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The Dumnonii or Dumnones were a Celtic tribe who inhabited part of the South West peninsula of Britain, during the Iron Age and the early Roman period.
The name meant "deep valley dwellers". It was reflected in the Roman name of Exeter, Isca Dumnoniorum, or "Isca 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
The Dumnonii are thought to have occupied territory in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall and possibly part of Dorset. They do not seem to have been politically centralised: the structure, distribution and construction of Bronze Age and Iron Age hillforts 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), Uxella (perhaps on the River Axe) and Voliba (unidentified). The Ravenna Cosmography adds the names of two more settlements: Nemetostatio, a name relating to nemeto-, sanctuary or sacred grove (Probably to be identified with North Tawton, Devon) and Durocornavium (unidentified, but possibly Tintagel). 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).
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.
The Dumnonii would have spoken a Brythonic dialect ancestral to modern Cornish.
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 between the two) appear to have had a presence also in Ireland, as shown by the presence of a people called the Fir Domnann in the province of Connacht.
References
- Ptolemy, Geography 2.2
- Amédée Thierry, L'Histoire des Gauloises pt iii, chapter II (in French)
- Marie-France Piguet, "Observation et histoire: Race chez Amédée Thierry et William F. Edwards" in L'Homme 153 (in French)
External links
"Dumnonii"