Britonia

Bretoña

The traditional centre of the see is the parish of Santa María de Bretoña [gl], in the municipality of A Pastoriza in the north of the province of Lugo.^[41][42] García y García considered it beyond doubt that the see, once it had become a territorial diocese, was seated at Britonia or Britona, the modern Bretoña,^[18] and Livermore located the see's central monastery, the monastery of Maximus, there.^[20] Excavations carried out by Manuel Chamoso Lamas [es] in 1970 and 1971 found, on the site of a double-ditched hillfort (castro), the apse of a church surrounded by burials of the Visigothic period, together with the remains of adjoining buildings that may have housed a monastic community.^[42][43] Chamoso attributed these remains to the British occupation and the creation of the see, which he regarded as an important residential see that survived until the eighth century and was then replaced by San Martiño de Mondoñedo, in his view the former monastery of Maximus.^[3][44] García y García accepted the importance of the finds, and did not think the identification of the monastery of Maximus with San Martiño unfounded in principle, but he knew of no source that supported it, and rejected Gildas Bernier's argument for it from the architecture of the church there.^[42][45]

The present parish church of Bretoña dates from the eighteenth century. Its east wall bears a damaged inscription recording the dedication of a church to Santa María, which Bernier dated to the ninth century and García y García to the eleventh or twelfth; its last line, which is difficult to read, may indicate that the church adjoined a monastic community (ad fratres).^[46][47] Bretoña had belonged to the diocese of Mondoñedo since the early Middle Ages, and the record of one of two canonical visitations of the parish made from Mondoñedo in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries shows that its priest owned, besides the usual liturgical books, a manuscript of the customs of the 'black monks'. García y García noted that by that date the phrase denoted monks of Benedictine descent, and that any connection with the church's original monastic character is unknown.^[48][49]

The Parochiale Suevorum

The Parochiale Suevorum lists the sees of the Suevic kingdom and the churches dependent on each.^[50] García y García associated it with a council held at Lugo in 569. Its date is disputed, David placing it between 561 and 572 and Claude W. Barlow, the editor of the works of Martin of Braga, between 572 and 582, but it certainly belongs to the second half of the sixth century.^[51][52][53] The see of the Britons stands last in the list.^[52] David interpreted its entry as describing a monastic bishopric, in which an abbot-bishop resident in the monastery of Maximus exercised authority over the churches of the Britons and of Asturias, an arrangement he regarded as characteristically Celtic.^[54][55][56] Thompson thought this "overstated": in his view the church was Celtic in origin but by 569 had already adopted, or was adopting, the diocesan organisation of the rest of the kingdom, although he conceded that the entry remained obscure, and that its failure to name the churches might indicate something distinctive about the see.^[54][55][57] Alberto Ferreiro wrote that, while no one seriously disputed the Celtic origins of Britonia, it was generally agreed that its church had adapted quite rapidly to the Roman episcopal and diocesan system.^[33] García y García inferred from the entry that the Britons had settled, probably peacefully, in a thinly populated district that may still have been largely pagan, and that the pastoral care of their bishops extended to the native population as well as to the immigrants.^[58]

Nothing is known of the Maximus after whom the monastery was named, or of whether he was its founder, owner or dedicatee.^[54][52] The reading monasterium maximum 'the great monastery', which would remove the difficulty, is without foundation.^[54][20] Some writers have taken Maximus to be a Latin rendering of Mailoc, whose name has been said to correspond loosely to it in meaning;^[c][60] Young found no proof of the identification, and suggested that its popularity in Galicia might be due to the survival there of an "outdated idea of the 'Celtic Church'", in which a bishop should reside in a monastery.^[52] Livermore could not entirely exclude the possibility that the monastery was named after Maximus, the usurper whom the general Gerontius proclaimed emperor and who later took refuge among the Vandals, perhaps while they were in the region of Lugo, though he thought it unlikely.^[61]

Mailoc

The first bishop of the see whose name is known with certainty is Mailoc, who subscribed the acts of the Second Council of Braga in 572 as Mahiloc Britonensis ecclesiae episcopus hic gestis subscripsi 'I, Mahiloc, bishop of the Britonian church, have subscribed these acts'.^[7][62][63] His name is recorded in several forms, including Mahiloc, Mahiloch, Mialoch, Mayloc and Maylocus, and has been universally regarded as Brittonic.^{[62][33][64][d]} He signed last of the twelve bishops present, and last of the six from the province of Lugo, whose subscriptions were introduced with the words Item, ex concilio Lucensi 'likewise, from the council of Lugo'.^[66][67][68] Since precedence at Hispanic councils usually reflected seniority, Young inferred that Mailoc had either been consecrated recently or was regarded as a "second-class bishop" and placed last as a matter of course.^[69][70]

David proposed identifying Mailoc with Maliosus, who subscribed last at the First Council of Braga in 561, the acts of which record the names of the bishops but not their sees.^[71][72] The identification has been followed by García y García, Livermore and Ferreiro, but Antonio Tovar doubted it and others have been more cautious.^{[7][20][33][71][73]} Young noted that the variant forms of Maliosus in the manuscripts suggest a name unfamiliar to scribes, but that it would be difficult to reconcile his last place in 561 with Mailoc's last place a decade later, unless the bishop of the Britons was automatically placed last.^[71] Other identifications, with the Maximus of the Parochiale and with a Welsh saint of the same name whom Sabine Baring-Gould assigned to the sixth century, rest on no firm evidence, and Young concluded that only the reference of 572 is certain.^[74][75]

In modern Galicia Mailoc has become emblematic of the British settlement, and is commemorated in the names of streets and shops, in works of local history and in an album of Galician folk music. Young warned that his modern prestige had encouraged claims unsupported by the evidence, and noted that nothing in the sources indicates that Mailoc led the migration or that he was the see's first bishop.^[76]

From ethnic bishopric to diocese

Mailoc's episcopate coincided with the reforms of Martin of Braga, under whose leadership the practice of the Suebian church was being made uniform.^[11] One canon of the Second Council of Braga gave the metropolitan the right to announce the date of Easter to his suffragans; García y García noted that this might be connected with the differences between the Gallic and Hispanic reckoning of Easter reported by Gregory of Tours in 577, but might equally reflect the wider disagreement over Easter in the West.^[77][78] Young suggested that such standardisation "may have been painful for a church with distinctive traditions", and that a canon transferring the choice of bishops from their congregations to the bishops of the province might have been perceived by the Britons as a threat to their autonomy.^[79][80]

Young argued that the evidence of the Parochiale and of the manuscripts of the Second Council of Braga points to a change in the name of the see, and quite possibly in its nature, between 572 and 633. This, he suggested, was a transition not so much from a "Celtic" to a "Roman" organisation, in Ferreiro's terms, as from an "ethnic bishopric", whose bishop had charge of the Britons wherever they lived in the Suebian kingdom, or at least in the province of Lugo, to a conventional territorial diocese corresponding broadly to the modern diocese of Mondoñedo-Ferrol.^[81] García y García similarly described the church as passing from a personal to a territorial church, which kept for a time characteristics typical of their original British practices before being made uniformly part of the church of the rest of Iberia; he considered that the conversion of the Visigothic king Reccared to Catholicism in 589, after the Visigoths had annexed the Suebian kingdom, undoubtedly facilitated its absorption.^[82]

Bishops

After 572 the see disappears from the record for sixty years. Young pointed out that only one council, the Third Council of Toledo in 589, took place in the interval, so that the see's absence need mean no more than that it had no bishop at the time, or that its bishop was unable or unwilling to attend.^[83] Metopius, bishop of the ecclesia Brittaniensis, subscribed the acts of the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633; his position, fiftieth of seventy-nine bishops, suggests that he had been consecrated about 630.^[83][77][84] No bishop of the see attended the Sixth Council of Toledo in 638, although the north-west was well represented there, perhaps because Metopius had died and his successor had not yet been consecrated.^[85] That successor, Sonna, subscribed the acts of the Seventh Council of Toledo in 646, and was probably consecrated in or shortly after 638.^[85][77][86] At the Eighth Council of Toledo in 653 the bishop of the see, whose name appears in the manuscripts as Sonnani, Sosani and in other forms, was represented by the priest Mactericus; since Flórez he has usually been identified with Sonna, an identification that Young thought plausible.^[87][88][e] The last recorded bishop, Bela, attended the Third Council of Braga in 675. He signed fifth of eight bishops, which suggests that he had been consecrated after 668, and Young observed that if Sonna had been absent in 653 through a final illness or extreme old age, another, unrecorded bishop must have held the see between them.^{[87][91][92][f]}

The bishops' names

The names of the seventh-century bishops are among the most controversial features of the see's history, since they bear on whether it remained in British hands or was taken over, in Young's phrase, by Visigothic or Galaeco-Roman "carpet-baggers".^[95] Most scholars accept that Mailoc's name is Brittonic and Sonna's Germanic; Sonna was a common name in the Peninsula, borne among others by an Arian bishop of Mérida.^[96] The others are more difficult. Thompson thought Metopius a Roman name, and suggested that if the others were Germanic their bearers were Suebi or Visigoths; García y García and Livermore likewise regarded Mailoc as the only bishop of the see with a Celtic name.^{[97][54][28][98]} Ferreiro, endorsing Thompson's suspicion that all or most of the names were Suevic or Visigothic, took the absence of Celtic names after 572 as further evidence of "the short-lived nature of any Celtic elements in Galicia".^[13] On the other side, Léon Fleuriot claimed all five names as Brittonic in 1980, and in the early 1960s Chadwick and Melville Richards, consulted by J. N. Hillgarth, thought that Bela might be British, Chadwick also wondering whether Mactericus might be Celtic.^[97][99]

Young criticised both schools. He found no evidence for Thompson's assumptions except in the case of Sonna, and saw in Ferreiro's restatement of them "the gradual process whereby suspicions harden to certainties without any intervening evidence"; but he judged Fleuriot's treatment "short and dilettante", its cognates mostly lacking or unconvincing.^[97] Young could find no parallel for Metopius in the prosopographies of the Roman Empire, nor any Germanic antecedent; the only other occurrence of the name appears to be an abbot commemorated on 20 September in the Mozarabic liturgy, conceivably the same man.^[83][100] Mactericus has no obvious Germanic or Latin root, while Bela, which lacks Germanic parallels and whose final -a sits awkwardly with a Latin origin, has been compared with the Brittonic Beli, though Young cautioned that the resemblance might be no more than coincidence.^[101][102] Comparing the names of the known bishops of the province of Lugo, and of their representatives, from the sixth century to the eighth, Young found only three (Bela, Mactericus and Vinicibilis of Iria) that have no obvious Greek, Latin, Hebrew or Germanic origin and are unattested elsewhere in the Peninsula in the early Middle Ages. Two of the three belong to Britonia, and Metopius would make a third if the abbot of the Mozarabic liturgy is the same man as the bishop. Young presented the comparison not as a serious survey of Galician onomastics but as a demonstration that two, and perhaps three, of the see's names had not yet been adequately explained.^[103]

Canon 41 of the Fourth Council of Toledo

Canon 41 of the Fourth Council of Toledo (633), which Metopius attended, required all clerics, including lectors, to shave the whole of the upper part of the head, leaving only a circular crown below. It condemned the practice of the lectors in the parts of Gallaecia, who wore their hair long like laymen and shaved only a small circle on the crown of the head (non sicut hucusque in Gallaeciae partibus facere lectores videntur, qui prolixis ut laici comis in solo capitis apice modicum circulum tondunt), a custom that the council described as having formerly been that of heretics in Spain.^{[77][104][105]} Since the tonsure was among the grounds on which the churches of Britain and Ireland were regarded as heretical, historians since Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs have often connected the canon with the Britons of Gallaecia, and García y García thought that the tonsure it described did appear to reflect Celtic influence in parts of Galicia.^{[106][77][107]} Others saw in the canon a condemnation of Priscillianist or Arian practice.^[108][109]

Ferreiro challenged both interpretations in 1991. Surveying the Hispanic conciliar legislation on hair and the tonsure from the Second Council of Toledo in 527 onwards, he found that the canons of the councils of Braga, which Mailoc and Maliosus had attended, did not single out the churches of the Britons for correction, and that the Galician lectors of 633 were likened to laymen, not to heretics or to a divergent monastic tradition. Since the tonsure had never been an issue in the polemic against Priscillian, he regarded the charge of heresy as a rhetorical device for condemning practices that the council wished to suppress in the interest of uniformity throughout the Peninsula. He concluded that it was "farfetched" to regard the ecclesia Britoniensis as the channel through which Celtic tonsures reached the Galician church, and that their presence in Galicia could not be confirmed.^[110] Young found Ferreiro's position interesting, wondering whether anyone would have connected the canon with the Britons but for its reference to Gallaecia, but questioned his reading of the word lector, which, he suggested, might have been used disparagingly of the "half-priests" of the British church; he acknowledged that this was no more than a possibility, and that the use of lector in the opening sentence of the canon might tell against it.^[111]

Contacts with Britain and Ireland

Isidore of Seville also attended the Fourth Council of Toledo, and Young suggested that the Britons of Gallaecia, whether at the council or at other times, might have been one of the channels through which Isidore's works reached Britain and Ireland, although there is no proof of this and other routes, including transmission through Francia, are possible. Hillgarth, who had once regarded Britonia as a very probable route of transmission, later placed less weight on it.^[112][113] García y García likewise considered it plausible, though he could offer no conclusive proof, that the British monasteries of Galicia transmitted Galician and Visigothic writings to Celtic monasteries, citing the treatise De pascha, falsely attributed to Martin of Braga, which is found in ninth-century Irish manuscripts.^[114][115] Young accepted that the treatise is to be linked with the north-west of the Peninsula, though it is unlikely to be Martin's work.^[116][117]

Oviedo and Mondoñedo

After the Muslim conquest the territory attributed to Britonia was divided between the sees of Oviedo and Mondoñedo, and the see itself was not restored. According to García y García, the diocese of Oviedo, created in the capital of the Asturian kingdom at the expense of the diocese of Astorga, could absorb only the Asturian churches of Britonia, while its Galician territory formed a new bishopric that eventually took the name of Mondoñedo.^[124] The see of Mondoñedo was later seated at San Martiño de Mondoñedo, from which it moved in the twelfth century to the present town of Mondoñedo, apart from a brief period at Ribadeo in 1182.^[125]

The name of Britonia was drawn into the rivalries of the successor sees. A royal charter dated 830 purports to make and confirm the church of Oviedo pro sede Britoniense, quae ab Ismaelitis est destructa et inhabitabilis facta 'in place of the Britonian see, which has been destroyed by the Ishmaelites and made uninhabitable', and a manuscript of the Parochiale transcribed by García de Loaysa ends with the words Ovetum, vel Britonia, exempta a Gallaeciae Bracara 'Oviedo, or Britonia, exempt from Braga of Gallaecia'.^[126][127] García y García regarded the charter as suspect, and attributed the identification of Oviedo with Britonia to a version devised at Lugo to curb Oviedo's metropolitan pretensions, according to which the bishop of Britonia had taken refuge at Oviedo when his see was destroyed and Oviedo had inherited his title. The forged councils of Oviedo associated with Bishop Pelayo (about 1100) further entangled the see in the disputes over Oviedo's territory and its exemption from Lugo and Braga.^[128][129] Young argued that in the documents of Oviedo Britonia served as a cipher for Mondoñedo, Oviedo's western neighbour, so that the extinct diocese had a "strange afterlife" as a virtual bishopric of the Asturian forgers.^{[130][131][g]}

Theodesindus

A bishop named Theodesindus, sometimes styled Britoniensis, appears in several documents of the later ninth century: charters of 857 and 896, an account of the consecration of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in 899, and the acts of a supposed council of Oviedo of about 900.^[134][135] García y García noted that he appears in the acts of an alleged council of Oviedo of 872 or 873 as distinct from the bishop of Oviedo, and in those of the council of 900 as bishop of both Dumio and Britonia, but regarded the councils of Oviedo as of very doubtful authenticity.^[136][137] Young argued that all the documents in which Theodesindus appears were written in, or influenced by, the scriptorium of Oviedo, which used forgery to justify its archiepiscopal ambitions and to disguise its recent origins. Since Theodesindus never appears alongside a bishop of Mondoñedo, Young concluded that Britonia in these documents stood for Mondoñedo, and that Theodesindus should be dismissed from the history of the see.^[138] The emendation of his name to Rudesindus, found in Joseph Loth and accepted by García y García, Young regarded as unnecessary: a nineteenth-century attempt to identify him with the contemporary bishop of Mondoñedo, Rosendo I (877–907).^{[139][125][140]}

Later lists and the Division of Wamba

The see continued to appear in lists as a dependency of Braga, in the forms Britona, Britonia and Britonacensis sedes, from 962 onwards.^[141][142] A privilege of Pope Callixtus II dated 20 June 1121, addressed to Archbishop Pelayo of Braga and confirming Paschal II's restoration of the metropolitan see, assigned to Braga as suffragans the sees of Astorga, Tui, Mondoñedo, Ourense, Porto and Coimbra and the episcopal cities of Viseu, Lamego, Idanha and Britonia; the same list, with the addition of Dumio and Iria, recurs in a claim put forward by Braga in 1186. García y García thought that Britonia was included not because it still functioned as a see, but in case it might one day be restored.^[143][144]

The eleventh- and twelfth-century forms of the name in all likelihood derive from recensions of the so-called Division of Wamba (Hitación de Wamba), which purports to fix the boundaries of the Hispanic dioceses and to have been issued by the Visigothic king Wamba at a council of Toledo in 675, but is a forgery of the eleventh or twelfth century by a cleric of Osma or Toledo. It assigns to Britonia boundaries that cannot now be identified, since the place-names are invented or corrupt (Britonia teneat de Busa usque Torrentes, de Coba usque Tobellam), Busa marking the boundary with Lugo and Torrentes that with Astorga.^[48][145] A privilege of Alfonso VII of 1156 still referred to the place as Britonia.^[141][146]

Later references to Britons

The settlement is usually said to have left behind, in Young's words, only "a handful of short notices and a single place name", Bretoña; Young argued that it may have left further traces, including a hamlet named Bretonia, also in the province of Lugo, and a second Bretoña in the province of Pontevedra.^[147] He drew particular attention to a charter of 1233 from the monastery of Meira, concerning property at Lousada in the province of Lugo, which refers to hominibus illis qui vocabantur britones 'those men who were called britones'. Young thought the term likely to be connected with the British settlement, since the charter comes from the very region that the migrants had settled; the monastery's charters, however, remain unedited.^{[148][149][h]}