Note 3216 — THE PLACE OF CAESAR’S LANDING IN BRITAIN (continued 2)

Iulius Caesar ... venit ad Brittanniam cum sexaginta ciulis, et tenuit in ostium Tamesis, in quo naufragium perpessae sunt naves illius dum ipse pugnabat apud Dolobellum, qui erat proconsul regi Brittannico &c. (Chronica minora, ed. Th. Mommsen, iii, 1898, p. 162). Besides apud there is another reading, contra; and one MS. has Dorobellum instead of Dolobellum. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his fabulous account of Caesar’s first invasion (Hist. Brittonum, iv, 3), says that ‘Cassibellaunus’ came ad Dorobellum oppidum. It is not surprising that an uneducated writer like S. Pritchard (Hist. of Deal, pp. 1, 10, 39) should assure his readers that Caesar called his landing-place Dola; but when a scholar like Dr. Guest (Archaeol. Journal, xxi, 1864, p. 242) gravely points to ‘the use of the phrase “apud dolo”’ in the Vatican MS. of Nennius, and argues that dolo means Deal, I am amazed. The reading dolo is not so much as mentioned in Mommsen’s apparatus criticus; but let us provisionally accept it, and then consider how Dr. Guest would have construed the passage:—Iulius Caesar ... pugnabat apud Dolo, qui erat proconsul regi Brittannico &c. Dolo, says Dr. Guest, means Deal; Dolo, says Nennius, was proconsul, or commander-in-chief, under the British king. Whatever Nennius may have written, it is clear that he believed Caesar to have landed somewhere on the north of the South Foreland, and probably on the coast of East Kent; for, as Battely pointed out (Antiquitates Rutupinae, 1711, p. 46), the mouth of the Thames, in which Nennius places the landing, had a wider signification in the Middle Ages than it has now; and William of Malmesbury (De gestis Pontificum Anglorum, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, 1870, lib. ii, § 73 [p. 140]) actually made it extend as far as Dover.