followers swarmed over Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Private Norman adventurers attempted to found a kingdom in Spain, and set up a monarchy in southern Italy strong enough to wrest Sicily from Islam [see pages 104–118]. Throughout the length and breadth of Europe, Norman warriors, priests, and poets made the French name famous. With the activity of the Normans first begins the preponderance of French ideas, customs, and language throughout the western world. [Sidenote: Brittany.] The old Celtic tribal state of Brittany had been almost overwhelmed by the Norman invasions, and had lost all its former prosperity. The most sacred shrines of the vast crowd of the Breton saints were pillaged and destroyed. At the best, the holy relics were transferred to Paris, to Orléans, or some other safe spot, far away from the marauding pagan. When Rolf got from Charles the Simple the duchy of Normandy, it is said that he asked for fresh land to plunder, while his followers learnt the arts of peace in their new home. In some vague way Charles granted him rights of suzerainty over Brittany. The Normans harried the land for another generation, and, as later in Wales and Ireland, many Norman chieftains settled down in the more fertile eastern districts of Upper Brittany. But a Celtic reaction followed. Led by Alan of the Twisted Beard (_barbe torte_), the native Bretons rose against their oppressors and made common cause with the Gallo-Roman peasantry against them. Alan became the founder of the county (afterwards duchy) of Brittany, a state half French and half Celtic, including besides ‘la Bretagne bretonnante’ of the western peninsula of Lower Brittany, the French-speaking lands of the Lower Loire and the Vilaine, with the purely French town of Rennes for its capital, and the equally French Nantes for its chief seaport. But despite the differences of tongue and custom, there was an essential unity of feeling in the new duchy, based on the disappearance both of the Celtic tribal system and the Gallo-Roman provincial system in favour of a feudalism that was common to Celt and Frenchman alike. Brittany, despite its composite origin, retained and still retains a marked type of local nationality, less active and energetic than the Norman, but more dogged, persevering, and enduring. When Alan Barbe-torte died in 952, Brittany had become an organised feudal state. [Sidenote: Flanders.]