A Breton Oral Tale of a Marginal Woman: Marc’harit Charlez and her Five Hundred Thieves

In this blog post, I wanted to briefly share with you a bone-chilling story of a criminal, Marc’harit Charlez, who spread terror amongst the inhabitants of Saint-Efflam, in northern Brittany.

The tale of this highwaywoman has been passed down to the twenty-first century through Breton oral tradition, and through folklorists who, throughout the nineteenth/early twentieth century, went from village to village to collect popular songs, sayings, and customs, and write them down to keep a record of collective memory in books or manuscripts. The oral stories of Brittany can be divided into sonioù, lyrical and joyful songs, and their dark counterparts, gwerzioù. The legend belongs to the latter.

Illustration by Christophe Rouil. (La Charlézenn, ed. Apogée, 2010)

How can gwerzioù be defined ?

According to François-Marie Luzel in the preface to the second volume of Gwerzioù Breiz-Izel, “Gwerziou [are] dark, fantastic, tragic songs, recounting supernatural apparitions, assassinations [...] and violence of all kinds” (p.vi).

The lives and misdeeds of bandits and outlaws therefore fall within the domain of gwerzioù as a recurring theme. The website Kan, which classifies all the known texts and melodies of the Breton oral tradition, lists no fewer than forty songs on this theme. The website brings together the songs in the form of a catalogue called the Malrieu Catalogue. Each song has its own reference number (called M-XXXXX). The reference of the song ‘Marc’harit Charlez’ (and all its different versions) is M-00161 on Kan.

Who is Marc’harit Charlez and what is her story ?

As the story has been passed down orally, there are several versions of the same gwerz (singular form of gwerzioù) with variations, which will be studied later. For now, I will stick to the version collected by Luzel and edited in the second volume of Gwerzioù Breiz-Izel (pp.74–79) to make the story clearer.

The events narrated in the gwerz take place in the region of Tregor, in northern Brittany, between the villages of Plestin-Les-Grèves, Saint-Efflam, Saint-Michel-en-Grève and Tréduder. According to the tale, a cruel woman named Marc’harit Charlez leads a troop of no less than five hundred bandits. To test the men’s strength and courage, she makes them drink a pint of human blood. Her authority is never once questioned in the songs; with the help of a whistle of golden silver, she can signal her thieves and put her enemies to flight. Marc’harit and her companions amass great wealth by pillaging and murdering merchants and travellers on the road between Lannion and Morlaix, accumulating a six-foot pile of white silver and yellow gold, which they bury in Coat-an-Drezen, the nearby wood — and the thieves’ hideout.

The King of Spain then sends five hundred soldiers to restore order on Breton land, but when the army arrives, the highwaywoman blows her golden silver whistle so hard that the moss falls from the trees and everyone flees. Although Marc’harit was reputed to be ruthless and extremely wealthy, even wealthier than the King of Spain, it is when she is offered the honour of being a godmother that she immediately becomes more human and allows herself to be lured into a trap.

One day, while the local lord, Keranglas, is in the forest with his page, Marc’harit accosts him and asks him to come to Coat-an-Drezen. The lord refuses, claiming to have more urgent business — namely, that his wife is giving birth to a child. He then offers her to become godmother to the child. Filled with a joy in stark contrast to her usual demeanour, Marc’harit accepts, mounts Keranglas’s horse, and rides to his abode. There, Keranglas uses a clever ruse to have her intercepted by an archer who takes away her knife and golden silver whistle, preventing her from calling her five hundred thieves.

The gwerz ends as Marc’harit Charlez is about to be hanged. As is customary, she confesses publicly before her death, and her testimony is bloodcurdling: she admits that she has murdered both her mother and father; she does not regret her mother’s death, but is nevertheless saddened that her bandits killed her father by accident, and that she has only realised this when she saw her father’s hat on the head of one of the bandits. She admits to having had a child, which she threw into a pyre ; she killed three pregnant women, and the only one who inspired her compassion was a young girl of fifteen who begged to be spared so that she could receive extreme unction and have her son christened. All the while during her confession, Marc’harit Charlez insists: “‘Wit-on da vea muntreres / Gant ma c’horf non ket pec’heres” (“Although I have committed murder / I am not a sinner in my body”).

Tradition has it that she buried her victims in the quicksand of the Lieue-de-Grève — and, when she climbed the scaffold, boasted that she had piled up more bones in the sand than there were in the ossuary of Morlaix.

Variations in the story of Marc’harit Charlez

Breton oral tradition oscillates between stability and variability, preservation and renewal: when elements do change, they create different variations of the song. As we are dealing with transformations, it is necessary to look at different versions of a song. That said, even when songs have been in circulation, we recognize them in spite of their variations. The core remains the same.

Kan lists eleven versions of gwerz ‘Marc’harit Charlez’. Here again, the various interpretations of the gwerzioù remain broadly the same, but there are a few notable differences: the heroine is sometimes called Marguerite Charlès (or in Breton Marc’harit Charlez), sometimes nicknamed Ar Charlezenn (Ar Jarlezen). The Lord of Keranglas is referred to as “Otrou Maner Koat an Drezen” (Penguern MS 89, p.146) or “Aotrou C’hoar C’hlaz” (Milin MS 1, p.36).

The geographical location also varies: the Penguern manuscript situates the story “between Trédrez and Morlaix” (MS 94, p.127), whereas La Villemarqué refers to “between Carhaix and Morlaix” (Revue de Bretagne, de Vendée [et d’Anjou] vol. 3, p. 439), or “between Pontou and Morlaix” in Milin’s version (MS 1, p.36). Coat-an-Drezenn, the place where the bandits set up their lair, sometimes becomes “Koat-Zouron” (Penguern MS 94). In this same version, Marc’harit’s victims are buried in the woods, and not in the quicksands as mentioned previously.

While in almost every version of the story Marc’harit immolated her only child, two versions — one captured in Milin MS 1 and the other in Penguern MS 89 — maintain that she had seven children with her husband and another seven with the brigands; the latter even says that she drowned all of them in a well.

What lesson is to be drawn from this gwerz ?

Whether Marc’harit Charlez really existed or not, she is an intriguing woman. While she stands outside social and moral codes, does that make her a free and liberated woman? Not really, since she imposes herself in a masculine environment through violence, not hesitating to kill women, even pregnant ones, and it is her pride that leads to her downfall. Does she deserve forgiveness, having slaughtered father, mother, child and other innocents?

Anatole le Braz, a Breton author, rewrote her story in Vieilles histoires du pays breton (1893) in which he subverts the character, making her a wild but fundamentally good woman who is only a victim of her fate and thus deserves redemption. It should be kept in mind, though, that Anatole le Braz was a Romantic writer, thus seeking to embellish the story.

The fact remains that the highwaywoman has not finished striking fear into the hearts of locals, if we are to believe a saying collected near Tréguier: “Ne ket eur zeblant vad / Klevet ar merc’hed o c’huitellad; / Gwech all amzer ar Charlezenn / A c’houitelle d’ar volerien”: “It is not good / To hear girls whistling; / In the past Ar Charlezenn / Whistled to call thieves” (Lucas Désiré, Histoires et légendes de la lieue de grève, p.15.)

Aliénor Fischer

Université de Bretagne Occidentale | University of Western Brittany

All translations from French or Breton to English are personal translations.