Dunwich
The similarity of sound between Dommoc and Dunwich may be misleading. Dommoc is a difficult name to construe, but could derive from the Latin dominicum, a church, possibly in an Irish-assimilated form domnhac, as Fletcher notes. The name Dunwich (in c. 1200 Donewic or Donewiz) should mean the wic (market, possibly from vicus, often riverine or estuarine) at the hill. The important wic names of Ipswich and Norwich are comparable. If the name Dommoc became Dunwich, its original meaning was lost in the shift and a different etymological structure was adopted to explain and replace it, between the tenth and twelfth centuries.
There was no known church dedicated to Saint Felix at Dunwich, but that is no objection since the founder could not have commemorated himself and would likely have made an apostolic dedication. Dunwich was thriving at Domesday, but following sea encroachments many of its ecclesiastical possessions were granted to the rising Priory of Eye in north Suffolk. The seal-matrix of the last-known bishop of Dommoc, Ethilwald, was discovered about two hundred years ago at Eye. Eye also possessed in post-mediaeval times a book now lost, known as the 'Red Book of Eye', written in Lombardic majuscule and presumably with purple-stained pages, reputed to have belonged to Saint Felix. These may have reached Eye from Dunwich, but they might also have been taken to Hoxne, close to Eye, during the tenth or eleventh centuries from any centre in East Anglia, when Hoxne was temporarily the episcopal seat.
During the fifteenth century, when the Dunwich identification had taken hold, a series of glass windows depicting Saint Fursey, Saint Felix, Saint Etheldreda, and other Anglo-Saxon subjects existed at Blythburgh church, not far from Dunwich. However that site had its own independent Wuffing tradition connected with the grave of King Anna of East Anglia (d. 653), but (conversely) its position at the fordable headwaters of the Blyth estuary, controlling the Blyth and its watershed hinterland suggests the likely existence of a royal dwelling in that neighbourhood in the time of Anna himself, and of Saint Felix. If so, the siting of an episcopal seat at Dunwich would be readily explicable.
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