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Dumnonii
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The Dumnonii or Dumnones were a Celtic tribe who inhabited the farther parts of the South West peninsula of Britain, during the Iron Age and the early Roman period.
Name
William Camden, in his 1607 edition of “Britannia”, describes Cornwall and Devon as being two parts of the same ‘country’ which:
“was in ancient time inhabited by those Britains whom Solinus called Dunmonii, Ptolomee Damnonii, or (as we find in some other copies) more truly Danmonii.
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Encyclopedia
The Dumnonii or Dumnones were a Celtic tribe who inhabited the farther parts of the South West peninsula of Britain, during the Iron Age and the early Roman period.
Name
William Camden, in his 1607 edition of “Britannia”, describes Cornwall and Devon as being two parts of the same ‘country’ which:
“was in ancient time inhabited by those Britains whom Solinus called Dunmonii, Ptolomee Damnonii, or (as we find in some other copies) more truly Danmonii. ... . But... the Country of this nation is at this day divided into two parts, known by later names of Cornwall and Denshire [Devonshire] ... The near or hithermore region of the Danmonians that I spake of is now commonly called Denshire, [or] by the Cornish-Britains ‘Dewnan’, and by the Welsh Britains ‘Duffneint’, that is, ‘low valleys’, for that the people dwell for the most part beneath in Vales; by the English Saxons [it is known as] ‘Deven-schire’, whereof grew the Latin name ‘Devonia’, and by that contraction which the vulgar people useth, ‘Denshire’.”
William Camden had learnt some Welsh during the course of his studies and it would appear that he is the origin of the interpretation of Dumnonii as meaning "deep valley dwellers" from his understanding of the Welsh of his time. An alternative derivation is from the Gaelic Domhnain which merely means "land" and leads to the meaning "people of the land", latinised as Dumnonii.
The Roman name of the town of Exeter, Isca Dumnoniorum, contains the Celtic root *iska- "water" (cognate with Irish uisce (See Whisky)) for "Water of the Dumnonii". The Latin name suggests that the city was already a Celtic oppidum, or walled town, on the banks on the River Exe before the foundation of the Roman city, in c. 50. They would give their name to the English county of Devon, and their name is represented in Britain's two modern Brythonic languages as Dewnans in Cornish and Dyfnaint in Welsh. Amédée Thierry (Histoire des Gauloises, 1828), one of the inventors of the "historic race" of Gauls, could confidently equate them with the Cornish ("les Cornouailles").
History and archaeology
The Dumnonii are thought to have occupied relatively isolated territory in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall and possibly part of Dorset. Their cultural connections, as expressed in their ceramics, were with the peninsula of Armorica across the Channel, rather than with the southeast of Britain. They do not seem to have been politically centralised: coins are relatively rare, none of them locally minted, and the structure, distribution and construction of Bronze Age and Iron Age hillforts, "rounds" and defensible farmsteads in the south west point to a number of smaller tribal groups living alongside each other.
Ptolemy's 2nd century Geography, places the Dumnonii to the west of the Durotriges, and names four of their towns: Isca Dumnoniorum (later Caeresk, now Exeter), Tamara (presumably on the River Tamar, possibly in the area of modern Plymouth), Uxella (perhaps on the River Axe) and Voliba (unidentified). The Ravenna Cosmography adds the names of two more settlements: Nemetostatio, a name relating to nemeton, signifying "sanctuary' or "sacred grove" (probably to be identified with North Tawton, Devon) and Durocornavium (unidentified, but possibly Tintagel or Carn Brea). The name Durocornavium implies the existence of a tribe called the Cornavii, perhaps the ancestors of the Cornish people (although some trace the Cornish to an unlikely hypothetical migration of the Cornovii of the West Midlands). See the article Cornovii (Cornish) for further information.
In the sub-Roman period a Brythonic kingdom called Dumnonia emerged, covering the entire peninsula, although it is believed by some to have effectively been a collection of sub-kingdoms.
Interestingly a kingdom of Domnonee (and of (Kernev/Cornouaille alongside) was established in the neighbouring province of Armorica across the English Channel, which has apparent links with the British population and suggests an ancient connection of peoples along the western Atlantic seaboard.
The Dumnonii would have spoken a Brythonic dialect ancestral to modern Cornish and Breton.
Victorian historians often referred to this tribe as the Damnonii, which is also the name of another Celtic people from lowland Scotland, although there are no known links between the two populations. Another tribe with a similar name but with no known links were the Fir Domnann in the province of Connacht.
The god worshiped by the Dumnonii was known as 'Dumnonos'
See also
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