century by St. Tudwal (or
Tual), one of the religious leaders of those great migratory movements
which introduced into the Armorican peninsula the name, the race, and
the religious institutions of the island of Britain. The predominating
characteristic of early British Christianity was its monastic
tendency, and there were no bishops, at all events among the
immigrants, whose first step, after landing in Brittany, the north
coast of which must at that time have been very sparsely inhabited,
was to build large monasteries, the abbots of which had the cure of
souls. A circle of from three to five miles in circumference, called
the _minihi_, was drawn around each monastery, and the territory
within it was invested with special privileges.

The monasteries were called in the Breton dialect _pabu_ after the
monks (_papae_), and in this way the monastery of Treguier was known
as _Pabu Tual_.

It was the religious centre of all that part of the peninsula which
stretches northward. Monasteries of a similar kind at St. Pol de Leon,
St. Brieuc, St. Malo, and St. Samson, near Dol, held a like position
upon the coast. They possessed, if one may so speak, their diocese,
for in these regions separated from the rest of Christianity nothing
was known of the power of Rome and of the religious institutions which
prevailed in the Latin world, or even in the Gallo-Roman towns of
Rennes and Nantes, hard by.

When Nomenoe, in the ninth century, reduced to something like a
regular organisation this half savage society of emigrants and created
the Duchy of Brittany by annexing to the territory in which the
Breton tongue was spoken, the Marches of Brittany, established by the
Carlovingians to hold in respect the forayers of the west, he found it
advisable to assimilate its religious organisation to that of the rest
of the world. He determined, therefore, that there should be bishops
on the northern coast, as there were at Rennes, Nantes, and Vannes,
and he accordingly converted into bishoprics the monasteries of St.
Pol de Leon, Treguier, St. Brieuc, St. Malo, and Dol. He would
have liked to have had an archbishop as well and so form a separate
ecclesiastical province, but, despite the well-intentioned devices
employed to prove that St. Samson had been a metropolitan prelate, the
grades of the Church universal were already apportioned, and the new
bishoprics were perforce compelled to attach themselves to the nearest
Gallo-Roman province at