Rodney Castleden - The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts

Docco died in Jerusalem in 473 and his body was buried at Congresbury.

Docco, David, and Gildasare the only British churchmen to be mentioned in the Irish Annals.

In the first century BC, Posidoniuswrote 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 goldtorcs, which were flexible enough to be bent and sprung back around the wearer’s neck. Poorer peoplewore 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 Iceninobility 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.

See Religion: Druids .

See Addedomarus , Cunobelin .

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 Samsonas bishop, apparently as his successor.

A chief of the Aedui tribein 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 ).

See Pabo Post Prydain .

See Pictones .

A fiercely independent Celtic tribewho 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.

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 Jarlshofin Shetland, the communal memorylinking 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. Thanks to an insane EU subsidy policy, these were plowed up some time ago to make a rocky landscape that is no use for arable or pasture, and its archeology has been destroyed too.

The brochs of Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles of Scotland represent a similar design approach—rooms ranged around a courtyard—but carried up into the air to make imposing towers. The finest is the Broch of Mousa, which has survived almost intact because of its inaccessibility on an uninhabited island off the east coast of Shetland. Built in the first century BC and inhabited until about AD 150, it soars 40 feet (10m) above the shore in a graceful drum shape. Timber ranges once lined the interior walls, with galleries at various levels, reached by stone staircases built within the thickness of the outer wall. There was a single door and no windows; it must have been very dark and dank inside.

The hearth was the centerpiece of every dwelling and it had the status of an altarin domestic cult. This custom may have had its roots in the Neolithic; the layout of the stone houses at Skara Brae in Orkney, with large central square hearths, treats the domestic fire almost theatrically.

The Laws of Hywel Dda supply inventories of the objects to be seen in a typical household in early medieval Celtic Britain. They include boilers, blankets, bolsters, coulters, fuel axes (axes for chopping firewood), broad axes, augers, gimlets, firedogs, sickles, baking griddles, trivets, pans, and sieves.

Dyfnwal Hen was a king of Alcluith(Clyde), whose fortress was the formidable Dumbarton Rock below Glasgow. His father or grandfather was Ceretic Guletic.

Dyfnwal lived at the end of the fifth century. His grandson was Tutagual Tutclit, and his great-grandson was Riderch, mentioned by St. Adomnánas ruler of the Rock of Clyde. From another son of Dyfnwal descends a long line of recorded kings of Strathclyde, right down to the end of the kingdom in the tenth century.

See Dubricius .

The Celtic economy was strongly rural in character, with some arable farming and a great many livestock. The Iron Age landscape was a patchwork of small irregular fields and meadows, with scattered round huts separated by substantial areas of dense forest.