The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts. Rodney Castleden

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      DIARMAIT

      See Columba of Iona, Ruadan.

      DICUL

      An Irish abbot who set up a small monastic house at Bosham, in Sussex, in around 650. He had with him five or six monks and they apparently had no effect at all on the local (pagan Saxon) population. St. Wilfrid found them there 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.