Church Magazine September 2020mk2

young Queen Mary of Scots embarked for home after her childhood spent in La
Belle France. All around in the neighbouring “pays,” blessed with an extremely
mild and even warm climate all the year round, where centuries of laborious
industry and intensive cultivation have produced of the once shallow and rockcumbered
soil, rich tracts of land worth its weight in gold, the Roscoff
“cultivateurs” annually raise thousands of tons of the homely health-giving
vegetable.
Here for many generations has existed an almost Communistic system of cooperation
in industry. All middlemen are eliminated by the adoption of family
co-operation in every operation—from the sowing of the onion seeds to the
book-keeping and division of the proceeds of the sale of the vegetables. A
“famille” may consist of 150 or more members, all generally relations—
brothers, cousins, second cousins, and to the fifth- and sixth-degree German. It
farms and owns the land—from 15 to 50 acres—under intensive cultivation. All
the tools, drying racks, and sheds necessary for the cultivation and storage of
the crop belong to the “famille,” which owns the stout ketches and topsail
schooners in which the onions are shipped to England and Scotland. The
“famille” also provides and finances the seamen of the onion fleet, and
furnishes from its members the “equipe” or gang of nine or ten young
salesmen—the “Onion Johnnys”—attached to each onion boat.
These last leave Brittany for these islands with the first of the season’s crop in
late July or in August of each year. These Breton lads are racially more truly
Britons than we ourselves. They are the direct descendants of that mighty
exodus which settled in Brittany and Vendée 3 , from the Dorset, Devon, and
Cornish coasts at the time when the heathen hordes were sweeping England
with fire and sword all along the Saxon shore after the departure of the Roman
legions 4 . To many of them the French language is a foreign one, for their own
is the old Breton tongue, once universal in England and still almost so in Wales.
Roscoff and Morlaix men have often told the writer that in Wales they
perfectly understand the Cymric tongue and are perfectly understood by the
Welsh in their own Breton. Wales, in fact, is their favourite part of Britain.
The onion-seller’s “equipe” or gang of eight or ten consists generally of five or
six boys or youths and three or four elder men, who act as section leaders in
separate districts. All the gang work from a common centre—some seaport
where the ketch or schooner discharges, and where the bulk cargo is stored
and strung on the familiar straw cunches [= ?] which hang from “Onion
Johnny’s” shoulder-pole. One of the older men acts as advance agent for the
equipe, and hires storage sheds and secures lodgings for the gang. Sometimes
he purchases a horse and cart, which are resold at the end of the season—
seldom, it may be stated, at a loss, for the Breton is a born “commercant”