In Thirteenth-Century Galicia
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CYFRANIADAU BYRION – SHORT CONTRIBUTIONS 361 Note on Britones in Thirteenth-century Galicia The early medieval British-Celtic colony that was set up in what is today north-west Spain (Galicia) is usually said to have failed quickly leaving behind only the meanest proof of its existence, a handful of short notices and a single place name: Bretoña (in the Galician province of Lugo).1 In fact, the settlement may have left a few more traces before disappearing. At least two other place names seem to recall the colony: Bretonia, a hamlet, also in the province of Lugo; and Bretoña, a hamlet in the parish of Currio in the Galician province of Ponte Vedra. Historians do not have appeared to have con- nected these with the settlement before.2 More intriguing is a charter of 1233 from the monastery of Meira in the province of Lugo. The charter, discussing a donation to the monastery, includes the following words: ‘De comparatione et de acquisitione, illam uidlicet totam, que fuit de Maria Michaelis et de Santa Pelagii, et de hominibus illis qui vocabantur britones et biortos, et quantam habui de mulieribus que dicebantur chavellas’. There is no obvious interpretation of chavellas or biortos. (The first sounds Galician, the second does not.) However, britones is likely connected to the ancient British colony. Certainly it comes from the right area. The charter deals with property in what is today the hamlet of Lousada in the province of Lugo, in the very region that was settled by British migrants many centuries before.3 It is also worth noting two other references to Britones in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula that have not been taken up by historians. The first, a charter dated 926 from 1 Four articles on the British colony in Galicia com- introducing me to the Gran Enciclopedia, one of mend themselves: Antonio García y García, ‘Ecclesia Galicia’s national treasures. Britoniensis’, Estudios Mindonienses, 2 (1986), 121–34 3 Unfortunately the charters of the monastery (in Spanish); Alberto Ferreiro, ‘A Reconsideration of remain unedited. I owe the Latin extract to Dolores Celtic Tonsures and the Ecclesia Britoniensis in the Mariño Veiras, Señorío de Santa Maria de Meira (De Hispano Roman-Visigothic Councils’, Annuarium his- 1150 a 1525): Espacio rural, régimen de propiedad y rég- toriae conciliorum, 23 (1991), 1–10; E. A. Thompson, imen de explotación en la Galicia medieval (La Coruña, ‘Britonia’, in M. W. Barley and R. P. C. Hanson (eds.), 1983), 91, n. 196 (see also p. 67 and pp. 92–3, n. 197). Christianity in Britain 300–700. (Leicester, 1968), 201–5 The author took the citation from a manuscript of the and Harold Livermore, ‘The Britones of Galicia’, monastery named the Tumbo de Meira, fo. 416v. For Estudios Mindonienses, 3 (1987), 355–64. a description of the manuscript see Señorío, 22. In her 2 For these two place names Gran Enciclopedia book Mariño Veiras does not locate Lousada – mod- Gallega (1974–90, 32 vols.), iv, 57–8. There are other ern Galicia has approximately twenty settlements of names in the Iberian Peninsula, most from the north- this name. However, in an article in the Gran west, that might also conceivably be connected to the Enciclopedia, iv, 58, she associates the charter with the colony: Bertona, Bertón, Bretón, Bretún, Bretios, Lousada of the municipality of Castro de Rei. The Brito; Bretó, Bretal, Bretelo, Britelo, Britelo, Bretuy, lack of an edn of the charter means that it has been Bretocino, Briteiros, Bretegos, Bretes. I would like impossible to check the author’s reasons for choosing here to thank here Manolo Rodriguez Valdés for this particular Lousada. 362 CYFRANIADAU BYRION – SHORT CONTRIBUTIONS Asturias, mentions a ‘fonte de bretones’.4 The second, a notice from thirteenth-century northern Portugal, concerns ‘hereditas de brethones’.5 Neither of these pertain to mod- ern Galicia, but both fall well within the limits of the Roman province of Gallaecia. SIMON YOUNG 4 Colección de documentos de la catedral de Oviedo, ed. tratingly does not give a reference for, the Latin Santos García Larragueta (Oviedo, 1962), 95. phrase that allegedly appears in a document from 5 Johannes Hubschmid, ‘Toponimia Prerromana’, Tarouca, Northern Portugal (‘territorio de Tarouca, in Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, ed. M. Alvar et al. Portugal’) and is dated by Hubschmid to 1258. I have (Madrid, 1960), 447–93 at p. 487, quotes, but frus- not yet been able to track the source down..