The British refugees remind us of Æneas whom tradition represents as bringing with him his Lares and Penates to Italy. The Dumnonian immigrants brought with them the cult of their own insular saints. At a later period Brittany was able to make a return in kind. Pol Aurelian, Sampson, Columba, Meriadec, Corentin and others of Breton fame were received into the devotional system of Cornwall.
Not only were the Breton and Cornish people one in origin, tradition, language and religious sentiment, they were one in their Celtic ideal of the priestly and religious life. Theirs no less than that of the Welsh and Irish was the monastic ideal. Every Cornish place-name bearing the prefix _lan_, together with some place-names bearing the prefix _nan_, implies a monastic foundation. Lanisley, Landithy, Lanhydrock, Lanherne and Landegy, Nancekuke and Nansladron are a few examples which show that the quasi-monastic foundations of Domesday Book were only modified survivals of what was in the sixth century the accepted ecclesiastical type, a type which continued to exist apparently long after the parochial system made its appearance. A body of celibate clergy, living in community, observing a religious rule and entrusted with the care of souls over an ill-defined area will probably represent the normal, just as an anchorite living solitary with a view to the perfecting of his soul in holiness will represent the abnormal development of the monastic ideal. We have no means of estimating the number of monks whose segregation constituted a Cornish lan. It is probable that the communities were small as compared with those of Wales and Ireland. The great monastery of Bangor Iscoed on the Dee had, according to the Venerable Bede, at the beginning of the seventh century no less than 2100 monks. Clonard, in the county of Meath, founded by St. Finnian about the year 520, is said to have been larger. It may be extravagance on the part of the biographer of St. Patrick to state that the saint enjoined a levy of a tithe of the men as well as a tithe of the land for the support of the Church,[45] but there can be no doubt that a very considerable fraction of the Celtic population embraced the religious life. At the same time we shall probably arrive at a false economic inference unless we bear in mind the tripartite division of the monk’s day which required one-third of it to be spent in manual labour.