Recollections of My Youth | Page 6

been very sparsely inhabited, was to build large monasteries,
the abbots of which had the cure of souls. A circle of from three to five
miles in circumference, called the minihi, was drawn around each
monastery, and the territory within it was invested with special
privileges.
The monasteries were called in the Breton dialect pabu after the monks
(_papae_), and in this way the monastery of Tréguier was known as
Pabu Tual.
It was the religious centre of all that part of the peninsula which
stretches northward. Monasteries of a similar kind at St. Pol de Léon,
St. Brieuc, St. Malo, and St. Samson, near Dol, held a like position
upon the coast. They possessed, if one may so speak, their diocese, for
in these regions separated from the rest of Christianity nothing was
known of the power of Rome and of the religious institutions which
prevailed in the Latin world, or even in the Gallo-Roman towns of
Rennes and Nantes, hard by.

When Noménoé, in the ninth century, reduced to something like a
regular organisation this half savage society of emigrants and created
the Duchy of Brittany by annexing to the territory in which the Breton
tongue was spoken, the Marches of Brittany, established by the
Carlovingians to hold in respect the forayers of the west, he found it
advisable to assimilate its religious organisation to that of the rest of the
world. He determined, therefore, that there should be bishops on the
northern coast, as there were at Rennes, Nantes, and Vannes, and he
accordingly converted into bishoprics the monasteries of St. Pol de
Léon, Tréguier, St. Brieuc, St. Malo, and Dol. He would have liked to
have had an archbishop as well and so form a separate ecclesiastical
province, but, despite the well-intentioned devices employed to prove
that St. Samson had been a metropolitan prelate, the grades of the
Church universal were already apportioned, and the new bishoprics
were perforce compelled to attach themselves to the nearest
Gallo-Roman province at Tours.
The meaning of these obscure beginnings gradually faded away, and
from the name of _Pabu Tual, Papa Tual_, found, as was reported,
upon some old stained-glass windows, it was inferred that St. Tudwal
had been Pope. The explanation seemed a very simple one, for St.
Tudwal, it was well known, had been to Rome, and he was so holy a
man that what could be more natural than that the cardinals, when they
became acquainted with him, should have selected him for the vacant
See. Such things were always happening, and the godly persons of
Tréguier were very proud of the pontifical reign of their patron saint.
The more reasonable ecclesiastics, however, admitted that it was no
easy matter to discover among the list, of popes the pontiff who
previous to his election was known as Tudwal.
In course of time a small town grew up around the bishop's palace, but
the lay town, dependent entirely upon the Church, increased very
slowly. The port failed to acquire any importance, and no wealthy
trading class came into existence. A very fine cathedral was built
towards the close of the thirteenth century, and from the beginning of
the seventeenth the monasteries became so numerous that they formed
whole streets to themselves. The bishop's palace, a handsome building

of the seventeenth century, and a few canons' residences were the only
houses inhabited by people of civilized habits. In the lower part of the
town, at the end of the High Street, which was flanked by several
turreted buildings, were a few inns for the accommodation of the
sailors.
It was only just before the Revolution that a petty nobility, recruited for
the most part from the country around, sprang up under the shadow of
the bishop's palace. Brittany contained two distinct orders of nobility.
The first derived its titles from the King of France and displayed in a
very marked degree the defects and the qualities which characterised
the French nobility. The other was of Celtic origin and thoroughly
Breton. This latter nobility comprised, from the period of the invasion,
the chief men of the parish, the leaders of the people, of the same race
as them, possessing by inheritance the right of marching at their head
and representing them. No one was more deserving of respect than this
country nobleman when he remained a peasant, innocent of all intrigues
or of any effort to grow rich: but when he came to reside in town he
lost nearly all his good qualities and contributed but little to the moral
and intellectual progress of the country.
The Revolution seemed for this agglomeration of priests and monks
neither more nor less than a death warrant. The last of the bishops of
Tréguier left one evening by a back door leading into the wood