The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts. Rodney Castleden
when he arrived in 680.
DIODORUS SICULUS
A Greek historian who lived in the first century BC. He was born in Sicily and later lived in Rome, where he collected the materials for his huge history of the world in 40 books. Some of our most reliable information about the state of Europe in the late Iron Age, not least about the Celts, comes from Diodorus.
DIVICIACUS
A Druid of whom Julius Caesar had personal knowledge. As well as being a Druid, Diviciacus was chief of the Aedui tribe and brother of Dumnorix. He went on a diplomatic mission to Rome, where he got to know Cicero, who described how Diviciacus would predict the future by augury. Cicero referred to him as a Druid.
Diviciacus helped Caesar enormously in his conquest of Gaul by persuading some of the tribes to collaborate with Rome. Caesar depended on him to form alliances that enabled him to conquer Gaul more smoothly and rapidly.
Caesar must have known that Diviciacus was a Druid, yet he does not mention it. But he did remember him as “the greatest man in Gaul”—a leader who had held sway among Gallic tribes and was also influential in Britain.
DOCCO
Also known as Kyngar of Congresbury, Docco was the son of Luciria and the emperor Constatinus III. He was born in 400–10. He was a cleric who traveled from Italy to found several major early monastic houses in Britain, including Congresbury in Somerset. The site was on the estate of a Roman villa, though the villa itself had by then gone.
Docco also crossed the Severn Sea to Glamorgan to found a monastery in the territory of Paulentus Penychen and visited Ireland, Aran, Rome, and Jerusalem. His monastery at St. Kew is the earliest known Cornish monastery—it was already well-established when St. Samson visited it in 540.
Docco died in Jerusalem in 473 and his body was buried at Congresbury.
Docco, David, and Gildas are the only British churchmen to be mentioned in the Irish Annals.
DRESS
In the first century BC, Posidonius wrote this colorful description of the Celts:
To the frankness and high-spiritedness of their temperament must be added the traits of childish boastfulness and love of decoration. They wear ornaments of gold, torcs on their necks, and bracelets on their arms and wrists, whilst people of high rank wear dyed garments besprinkled with gold.
The torc was a neck ring that was a mark of status of freeborn Celtic men (and sometimes women). Rich people wore gold torcs, which were flexible enough to be bent and sprung back around the wearer’s neck. Poorer people wore torcs of iron or bronze, which had movable sections that could be pegged into place. The huge difference in wealth between rich and poor is clear from the finds of torcs.
The Snettisham hoard, found in Norfolk between 1948 and 1968, includes a rich array of gold torcs dating from perhaps AD 50, and it shows how incredibly rich the Iceni nobility were compared with the ordinary people. The magnificent Snettisham torc is fine enough to have been a piece of royal regalia, and it may have been worn by the kings and queens of the Iceni: Snettisham was in their territory (See Boudicca).
Torcs were worn by the aristocracy throughout the world of the Celtic west, even in Galicia.
DRUIDS
See Religion: Druids.
DUBNOVELLAUNUS
See Addedomarus, Cunobelin.
DUBRICIUS
Dyfrig, also known by his Latinized name, Dubricius, was a Dark Age saint. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s glamorized version of King Arthur, after Uther’s death, Britons gathered “from their various provinces in the town of Silchester and suggested to Dubricius, the Archbishop of the City of the Legions [Caerleon], that he should crown Arthur, the son of Uther, as their king.”
Dubricius was a real historical figure living in sixth-century post-Roman Britain, and the only bishop to be attached to a city. Today that is normal, but in the Dark Ages bishops were more often unattached. Bishops were usually creatures of their kings, and very much personal appointments. Dubricius consecrated Samson as bishop, apparently as his successor.
DUMNORIX
A chief of the Aedui tribe in Gaul in the first century BC. He fought vigorously against any Gaulish alliance with Julius Caesar. In 54 BC, Caesar chose him as one of the hostages he would take with him on his expedition to Britain, fearing that he would cause trouble if left behind in Gaul. When he failed to argue his way out of this, on the grounds that he suffered from sea-sickness, Dumnorix tried to escape from Caesar’s camp. Caesar sent cavalry after him. Dumnorix was killed, shouting that he was “a free man and a citizen of a free state” (see also Diviciacus).
DUNAWT
See Pabo Post Prydain.
DURATIOS
See Pictones.
DUROTRIGES
A fiercely independent Celtic tribe who resisted the Roman conquest. Their territory coincided with the modern English county of Dorset. Their capital was the magnificent hillfort of Maiden Castle, which was attacked by the Romans and then replaced by a new open town (Dorchester) on lower ground nearby.
DWELLINGS
The standard dwelling in the Iron Age was a stoutly built round wooden hut with a conical thatched roof and a porch opening to the south-east.
Chysauster in Cornwall, inhabited from about 50 BC to AD 300, was built in a much more ancient tradition. The irregular, fetus-shaped houses with thick, stone-built walls were much more like the stone houses built in Neolithic Orkney hundreds of years earlier. The design was probably partly remembered from an earlier age, and partly a response to a windy, maritime environment.
At Jarlshof in Shetland, the communal memory linking the centuries is made visible. Jarlshof was first inhabited in the Neolithic and continued as a village through the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age, with interruptions when it was engulfed by sand.
Like the Jarlshof houses, the houses at Chysauster were in effect stoutly walled courtyards designed to keep out the wind, with rooms opening out of them. Once there were walled fields round Chysauster, the walls dating from the same time as the village.