Breton

Yeah.

It's closely related to, yeah, Wale- uh, to Welsh and, and Breton.

Yeah, and it, and it sort of died out, but it's been resurrected by some very dedicated people, uh, around there.

And, uh, I, I didn't know they got their own idioms going on.

I was in France for the summer.

And I was with the family and they were Breton.

How do you say Breton?

Bretones.

And the grandfather came to stay.

And he was classic.

Despite living in France, only Francois spoke French.

The rest of the family spoke Breton, the language unique to the region.

Which is more than just a fun fact.

This will play a major role in the story.

And most of the people around the Picards also only spoke Breton.

It was a tight-knit community, the kind of place where kids roamed around unsupervised.

That's what two-year-old Pauline Picard was doing on the afternoon of April 6th.

Pauline didn't recognize her own siblings.

And when Walter Manny and the English arrived, she kissed him and his companions one after the other two or three times, and those who saw her might well say, Twas a valiant dame.

It would take too long to follow Froissart through the detailed account of skirmishes and sieges which went to make up the Breton War, but it can be easily seen how a disturbance like that was a godsend to the English king, who wanted nothing more than a good entry into France through the land of Brittany.

In 1344, actual war was renewed between England and France with the sending of the Count of Derby into Guyenne, but before Edward himself took active part in the struggle, he suffered a great loss in the death of his ally, Jacob van Artevelde, 1345.

Various causes led to his murder.

In the struggle with the English, he introduced the plan of avoiding battles, and so leaving the enemy to all the dangers of a hostile country with no great successes to compensate and to raise their spirits.

In the war, the king was ably assisted by one of the greatest soldiers of the age, who introduced into the French army some of the discipline and subordination which had been so lacking in the earlier campaigns.

Bertrand du Guesclin came of a good Breton stock, though his was a younger branch of the family, and in rather humble circumstances.

As a child he was so ugly, so rough, and so intractable, that though the eldest son, he was disliked by his parents.

They brought her home to Brittany, and on the surface it seemed like a miraculous reunion, But something wasn't right, and the girl was deeply withdrawn and fearful in a way Pauline hadn't been before.

More troubling still, she didn't speak a word of Breton, the regional dialect that would have been Pauline's first language.

What little she did speak was in French only, which according to some sources, was a language Pauline didn't yet speak at all.

And to get into the history a bit more, Breton is a Celtic language, much like Irish or Scottish, and during this period many rural families didn't speak French at all prior to formal schooling.

Her parents chalked it up to trauma and whatever ordeal the child had endured during her month-long absence.

It didn't make much sense, but they were happy, and the neighbors accepted the explanation too, at least for a while.

Yeah.

So what do we need? Manx, Breton, Irish.

We've had Welsh.

Obviously we've had English.

Mm-hmm.

Ulster Scots.

Breton Irish.

Scots.

Amy has spent years doing something remarkable.

She's reached back past Thomas Malory, past the great French romance cycles, past even Geoffrey of Monmouth, all the way into the oldest surviving scraps of Welsh poetry, Celtic saints' lives, Breton stone sculptures, Bronze Age bog finds.

In her recently published book, Arthur: A New Life- She explores the evolution of the legends of King Arthur, and what they meant to the people who first told and heard them before the centuries of sentiment and chivalric fantasy made them the stuff of Hollywood.

Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Amy.

But Malory is a 15th-century writer.

He brought us Le Morte d'Arthur, and it is really the blueprint for most modern retellings, and it gives us that high medieval, pointy-shoed, wimples and high headdresses, and knights in shining armor Arthur, that aesthetic that we're so familiar with.

So I thought, "Well, what if I spun a life of Arthur, a fictional life of Arthur from pre-Malory sources that reflected that world of Breton saints' lives and Anglo-Norman chronicles and Middle English Brut chronicles, early Welsh poetry? What if I did that and interspersed it with commentaries and just st- and stuck with the, the world of Arthur that I so loved?"

Yeah.

Diwallit amañ plij, diwallit amañ.

Hep brezhoneg [brezhoneg], hep brezhoneg [brezhoneg], hep brezhoneg, breizh izelañ.

Hep brezhoneg [brezhoneg], hep brezhoneg [brezhoneg], hep brezhoneg, n'eus ket maez ken.

Margalit ket seurt dil seurt led.

Margalit ket a deiz neuze.

Margalit ket lammer ma bugale.

Pe chuen a-balamañ vivien.

Hep brezhoneg [brezhoneg], hep brezhoneg [brezhoneg], hep brezhoneg, breizh izelañ.