Charlemagne in the Clos-Poulet

Extract

In that stretch of country that may be described as lying between France and Brittany—the pays gallot —there is a still narrower district that encircles the Three Towns (Saint-Malo, Saint-Servan, and Dinard) and lies along the banks of the Rance. It is known in the local speech as the Clos-Poulet, a quaint phrase with a ring of the patois about it, and like the patois itself venerable and significant; for it has a meaning that is plainly declared by the name of a village within its borders, Saint-Pierre-Marc-en-poulet, or in the Latin Sanctus Petrus de Marco in pago Aletho.

Now this ‘Aleth’ deserves at least a word in passing. Very long ago—I cannot give a precise date, but it was in ‘the time of the Saints’ when they crossed the water (in stone boats or not, as you may prefer) as missioners to the folk of Armorica : when Saint-Malo found his way to Saint-Aaron’s hermitage on the rock then rising in the midst of forests that was later to be called after him; when men of our own race, our own blood, Scots, Welsh, and Irish, came here to conquer, to teach, and to pray, saints and fighting-men, an endless list of amazing names, Coulfmith, Armaël, Cadocanam, Jagu, Maclou—somewhere in the fifth or sixth century, Aleth came first into being. Very little is known of that first settlement, but it was the home of one of the many early bishops or missioners, more important than the rock of Malo to which some centuries later the Bishop and his Chapter removed. And somewhere very early in the ninth century it emerges from the shadows, if not into the full light of history, at least into the daybreak of a clear tradition.