The plague to which reference is made is the
Yellow Death, that carried off Maelgwn Gwynedd,
King of Wales, 547.
The invasion was not a military occupation; the settlers encountered no resistance. Every account we have represents them as landing in a country that was denuded of its population, except in the district of Vannes and on the Loire.
In or about 514 Riwhal, son of a Damnonian king, arrived with a large fleet on the north-east coast, and founded the colony and principality of Domnonia on the mainland.
One swarm came from Gwent, that is to say, Mon- mouthshire and Glamorganshire, where the Britons were hard pressed by the Saxons; and this Gwentian colony planted itself in the north-west of the Armorican peninsula, and called it Leon, or Lyonesse, after the Caerleon that had been abandoned.
This Leon was afterwards annexed to Domnonia in Brittany, so as to form a single kingdom.
Again another swarm took possession of the western seaboard, and called that Cornu, either after their Cornwall at home, or because Finisterre is, like that, a horn thrust forward into the Atlantic.
By degrees Vannes, itself a Gallo-Roman city, was enveloped by the new-comers, so that in 590 the Bishop Regalis complained that he was as it were imprisoned by them within the walls of his city. The Gallo-Roman prelate disliked these British invaders and their independent ways. S. Melanius of Rennes and S. Felix of Nantes shared his dislike. The prelates exercised much of the magisterial
