THE FLAX-CRUSHER.

PART I.


Tréguier, my native place, has grown into a town out of an ancient
monastery founded at the close of the fifth 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 Tréguier 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 Léon,
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