time the British Empire first sent settlers to Australia. Happily, it has been revived thanks to efforts beginning in the early 20th century.
Welsh fared better, the cause of the language being taken up by activists interested in other rights for Wales. A campaign saw Welsh citizens refusing to pay for TV licences unless they could watch programs in their own language. Large numbers of people, many of them elderly, were prepared to go to jail for failure to pay the licence or the fine. The authorities eventually created S4C, the Welsh-language television channel.
The language of Brittany, where Catholicism is the dominant religion, did not have the benefit of translations of the Bible. The French government has never shown any particular goodwill towards minority languages, and has at times been overtly hostile to them. Breton has never been standardised – each dialect has its own words, spellings, and structures. However, it has never been declared a dead language: it clings on against the odds.
Gorseddau
Wales, Cornwall and Brittany share an interesting custom: the Gorsedd, or gathering of the Bards. The Welsh Gorsedd was established in 1792 by Iolo Morganwg, who claimed (fictitiously) to be basing it on ancient druidic customs. It first met in London, but soon moved to Wales. The Gorsedd has been an important forum for Welsh language, poetry and national pride.
The Breton Gorsedd was founded in 1900 (the year of Australian federation), after Breton representatives attended the Welsh Gorsedd the previous year. The Cornish Gorseth was founded in 1928, again after Cornish visitors to the Welsh Gorsedd.
The Welsh Gorsedd is closely tied to the Eisteddfod. The eisteddfod tradition spread around the world, and was at one time very popular in Australia – no longer tied to its Welsh roots, but simply a music and drama competition. They are much more rare nowadays, but there will be an eisteddfod as part of this year’s Australian Celtic Festival – very suitable for the year of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany!
