Kingdoms of Armorican Celts

The north-western corner of today's France was known during the Roman period as Armorica. The tribe of the Veneti had been the most powerful of Armorica's tribes, and their name gradually changed during the Roman occupation to be applied to the territory itself as Vannetais. This was how Armorica was initially known to the Britons who began migrating there in the fourth century AD, during a period in which British town life appears to have declined.

The low-key migration from Britain into Armorica seems to have picked up noticeably in the mid-fourth century, but it became a flood in the unsettled fifth century. Traditional certainly maintains that the British colony in Armorica was founded before the expedition of Constantine III in 407. People arrived mainly from the south-west of Britain, from Dumnonia and Cornubia, and each group retained its ethnic name (ergo the people in each region knew exactly what they were ethnically or tribally, regardless of who was king over them).

This new colony of Britons formed in a region which was beginning to drift out of firm Roman control. The colony's traditional first king, Conan Meriadog, ruled Armorica as the kingdom of Vannetais, maintaining the local Belgic tribal name. The area was permanently 'freed' of Roman control by Magnus Maximus as the first stage of his invasion of Gaul in 383 (see feature link). Conan was placed in command, with a probable capital in Vannes. The usual Celtic practice of dividing territory between sons soon created the smaller principalities out of Vannetais during the course of the fifth and sixth centuries whilst other Britons also popped over from the mainland to found their own principalities.

As the kingdom of Vannetais became better known as Brittany ('Little Britain') thanks to its British dominance, the name Vannetais seems to have remained attached to the land itself, or at least areas of it. This name still seems to have been in use for the more nebulous eastern territories which bordered the Franks, but it was eventually changed or evolved into Bro Erech. This remained a petty kingdom within Brittany until the seventh century, when it was seemingly inherited by the king of Brittany in person.

As for Rennes, it may be a somewhat poorly-accepted opinion, but it seems likely that the Rhegin Britons were also involved in the colonisation process of Armorica. Four (self-identifying) sub-ethnic groups seem to have moved to Armorica to settle in a geographical order which matched that of their homelands in Britain - from west to east these were Leon, Cornouaille, Domnonia, and Rennes. The Rhegin Britons would quite naturally have taken territory in the east of early Domnonia (opposite their brothers on Britain's south coast), and their colony was seemingly soon absorbed into Vannetais itself. The only south coast Britons who seem not to have crossed are the Canti.

At some point, Bro Erech's territory appears to have been divided. By the ninth century its southern section around Vannes and its northern section around Rennes both had their own separate lines of counts. The two sections were anyway divided by heavily forested highlands and were sparsely populated. The division appears to be due to the Frankish creation of a 'Breton March' or borderland, which was designed to keep the Bretons contained within Armorica and prevent their expansion eastwards. In the ninth century this failed, with all this territory along with Nantes being reclaimed by the Bretons. As the former heart of Bro Erech, Vannes is shown as a diminished eventual continuance of that principality, whilst Rennes - arguably the more powerful of the two in later years - is shown separately here.

According to an Angevin genealogy of the eleventh century, the House of Rennes was descended in the male line from the House of Vannes, showing a likelihood that Rennes was a division of Vannes, and not the other way around. The name Rennes seems to descended from the tribe which counted this town as one of its settlements, the Celtic Redones (which does seem to count against a migration here by Rhegin Britons). This was not their main settlement, however. That was at Condate which was located between the rivers Ille and Vilaine (the modern Redon).

European Kingdoms

Celts of Armorica

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