ARMORICA (from Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia)

In Roman times, the Tractus Armoricanus referred to

the coastal region from roughly the mouth of the river

Seine (Sequana) to the Loire (Liger), west of the lands

of the Belgae and north of those of the Aquitani,

hence approximately coterminous with latter-day Normandy

and Brittany combined. The earliest surviving

examples of the name are two occurrences in Caesar’s

De Bello Gallico (5.53, 7.75), both times used as an adjective

in the phrase civitates Armoricae ‘the Armorican

tribes’. In the second instance, he explains the term to

mean ‘the tribal lands touching the ocean’ and lists these

as including the Curiosolites, R{dones, Ambibari¼,

Caletes, Osism¼, Venet¼, Lemov¼ces, and Venell¼. With

the exception of the third civitas, these can be located,

showing that Caesar understood Armorican Gaul to

extend from the north-eastern shore of the lower Seine

to the southern shore of the Loire estuary. Elsewhere

in De Bello Gallico (3.7–11, 16–18), Caesar discusses the

strongest of the Armorican tribes, the Veneti, whose

name survives in Modern Breton Gwened, French

Vannes, a city and diocese in south central Brittany.

The Veneti dominated the other coastal tribes, had an

extensive maritime trading network, which included

Britain, and sailed the ocean routes in high-prowed ships

built of massive oaken planks and fitted with leather

sails. When Caesar faced the Venetic forces in a great

naval battle in 56 bc, these included their subject tribes

in Gaul and auxiliaries called in from Britain, a point

which helped to justify Caesar’s campaigns across the

Channel in the following two years.

Place-name and other fragmentary evidence implies

that the Gaulish language survived in parts of Armorica

through the Roman period and eventually contributed

names, words, and possibly other linguistic features to

Breton. The Plumergat stone (Wendy Davies et al.,

Inscriptions of Early Medieval Brittany M8) in south central

Brittany shows an interesting microcosm of cultural

change and continuity—a dressed stone of the pre-

Roman Iron Age with an Old Breton name RIMOETE

on one side and a late Gaulish inscription of c. ad 300

on the other: U [ . . ]PQS R I [ . . ]OUT ATEREBO

ATEMINTOBO DURNBOGIAPO ‘U. has granted [this]

for the memories of the male ancestors by means of

hand carvings’.

In the later Roman period, Armorica was more than

once controlled by regional emperors, backed by the

Romano-British garrison, whose authority was not

recognized in Italy or the East—for example, Carausius

and Allectus (287–96), Maximus (Macsen Wledig;

383–8), and Constantine III (407–9). Intermittently

from the late 3rd century, Armorica slipped out of

Roman control altogether, as a result of a series of

uprisings by bacaudae (rebel bands made up of peasants

and disaffected soldiers). The Byzantine historian

Zosimus (6.5.2) relates concerning the events of ad 409:

. . . the barbarians from beyond the Rhine overran

everything at will and reduced the inhabitants of

the British Island and some of the peoples in Gaul

to the necessity of rebelling from the Roman Empire

and of living by themselves, no longer obeying

the Romans’ laws. The Britons, therefore, taking up

arms and fighting on their own behalf, freed the

cities from the barbarians who were pressing upon

them; and the whole of Armorica and other provinces

of Gaul, imitating the Britons, freed themselves

in the same way, expelling Roman officials

and establishing a sovereign constitution on their own

authority . . . (Trans. Thompson, Britannia 8.306).

A shaky Roman rule was re-established in 417 and

lapsed more than once before the mid-5th century. By

the 460s, we find a ‘king of the Britons’ with the

Brythonic name or title Rigotamus ‘supreme king’

and 12,000 men on the Loire, and Gallo-Roman

Armorica belongs to the past.

The name Armorica is Celtic, deriving from the

preposition are < older ari ‘before, in front of ’, mori-

‘sea’ and the feminine adjectival suffix in -k\, thus

‘country facing the sea’, specifically the north Atlantic.

Compare Modern Breton Arvor ‘regions by the sea’,

Argoad ‘inland regions’ (lit. ‘before the wood’), and

Welsh arfor-dir ‘coast’. Middle Breton Arvoric is probably

a learned adaptation from Latin. The more archaic

spelling Aremorica is also attested in classical Latin,

though it does not appear in the earlier Latin sources.

Latin dictionaries sometimes mark the -{- as long, but

this is unhistorical. The loss of the unstressed short e

had occurred in spoken Gaulish before Caesar’s time

and is an example of an early Celtic ‘syncope’ or loss

of unaccented internal syllables of the sort that later

became systematic in both Goidelic and Brythonic.

Armorica is sometimes used in modern writing as a

place-name roughly synonymous with Brittany (Breizh),

in particular with reference to the region in Roman

and prehistoric times or referring to it physically and

geographically without reference to a particular language

or culture, hence ‘the Armorican peninsula’.

Beginning with the 6th-century Historia Francorum of

Gregory of Tours, Britannia is the regular name for the

peninsula in Latin sources. In present-day discourse,

the region is more usually called Brittany with reference

to medieval and modern times. In medieval Latin,

Armorica was sometimes still used (as in Historia

Brittonum) to make it clear that maritime northwest

Gaul was meant, as opposed to Britannia ‘Britain’

or ‘Wales’. Similarly, the French adjective Armoricaine

is useful, as Bretagne means ambiguously both Britain

and Brittany.

further reading

Belgae; Breizh; Breton; Britain; Brythonic; Caesar; civitas;

Gaul; Gaulish; Goidelic; Gwened; Historia Brittonum;

Iron Age; Macsen Wledig; Rigotamus; Sequana;

Cunliffe, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 1.39–68; Wendy Davies

et al., Inscriptions of Early Medieval Brittany; Fleuriot, Les origines

de la Bretagne; Galliou, L’Armorique romaine; Giot et al., Préhistoire

de la Bretagne; Giot et al., Protohistoire de la Bretagne; Higham,

Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons 71–3; Michael E. Jones, End

of Roman Britain 249–53; Thompson, Britannia 8.303–18;

Thompson, Classical Quarterly 76 [new ser. 32] 445–62.

JTK