urth century A. D., the men of England were hard pressed
by the Picts and Scots from the northern border, and were helped in
their need by the Teutons. When this tribe saw the fair country of
the Britons they decided to hold it for themselves. After they had
driven out the northern tribes, in the fifth century, when King
Arthur was reigning in Cornwall, they drove out those whose cause
they had fought. So the Britons were scattered to the mountains of
Wales, to Cornwall, and across the Channel to Armorica, a part of
France, which they named Brittany after their home-land. In lower
Brittany, out of the zone of French influence, a language something
like Welsh or old British is still spoken, and many of the Celtic
beliefs were retained more untouched than in Britain, not clear of
paganism till the seventeenth century. Here especially did
Christianity have to adapt the old belief to her own ends.

Gaul, as we have seen from Caesar's account, had been one of the
chief seats of Druidical belief. The religious center was Carnutes,
now Chartrain. The rites of sacrifice survived in the same forms as
in the British Isles. In the fields of Deux-Sevres fires were built
of stubble, ferns, leaves, and thorns, and the people danced about
them and burned nuts in them. On St. John's Day animals were burned
in the fires to secure the cattle from disease. This was continued
down into the seventeenth century.

The pagan belief that lasted the longest in Brittany, and is by no
means dead yet, was the cult of the dead. Caesar said that the Celts
of Gaul traced their ancestry from the god of death, whom he called
Dispater. Now figures of l'Ankou, a skeleton armed with a spear,
can be seen in most villages of Brittany. This mindfulness of
death was strengthened by the sight of the prehistoric cairns of
stones on hilltops, the ancient altars of the Druids, and dolmens,
formed of one flat rock resting like a roof on two others set up on
end with a space between them, ancient tombs; and by the Bretons
being cut off from the rest of France by the nature of the country,
and shut in among the uplands, black and misty in November, and
blown over by chill Atlantic winds. Under a seeming dull
indifference and melancholy the Bretons conceal a lively
imagination, and no place has a greater wealth of legendary
literature.

What fairies, dwarfs, pixies, and the like are to the Celts of
other places, the spirits of the dead are to the Celts of Brittany