be made bailiffs or farmers of the seaport. John de Mohun granted other charters in 1301 and 1307. Dunster was only represented in parliament in conjunction with Minehead, one of its tithings being part of that borough. Representation began in 1562, and was lost in 1832. Feudal in origin, Dunster’s later importance was commercial, and the port had a considerable wool, corn and cattle trade with Ireland. During the middle ages the Friday market and fair in Whit week, granted by the first charter, were centres for the sale of yarn and cloth called “Dunsters,” made in the town. The market day is still Friday. The manufacture of cloth had disappeared, the harbour is silted up, and there is no special local industry.
See Sir H. C. Maxwell Lyte, Dunster and its Lords (1882); Victoria County History, Somerset, vol. ii.
DUNTOCHER (Gaelic, “The Fort of ill hap”), a town on Dalmuir Burn, Dumbartonshire, Scotland, 9 m. from Glasgow. Pop. (1901) 2122. The district contains coal, limestone and ironstone, but there is not much mining. Many of the inhabitants are employed at the Singer factory in Kilbowie and at the Clyde Trust yards in Dalmuir. There are considerable Roman remains in the neighbourhood. Antoninus’ Wall passed immediately to the south; the burn is crossed by a bridge alleged to be of Roman origin (which at least is doubtful); subterranean remains indicate a Roman structure; a Roman camp has been traced, and the vicinity has yielded a number of altars, urns, vases, coins and tablets, which are now in the custody of Glasgow University.
DUNTON, JOHN (1659–1733), English bookseller and author, was born at Graffham, in Huntingdonshire, on the 4th of May 1659. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been clergymen. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to Thomas Parkhurst, bookseller, at the sign of the Bible and Three Crowns, Cheapside, London. Dunton ran away at once, but was soon brought back, and began to “love books.” During the struggle which led to the Revolution, Dunton was the treasurer of the Whig apprentices. He became a bookseller at the sign of the Raven, near the Royal Exchange, and married Elizabeth Annesley, whose sister married Samuel Wesley. His wife managed his business, so that he was left free in a great measure to follow his own eccentric devices. In 1686, probably because he was concerned in the Monmouth rising, he visited New England, where he stayed eight months selling books and observing with interest the new country and its inhabitants. Dunton had become security for his brother’s debts, and to escape the creditors he made a short excursion to Holland. On his return to England, he opened a new shop in the Poultry in the hope of better times. Here he published weekly the Athenian Mercury which professed to answer all questions on history, philosophy, love, marriage and things in general. His wife died in 1697, and he married a second time; but a quarrel about property led to a separation; and being incapable of managing his own affairs, he spent the last years of his life in great poverty. He died in 1733. He wrote a great many books and a number of political squibs on the Whig side, but only his Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705), on account of its naïveté, its pictures of bygone times, and of the literary history of the period, is remembered. His letters from New England were published in America in 1867.
DÜNTZER, JOHANN HEINRICH JOSEPH (1813–1901), German philologist and historian of literature, was born at Cologne on the 12th of July 1813. After studying philology and especially ancient classics and Sanskrit at Bonn and Berlin (1830–1835), he took the degree of doctor of philosophy and established himself in 1837 at Bonn as Privat docent for classical literature. He had already, in his Goethes Faust in seiner Einheit und Ganzheit (1836) and Goethe als Dramatiker (1837), advocated a new critical method in interpreting the German classics, which he wished to see treated like the ancient classics. He subsequently turned his attention almost exclusively to the poets of the German classical period, notably Goethe and Schiller. Düntzer’s method met with much opposition and he consequently failed to obtain the professorship he coveted. In 1846 he accepted the post of librarian at the Roman Catholic gymnasium in Cologne, where he died on the 16th of December 1901. Düntzer was a painstaking and accurate critic, but lacking in inspiration and finer literary taste; consequently his work as a biographer and commentator has, to a great extent, been superseded and discredited.
Among his philological writings may be mentioned Die Lehre von der lateinischen Wortbildung (1836); Die Deklination der indogermanischen Sprachen (1839); Homer und der epische Kyklos (1839); Die homerischen Beiwörter des Gotter- und Menschengeschlechts (1859). Of his works on the German classical poets, especially Goethe, Schiller and Herder, the following are particularly worthy of note, Erläuterungen zu den deutschen Klassikern (1853–1892); Goethes Prometheus und Pandora (1850); Goethes Faust (2 vols., 1850–1851; 2nd ed. 1857); Goethes Gotz und Egmont (1854); Aus Goethes Freundeskreise (1868); Abhandlungen zu Goethes Leben und Werken (2 vols., 1885); Goethes Tagebücher der sechs ersten weimarischen Jahre (1889); Goethes Leben (1880; 2nd ed. 1883; Engl. transl. by T. Lyster, London, 1884); Schillers Leben (1881); Schiller und Goethe; Übersicht und Erläuterung zum Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe (1859); Herders Reise nach Italien (1859); Aus Herders Nachlass (3 vols., 1856–1857), and further, Charlotte von Stein (1874).
DUNWICH, a village in the Eye parliamentary division of Suffolk, England, on the coast between Southwold and Aldeburgh, 5 m. S.S.W. of Southwold. Pop. (1901) 157. This was in Anglo-Saxon days the most important commercial centre and port of East Anglia. It was probably a Romano-British site. The period of its highest dignity was the Saxon era, when it was called Dommocceaster and Dunwyk. Early in the 7th century, when Sigebert became king of East Anglia, Dunwich was chosen his capital and became the nursery of Christianity in Eastern Britain. A bishopric was founded (according to Bede in 630, while the Anglo-Saxon chronicle gives 635), the name of the first bishop being Felix. Sigebert’s reign was notable for his foundation of a school modelled on those he had seen in France; it was probably at Dunwich, but formed the nucleus of what afterwards became the university of Cambridge. By the middle of the 11th century (temp. Edward the Confessor) Dunwich was declining, as it had already suffered from an evil which later caused its total ruin, namely the inroads of the sea on the unstable coast. At the Norman Conquest the manor was granted to Robert Malet; but the history of the place remains blank until the reign of Henry II., when it re-emerged into prosperity. In 1173 the sight of its strength caused Robert earl of Leicester to despair of besieging it. The town received a charter from King John. In the reign of Edward I. it is recorded to have possessed 36 ships and “barks,” trading to the North Seas, Iceland and elsewhere, with 24 fishing boats, besides maintaining 11 ships of war. But early in the reign of Edward III. the attacks of the sea began to make headway again. In 1347 over 400 houses were destroyed. In 1570, after a terrible storm, appeal was made to Elizabeth, who parsimoniously granted money obtained by the sale of lead and other materials from certain neighbouring churches. But the doomed town was gradually engulfed, and now the only outward evidence of the old wealthy port is the ruined fragment of the church of All Saints, overhanging a low cliff, which, as it crumbles, exposes the coffins and bones in the former churchyard, the greater part of which has disappeared. A small white flower growing wild among the ruins is called the Dunwich Rose, and is traditionally said to have been planted and cultivated by monks. Many relics have been discovered by excavation, and even from beneath the waves. Until 1832 Dunwich returned 2 members to parliament.
DUOVIRI, less correctly Duumviri (from Lat. duo two, and vir, man), in ancient Rome, the official style of two joint magistrates. Such pairs of magistrates were appointed at various periods of Roman history both in Rome itself and in the colonies and municipia. (1) Duumviri iuri (iure) dicundo, municipal magistrates, whose chief duties were concerned with the administration of justice. Sometimes there were four of these magistrates (Quattuorviri). (2) Duumviri quinquennales, also municipal officers, not to be confused with the above, who were elected every fifth year for one year to exercise the function of the censorship which was in abeyance for the intervening four years. (3) Duumviri sacrorum, officers who originally had
