A Welshman resident in Jersey once told the author that he was able to carry on a Keltic conversation with the Breton peasant women who came over from the mainland for a fair; yet though the Welsh and Breton dialects are so little differentiated, there is no common consciousness whatever between the populations that speak them.
The Breton is as good a Frenchman as the Welshman is a “Britisher.” The Welshman is distinguished within the general British mass not so much by his language as by his Nonconformity, which he shares with an important class of the whole English-speaking population: the Breton is a clerical, like his French-speaking Vendéan neighbour, not because of his Keltic speech, but because he is a peasant [as the picture below suggests] and inhabits a district remote from the centres of French national life.
Why dialect, not language? Because a dialect can be a different language which is culturally or socially subordinate to a standard language. It does not have to be a variant of a language (was he thinking about a meta-Celtic?).
Breton traders travelled further than Jersey. From the early nineteenth century until the 1960s many toured England as onion sellers or johnnies. Seventy onion johnnies died when the steamer SS Hilda sank at Saint-Malo in 1905. There’s a photograph online of one in Renfrewshire. They were often from the area around Roscoff. They used to call on us on their bicycles in the London suburb where I grew up.
Of course, the whole of Europe was a pattern of itinerant traders, which could be mapped.
Secondary picture source: Telegraph
Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915
