Castennec Hill (ancient Sulis/Sulim), Oppidum of the Osismii
Hermitage of St. Gildas at Castennec
Whenever we treat of Brittany it is important we bear in mind that it was subject to heavy migration from Britain in the 5th-6th centuries. And this means that traditions and place-names could be brought from the latter island to the Gallic pennisula.
Still, I appear to have discovered (?) something odd about a well-known Gildas/Gueltas site in Morbihan.
According to legend, in 538 Gildas and a companion monk found an oratory or hermitage in a cave next to Castennec. Why is this interesting? Well, Castennec Hill is accepted as the location of a Sulis or Sulim hilltop fortification, thought to be an oppidum of the Osismii tribe. The name is this hillfort preserves the goddess name Sulis, who was the tutelary deity of Aquae Sulis in Britain.
There are a great many Websites that discuss this location and St. Gildas' connection with it. What follows is just a quick sampling:
Now, the British Aquae Sulis became known as Bath to the English, and our best linguists are sure that Gildas's Badonicus = Bathum. [1] The same is true of the later Welsh form of the name, Caer Faddon. This is so despite an apparent traditional identification of Badon in the Welsh Annals and The Dream of Rhonabwy with the Liddington Badbury, something I've written about elsewhere in considerable detail. The has always existed the possibility that a Badon/Bathum could have been confused at some point with the Baddan- of Baddanbyrig. Or vice-versa.
What I'm a bit surprised about is that no one seems to have suggested (?) that given a Gildas at a Sulis site - a site on a fortified hill - that it is quite possible the Bath name from the British Aquae Sulis had at some point in the transmission through the centuries of Gildas's RUIN OF BRITAIN been transferred to the Breton Sulis location. This would have been a fairly natural legendary development, I would think. And if this is the way Badonicus came to be, then the original site of the Badon battle was neither Bath nor Badbury in Britain, but Castennec Hill in Brittany.
I've before suggested that the English name Bathum may have been used in preference to the pagan-charged Sulis.
We may recall that Brittany, like Britain, had been subjected to heavy Saxon raids. And, indeed, during the later Roman period Armorica comprised the Tractus Armoricanus et Nervicanus under the command of a dux responsible for defending the peninsula against seaborne Germanic invaders. Saxons were the chief foe.
On the map at the top of the page we can see another interesting name next to Gueltas and Castennec - Gamblen. While the etymology of this place-name is not the same as that of the Camlan of Welsh sources (my research, not yet confirmed, shows it to be from the same initial element, meaning 'crooked', but a second derived from the Celtic word *lindo- for 'pool'), it is interesting to find such a river-bend name so close to what may have been the original Badon hillfort.
Some time ago I had written about an unusual Breton "Badon" place-name in the same region:
When I wrote that piece I had no idea about the presence of the nearby Sulis oppidum.
There is really no "safe" conclusion to draw from all this. To begin with, the identification of the Breton St. Gueltas and St. Gildas has always been somewhat suspect. And, again, we have the problem of British immigrants bringing their own place-names and traditional histories or folktales into Brittany. But it is hard to ignore the obvious correspondence that exists between two confirmed ancient sites dedicated to the worship of Sulis and their connection with St. Gildas.
[1]
Dr. Graham Isaac with an authoritative discussion of the Badon place-name (via personal correspondence):
"Remember in all that follows that both the -d - in Badon and the -th- in OE Bathum are pronounced like th in 'bathe' and Modern Welsh - dd-. Remember also that in Old English spelling, the letters thorn and the crossed d are interchangeable in many positions: that is variation in spelling, not in sound, and has no significance for linguistic arguments.
It is curious that a number of commentators have been happy to posit a 'British' or 'Celtic' form Badon. The reason seems to be summed up succinctly by Tolstoy in the 1961 article (p. 145):
'It is obviously impossible that Gildas should have given a Saxon name for a British locality'.
Why? I see no reason at all in the world why he should not do so (begging the question as to what, exactly, is the meaning of 'British locality' here; Gildas is just talking about a hill). This then becomes the chief crutch of the argument, as shown on p. 147 of Tolstoy's article: 'But that there was a Celtic name ‘Badon’ we know from the very passage in Gildas under discussion'.
But that is just circular: ' "Badon" must be "Celtic" because Gildas only uses "Celtic" names'. This is no argument. What would have to be shown is that 'Badon' is a regular reflex of a securely attested 'Celtic' word. This is a matter of empirical detail and is easily tested; we have vast resources to tell us what was and was not a 'Celtic' word. And there is nothing like 'Badon'.
So what do we do? Do we just say that 'Badon' must be Celtic because Gildas uses it? That gets us nowhere.
So what of the relationships between aet Bathum - Badon - Baddanbyrig? The crucial point is just that OE Bathum and the Late British / very early Welsh Badon we are talking about both have the soft -th- sound of 'bathe' and Mod.Welsh 'Baddon'. Baddanbyrig, however, has a long d-sound like -d d- in 'bad day'. Both languages, early OE and Late British, had both the d-sound and the soft th-sound. So:
1) If the English had taken over British (hy-pothetical and actually non-existent) *Badon (*Din Badon or something), they would have made it *Bathanbyrig or the like, and the modern names of these places would be something like *Bathbury.
2) If the British had taken over OE Baddanbyrig, they would have kept the d-sound, and Gildas would have written 'Batonicus mons', and Annales Cambriae would have 'bellum Batonis', etc. (where the -t- is the regular early SPELLING of the sound -d-; always keep your conceptions of spellings and your conceptions of sounds separate; one of the classic errors of the untrained is to fail to distinguish these).
I imagine if that were the case we would have no hesitation is identifying 'Baton' with a Badbury place. But the d-sound and the soft th -sound are not interchangeable. It is either the one or the other, and in fact it is the soft th -sound that is in 'Badon', and that makes it equivalent to Bathum, not Baddanbyrig.
(That applies to the sounds. On the other hand there is nothing strange about the British making Bad-ON out of OE Bath -UM. There was nothing in the Late British/early Welsh language which corresponded to the dative plural ending - UM of OE, so it was natural for the Britons to substitute the common British suffix - ON for the very un-British OE suffix -UM: this is not a substitution of SOUNDS, but of ENDINGS, which is quite a different matter. That Gildas then makes an unproblematic Latin adjective with -icus out of this does not require comment.)
To conclude:
1) There is no reason in the world why a 6thcentury British author should not refer to a place in Britain by its OE name.
2) There was no 'British' or 'Celtic' *Badon.
3) 'Badon' does not correspond linguistically with OE Baddanbyrig.
4) 'Badon' is the predictably regular Late British / early Welsh borrowing of OE Bathum.
Final note: the fact that later OE sources occasionally call Bath 'Badon' is just a symptom of the book-learning of the authors using the form. Gildas was a widely read and highly respected author, and Badon(-is) (from Gildas's adjective Badon -icus) will quickly and unproblematically have become the standard book-form (i.e. pri-marily Latin form) for the name of Bath. Again, all attempts to gain some sort of linguistic mileage from the apparent, but illusory, OE variation between Bathum and Badon are vacuous."
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