The Ancients - The Romans in Brittany

Episode Date: July 17, 2021

It was one of the most powerful empires in history, leaving marks and remnants across the globe, but in this episode we are looking specifically at the impact of the Romans on Brittany. Tristan was joined once again by Sir Barry Cunliffe, who takes us through the Roman occupation of Brittany, the response of the residents, and the impact on both cultures. From slaves and wine, to fish sauce and rebellion, this is an intriguing look into the character of Brittany and the realities of a Roman occupation. Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford, Sir Barry Cunliffe is the author of Bretons and Britons: The Fight for Identity.

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And now we're really continuing on looking at Brittany's ancient history. We're really focusing in on the next great power that has significant influence in this northwest peninsula of mainland France. And this, of course, is the Romans. In this podcast, we go from Julius Caesar to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. We're covering hundreds of years of ancient history. And Barry, the wonderful, eloquent speaker that he is, it was a joy to talk to him about this incredible topic. So without further ado, here's Sir Barry Cunliffe.

further ado, here's Sir Barry Cunliffe. Barry, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Very pleased to be here, thank you. Now, you've been on the pod once before to talk about Brittany in antiquity, before the Romans arrived, so we went from Mesolithic all the way to the Iron Age. But just before, should we say, the turn of the millennium, we do see the arrival, we've talked about the Greeks, and now we do see the arrival of the big power in the central Mediterranean at that time,

and that is, of course, the Romans. Yeah, the Romans, I suppose we've really got to go back to about 120 BC, when the Romans moved into the southern part of France, what they called Gaul, Transalpine Gaul. It's now Provence and Languedoc, that part of Gaul. And one of the main towns they developed was Narbonne as a great port for the Mediterranean. And that port linked the Western Mediterranean traders with the whole of Gaul, which was a big new market for the Romans,

Mediterranean traders with the whole of Gaul, which was a big new market for the Romans, a market to get things from and a market to get rid of their old tats too. And one of the things they had in surplus, the Romans, was wine. They're producing vast quantities of wine in northern Italy and putting it in big containers, ceramic containers, which we call amphorae, bunging them on a boat, then taking them to southern France and offloading it on the poor unsuspecting French, or Gauls as they were then. And what they were getting in return was a whole range of things they wanted, raw materials, metals, leather, things like that. Also luxuries like smoked hams, they particularly liked smoked hams that came from the north. But very importantly, they got slaves. And they were joking, the Romans, about these poor old Celts, the Gauls, that they were trading with, saying, you know, they're stupid, really. bearer. They couldn't believe it. Whereas if you were a Celt, you'd be looking at it the other way and saying, these Romans are really stupid. They'll give you a really valuable amphora of wine

for a mere old slave. And these slaves are ten a penny. You just go and attack your neighbour and bring in his relations and then exchange them for wine. And with wine, you can gain status. So I'm being slightly flippant, but this is exactly how it worked. The main movers, I'm being slightly flippant, but this is exactly how it worked. The main movers, the main commodities, were slaves coming out of Gaul because Rome consumed slaves at an enormous rate and wine going back for return. And it's this that we begin to recognise. You can't easily recognise a slave in the archaeological record,

but you can recognise an amphora of wine. And what we can do is to trace these Roman amphorae, which we know from the fabric where they were made along the west coast of Italy. They were made of local clays. The wine was put in them. They were traded to Gaul. And then we can trace them all the way through Gaul.

And one of the lines of trade goes from Narbonne along the Aude River across Carcassonne Gap into the Garonne and along the Garonne. And when they got to Toulouse, there was a big marketing venture going on there where they decanted a lot of the wine into barrels and then it went in barrels inland into Gaul. And we know this because they chucked all the amphorae away. And some parts of that area are so thick with amphorae that the local farmers can't plough the land. There are so many amphorae shards there.

So this was a big transshipment centre. But some of those amphorae carried on downriver, past Bordeaux, out into the Bay of Biscay, and then on ship up to Brittany. And we find them on the Breton coast. So presumably the Bretons were getting rid of their excess populations, along with tin and other things, and sending them back and getting Roman wine. And this would be about 120-100 BC. So it's the bow wave effect of Rome, really. More to the point, some of these amphorae were being taken around the west coast of Brittany to the north coastal ports and then across the Channel to Britain.

And we get the very first Roman amphorae at a place called Hengistbury Head, which is on the Dorset coast, a wonderful headland and harbour. the Dorset coast, a wonderful headland and harbour. And that's where the Bretons were trading with the British, using these exotic commodities like wine. They also brought in some metalwork, Roman metalwork. They had glass, raw glass, which the British didn't have, and figs, dried figs. All of this is found in the archaeological record in Hengistbury Head. I excavated there some years ago and we found these deposits with all these exotic things in. We also found a lot of Breton pottery. So the sort of model we've got is that Hengistbury Head was probably a great market. It's a headland with a harbour on one side and sea on the other, a smallish headland. And it was a place to which people went to trade.

And I can imagine the Bretons accumulating all this Roman stuff and knowing it had an enhanced value in Britain, taking it across perhaps for the summer season and camping out on Hengistbury Head and exchanging their wares with the locals. And what they were getting were slaves, obviously, possibly hunting dogs. It's one of the exports from Britain at this stage. They were getting metals. We actually found metals being worked at Hengistbury Head. They were bringing in shale armlets, which were being made on the Kimmeridge coast from shale. Those were being exported. So we can see the whole of this little trade network between central southern Britain and the north coast of Britain developing. And it's the first time that wine hit Britain.

And I remember when we were digging there, I wrote to a wine merchant who shall be nameless and said, I'm sure you're interested that we're finding the first wine that came into Britain ever. And I'm sure you'd be only too pleased to fund the excavation. They didn't. They sent a dozen bottles of wine, but it was better than nothing, I think. So that's how distant Rome in the Mediterranean, beginning to develop that Gaulish market in about 120, had a big impact on Brittany and a big impact on central southern Britain. Absolutely. It's really interesting to consider perhaps the first Roman objects that reached Britain, came via Brittany and through this trade route.

I mean, Barry, keeping on the Roman presence, this is the whole point of this podcast. We first see, let's say, Roman traders' influence on Brittany at that time. But it's not too long, almost like half a century later, that we see Rome's military power on that part of Gaul with perhaps the most famous or infamous Roman statesman. Yes, what happens really is having got their foothold in southern France, it wasn't long before they thought they'd take over the whole of Gaul and the person to do it was Julius Caesar for a whole range of reasons. He was in big debt, he needed a lot of money. So conquering a new country brought in the money so he could pay off his debts.

But he also needed power. He needed to have a big army in the field so that he could frighten his enemies back in Rome. He needed to get the public to follow him. So he needed a very flashy attack on a foreign country and bringing that foreign country into the empire. So Gaul offered him everything and it was quite close. He could get back quickly if his neighbours were a nuisance. It had the advantage also of being very close to Rome so that he could get back to Rome if it was necessary to make sure his enemies weren't getting too powerful. What always strikes me is the brilliance of the man in terms of geography and how to work geography. He had a conception of Gaul which was near to perfect, I think.

He must have had lots of people feeding him information. And he decided that to conquer Gaul, you had first to go to the extremities and tidy up the extremities and then you could wipe off the central bit. And that's what he does. He goes north to the Rhine frontier. There are other reasons for going there but he goes north to the Rhine frontier. And then very early on in 57 he sends one of his generals to take Brittany. And this general goes to Brittany and he does a deal with the locals.

He probably sort of tells some stories about the greatness of Rome and gives them presents and so on. And he says, you know, it's all peaceful in Brittany and you can relax. And he settles down and puts his army along the Loire Valley. And that army has to be fed. And they ask the Breton tribes to produce food. And that really worries the Bretons. And they rebel. Now, Caesar is in Rome at this time. And this rebellion breaks out in the spring of 56. So it's a very, very dangerous situation. The northern frontier isn't properly stabilised and this whole great

block of the west is up in arms. It's rebelling against him. So his strategy is absolutely stunning. He tells one of his generals to go and keep an eye on the north coast and the northern frontier. He sends another to keep an eye on Aquitania, so that isolates Brittany. Then he sends messages general to the north, to the Coriolis Salites and to the tribes living in western Normandy. He sends Decimus Brutus on boats into the sea off the coast of Morbihan because the Veneti were very famous sailors and he was worried about their flexibility as sailors. And then he himself moves by land in a sort of pincer movement against the Veneti.

The Veneti in the Morbihan were the ringleaders and the very powerful people. And they were maritime and mobile. So the general he sends to the Coriolis Letis in the north of Brittany and has a big battle and wins. But Caesar finds it very difficult in the south because the Veneti go on to their cliff castles, these fortifications that jut out into the sea. And when he comes at them by land, they sort of get on their boats and go away. Anyway, it all ends with a big sea battle off the coast of Morbihan in Quiberon Bay, a massive sea battle. and it takes a day. At the end of the day, the Breton fleet is destroyed or captured, and that's the end. And he says that he really didn't want the knowledge that people could rebel easily against Rome and get away with it

to spread to Gaul. So he had to really go at the Veneti with vengeance. And what he does is he said, quite simply in about two sentences, I killed off all their leading men and I sold all the rest into slavery. That's the sort of thing he did. And people reckon, who've looked at all the facts and figures about Gaul, that during the Roman conquest of Gaul, one third of the population was sold Gaul, one third of the population was sold as slaves, one third were killed. That's a big impact on a country. Absolutely, it really

is. It's interesting how Brittany is such a focus for Caesar during those campaigns and this sea battle, and it seems like the whole design of the Veneti ships, that they were ocean-built or Atlantic-ready, Atlantic-prepared, weren't they? And that may in turn have influenced Caesar when he does the crossing of the English Channel to Britain itself. Yeah, the Breton boats, the boats of the Veneti, he was absolutely fascinated by them.

He describes them in minute detail. He says that they are built of massive planks of oak, that they have ribs a foot thick upon which the planks are based. They have high sterns and prouts. So they're really well out of the sea. And they also have a central mask. They're cross-rigged and they have a sail made of leather, soft leather or rawhide. And they have anchors of iron with iron anchor chains. And he says, these are so well designed. They're fairly shallow draft. They're fine on shoally rocks and shores.

And they're fantastic against the great gales of the Atlantic. They're really robust, sea-going ships. And he had some native ships in his fleet. He also had galleys. He had galleys built. And that was probably why he won, because it seems that what happened during the battle was that the wind went down and the Venetian ships, of course, relied on their sails. So they were sitting targets. So the galleys were manoeuvrable and could come up. And then they had knives and hooks, the Romans did, on the ends of sticks, on the ends of long poles, which they cut the rigging of the Venetian ships. They were very tall. They couldn't get up into them, but they cut the rigging

and the sails failed. So the ships were wonderful. And these must have been the sorts of ships which were used between Brittany and Britain regularly, and which he would have seen when eventually, as you say, he came to look across the coast at Dover and look at Britain and think, I better go and have a look at that lot as well. Absolutely better go and have a look at that lot. Now, just before we move on to, say, the Roman province of Brittany, the last thing I'd like to ask about in this time period is the coinage that we do see in this period. Because, I mean, what do we know about the coinage in Brittany of the Veneti at the time of Caesar? Well, most of the different tribes in Brittany at some time or another issued coins. And they were,

to start with, gold. Gold staters, they're called. And they were based on a classic coin of Philip of Macedon. And it seems that those coins may have been used to pay Celtic mercenaries fighting over in Eastern Europe and fighting with the Greeks and so on. And they were being brought back. And the local tribes in Gaul and in Britain and in Brittany, seeing some of these coins, copied them. So you get a head on one side and something like a man on a chariot or just a horse on the other side. And the Bretons use those simple models and then interpret them in their own ways.

So the horses become wonderful, sort of elegant, disarticulated creatures. And the heads you can barely recognise as a human head. The coins are a real work of art. What caused the anarchy? How did medieval migrants shape the language I'm speaking right now? Who won the Hundred Years' War? Could England's lost patron saint be buried under a tennis court in Suffolk? How did England's last medieval king end up under a car park? And were the

Dark Ages really all that dark? I'm Dr Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis. On Gone Medieval, we'll uncover the most exciting and unexpected stories about the Middle Ages, hearing from the best and brightest minds. We will disentangle fact from fiction, bring you the latest discoveries, and reveal how the so-called Dark Ages laid the foundations for much of the world we're living in today. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you.

From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. moving on brittany is now part of the roman empire and the roman province of brittany first of all it seems to be quite interesting when we look at the administration of Roman Brittany. How was this province administered within the Roman Empire? Well, the first thing, once it was taken over, it was left to lick its wounds for a long while, and it was in a state of mild rebellion from time to time. Then they began under Augustus,

the Emperor Augustus in the 20s, decided to take a sort of census and do the equivalent to a doomsday book, who owned what land and so on, so that it could begin to be taxed. And that was a crucial thing, to take it into the Roman Empire in a way that the land could be taxed. So that was going on. And then what they did, Caesar, right at the beginning of his famous book, The Gallic War, says Gaul is divided into three parts. There is Aquitania on the one hand, there is the Belgae in the north, and then there is this whole central bit, which we call Gaul, but they call themselves Celts. And that runs from Brittany right down to Marseille. And each of those three bits were turned into a province. right down to Marseille. And each of those three bits were turned into a province. So Brittany is in the central province, which was called Lugdunensis. And the capital was in Lyon. So it

was a big, big province. And each province was run by a legate, who was the main man responsible directly to the emperor. It was run by a sort of financial officer, procurator, who was also responsible directly to the emperor. That was a neat way of stopping corruption because both men reported to the emperor and they didn't have anything to do with each other and often fell out. And then within that great area, they divided it up into the civitates, sort of townships, if you like. And those were the means of local government. And each civetates, which were based always on the tribes, it was logical if you had a tribe like the Veneti to create a civetates around the Veneti

and to make one town the central place of that civetates, a civis capital. So in the area of the Veneti, Van became the Roman capital. And they were self-governing to some extent, responsible obviously to the legate and the procurator and so on. But each Kivitas capital had a senate or an ordo. And this was 100 men, local elite, who governed the city. And they were responsible for upholding the Roman laws, for making sure the taxes were collected and so on.

And those 100 men were all local elite. So you just got all your local chieftains and everyone who thought he had a claim to power to become a councillor. So you gathered them in and they became your own. It was a way of using the existing system and making it work for you. It's very interesting, the absorption of the local elite into the administration of this part of the Roman Empire. Barry, keeping on that a bit longer, because I'm guessing the Romans must also leave their mark

in regards to communication routes, I'm thinking in particular. The Romans loved their roads, and this is the same with Brittany. Oh yes, there were a number of towns dotted around Brittany, and ports, and a whole road system, a very, very complex road system, which joined all parts of Brittany together. And in a later period, we can actually trace some of them because milestones were created and put along bits of road which were repaired. So the Breton archaeologists really studied their road system probably more thoroughly than we have in Britain and got a lot of roads and even minor roads. Yeah the road network was crucially important and that joined all the major towns and all the major ports.

And with this extensive road network, with all the ports there, with the natural resources of Brittany, this area of the empire, even though it may be seen as on a far-flung corner of the known world, it must become extremely rich, extremely lucrative for the Romans. Yes, the Roman Empire really at this stage

was a rotten core that needed to be kept alive. It was a rotten core that needed to be kept alive. It was a consuming core, and it was kept alive by the provinces around pushing their surplus into the centre. And the difference is interesting because in the Iron Age, the local chieftains had access to the surplus of the people in sort of simple Marxist terms, but what they did was redistribute it in terms of gifts and so on. So the surplus of the people was kept in the land.

When the Romans came, the surplus was creamed off and went to Rome. So the provinces became poorer than they would have been. And the poorer people had a less good life in many ways than they would have had in the pre-Roman period. In terms of productivity, iron was produced in quantity, salt was produced in quantity, sea salt is very important. And you don't get much good sea salt in the Mediterranean. And the other commodity which they produced was this garum,

which was a local delicacy, fish sauce. And all around the western coast of Brittany, you had these factories producing fish sauce, which essentially you got small fish sardines, and the Breton sardines are fabulous, they're the best sardines in the world. And you brought them in in quantity, and you stuffed them and the guts of other fish in tanks, and poured brine on them, and just left them in in quantity and you stuffed them and the guts of other fish in tanks and poured brine on them and just left them in the sun to rot. And they did rot. And the oil that came off was this garum, which was used in cooking. It's a wonderful oil. It's a rich means of treating food.

means of treating food. Now I remember eating pears, ordinary pears cooked in garum, which were brilliant, absolutely wonderful, a set of tastes that you'd never have thought of. But you could do it in Brittany because you had a lot of salt and you had all these wonderful shoals of sardines. So the garum industry was a big industry for Brittany and this oil would have been transported down into the Mediterranean and sold. Those networks are incredible in themselves, Barry. But it leads us on to the big question. We talked about the communication routes. We've talked about the towns. But really, how Romanised does Brittany become? There are hints that what you've got is a big divide between the urban elites and the rural communities. Sounds almost like modern politics, doesn't it?

But the big cities, particularly Rennes, Nantes and Vannes, the Roman versions of those, were rich. It's where the elites congregated and where the government went on. But the other cities were rather small and less important. And as time went on, it looks as though the countryside became more and more separated from the life of the towns. And this shows up much later when there are peasant rebellions. So I think there was this real divide between town and country, possibly more intense in Brittany than in other provinces.

So we'll get back to that identity and all that in due course very soon. Just before we go on to that, of course, in the previous podcast, we talked about these extensive links, connections between Brittany and the sea routes before the Romans come. But during the Roman period, it does seem that these maritime connections, they continue, they thrive. Yes, if anything, they intensify. And we've got little bits of evidence for this. It's tricky to quantify. But for example, there is a Roman wreck that is found in the harbour of St. Peter Port, which is in Guernsey. And that wreck burned in the harbour somewhere around 280 AD. And that wreck burned in the harbour somewhere around 280 AD. And it was carrying big blocks of pitch from pine trees, which would have been tapped off from pine trees,

which is very valuable in treating timber and boats and so on, really valuable. And when it was analysed, it had sand in it, which came from the land, which is that long coastline of Western France, south of the Garonne Estuary, south of Bordeaux, that area there, where there are pine trees, large numbers of pine trees growing. And that must have been one of the main areas where pitch was created. So that ship must have gone down to there and collected its cargo of pitch and sailed around the coast of Brittany and into the harbour of St Peterport in Guernsey en route to Britain. It was clearly a sort of tramp ship that was picking up cargos anywhere it could and taking them anywhere it could. And the people on board were using French pottery.

They were using pottery from Poole Harbour. They were using pottery from East Anglia. So they presumably were going into ports, well, certainly London and possibly a south coast port, jogging from one port to another to another all along the Atlantic seaways. And that's how it must have been for a large number of people, you know, little ship owners doing their local trade.

There's another ship, which is a very interesting one, found off the Set Eel, which is a set of islands off the north coast of Brittany, a shipwreck. And that had large numbers of ingots of lead on it, which have got stamps on, which shows it came from Britain, northern Britain, probably from the Pennines, that area. So that ship must have picked up its cargo somewhere in northern Britain and sailed round to Brittany. There's another one off another island in Brittany which had ingots of tin on. So, you know, we've got these little hints of small ships carrying local cargos from A to B and then from B to C and so on. And the other way of looking at it is in terms of pottery. There is a kind of pottery that's made in Western France, very shiny red stuff, which is found particularly in South

Hampton area and around central southern Britain. And that must have been one of the commodities that the ships carried. So we can build up these pictures of maritime interconnection just all the way through the Roman period. And these little ships of Brittany and their owners doing these voyages, which they must have known like their forefathers had done for centuries before then, during the Roman period, although they have the overarching influence of Rome

on the province, these figures, does it really seem that they at least tried to keep alive, to triumph the unique, the individual identity of Brittany and the people of Brittany? Yes, I think there are signs that they did. And probably the most important thing is that they were living in a landscape in which their ancestors were very, very, very evident, more so than in Britain, I think, because of all these standing stones that there were. You can't easily get rid of a standing stone, you know, put it up and it stays. So there are standing stones in their landscape going right back to the Mesolithic period, which they would have been aware of and would have been

aware of that as the work of our ancestors. Similarly, the megalithic tombs, which were there to be seen as we see them now and crawl into, the Romans crawled into some of them and dropped coins and things. So they must have been so much aware of their ancestors. And they did actually use, in the Maubian, they used these old passage graves as a way of communicating with the gods of the underworld. And some of them we find little clay models of Venus figurines, pipe clay Venus figurines, which are used as votive offerings in temples in the Roman period. And here they've been used, being taken down into the tombs and left in the tombs. So presumably people were trying to relate to their ancestors, even in the height of the Roman period.

So there are all these hints. And then even in decoration, in decorating their villas, they've got an identity. Some of the villas' walls are often painted, as they are in the Roman world generally. But a very special thing is done in Brittany. They stick seashells in the wall. A really garish, naff thing to do, I think. Rows of seashells sticking out of the plaster. So they plaster the wall wet plaster and stick these seashells in and then paint it garish colours.

And that's, again, a reference to the sea, which you don't find. You don't find it at all in Britain or in much of the rest of Gaul. That's something special in Brittany. And then they have these decorative plaques of stone, schist stone, which they use somewhere in their villas, possibly as ornamentation, always carved with sea creatures, fabulous sea creatures. So if you walked into a Breton villa, you would recognise it as different from a villa in Britain, I think. There is an identity which is recognisable, it's tangible and very probably deliberate. As we go along the time span of the Romans in Brittany, let's now focus on the late Roman Empire and the Romans in Brittany. Because we talked about the rich, lucrative nature of Roman Brittany earlier on

in ancient history with the Romans but now as we get to the later empire Barry it almost feels as if this period it's a time of crisis for the whole province. It's a time of crisis for the whole of the Roman Empire really and Brittany really suffers during this time. And it's recognisable. I think the problems start in the middle of the third century with people raiding from north of the Rhine into the Roman province of Gaul and some of them getting quite far down and also taking to sea, people like the Frisians and the Saxons, taking to sea and coming through the Straits of Dover and into the sea of the Western

Channel and being a nuisance both to Britain and to Britain and to Normandy, raiding the coasts and so on. And this builds up to an intensity from the middle of the 3rd century to the late 3rd century, the 270s, 280s. And there is a major incursion of German barbarians from across the frontier in 275, 276. And they sweep right down through Western Gaul and impinge on Britain. And these are barbarians attacking the Roman state. And it builds up to such an extent that the Romans have to appoint a special person to look after the fleets in the channel, on both sides of the channel, to keep the pirates, the Saxon pirates, away. So you can begin to see this

happening. And at the same time, in Brittany, there is social unrest, which is fascinating to see. And there is an actual description of how the rusticani, these are the countryside dwellers, the people who are not the urban dwellers, the Rusticani, the peasants, take up arms against the Romans, essentially the cities. So the people are beginning to rebel. There is real outright rebellion in the 280s of the peasants against the cities. And this has got to be seen against a background of the economy collapsing. So you've got German mercenaries and people pouring in and attacking. You've got social strife within the community between the countryside and the towns. And in addition to that, you've got something that I think is very important, a serious decline in population, which is recognised

right across the Roman world. And this decline in population means that services start breaking down. For example, the aqueduct, the great aqueduct, which served the city of Burgim, the Carré in the middle of Brittany, it breaks down in the 230s. It's never repaired again. So the systems start to collapse and break down and people bury more hordes of coins because it's unsafe. So you can see all those things happening in the 270s, 280s. And then there's a good strong emperor is appointed Diocletian and he sort of brings things together again and stabilizes the empire. So there's stability for about 50 years. And then 340s, the rot really starts again. You see more and more raiders from beyond the frontiers.

The Bretons respond, or the Roman authorities in Brittany, respond by building coastal forts along the north coast to keep the barbarian raiders from sea away. The towns are all fortified. Certainly the three big towns are fortified. And I think we've now got a real disconnect between those urban elites in their very fortified towns and the people in Rennes, just outside Rennes,

there is a settlement of people called Laity, who are German mercenaries who are employed by the town to protect it. These are people who've crossed the frontier and were raiding, and they've been bought off and given land and said, you settle there, we'll pay you just to keep off any other raiders. So you can see how things are beginning to decline. And I think this is when the peasant rebellions start again. The Bogordi, they're called, just means fighters, become famous. And there's a big outbreak of local rebellion in about 407. Then it's put down. Then there's

another outbreak about 20 years later. So you see gradually the decay happening, all the systems collapsing, and this divide between those who go into the cities and those who stay in the country. Nevertheless, as it seems we're coming to the end of Roman Brittany, trade between Bretons and Britons, it continues nonetheless. It continues, and we can recognise the pots that are being made in Pool Harbour, for example, are still being traded across the Channel and still being found in some of the forts that were built along the northern coast. And it's even possible that at that stage people are coming from Britain into Brittany, possibly as mercenaries, to help the Bretons protect their coast. And at the site which I excavated at Le Yeudet, which is on the coast near Lannion,

we found the kind of brooch which is often used by mercenaries, and horse harness, which may even have come from Britain, that is used by these mercenary groups. So you may have not only German mercenaries coming in, but possibly even British mercenaries being called in by the locals to help protect the coast. And that's the end of stage one and the beginning of stage two, which is when the British come across in some quantity and settle in Brittany, and Brittany gets its name, Brittany, from that. There you go.

Barry, this has been another fantastic podcast. Last, and always certainly not least, your book on this topic is called? It's called Britain's and Britain's, The Fight for Identity. Barry, thanks for taking the time to come back on the podcast once more. Thank you.