When he discovered the fact, he resolved on a life of penance and became a hermit in the woods near the abbey of S. Emiliano in Congiuntoli, then a Camaldolese monk at the monastery of Fonte Avellana in 1040.

It is through his vigorous embrace of this practice that Dominic Loricatus has become most well known, particularly through a mention by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Vol.

V, C. LVIII): "By a fantastic arithmetic, a year of penance was taxed at three thousand lashes; and such was the skill and patience of a famous hermit, Saint Dominic of the iron Cuirass, that in six days he could discharge an entire century, by a whipping of three hundred thousand stripes.

His example was followed by many penitents of both sexes; and, as a vicarious sacrifice was accepted, a sturdy disciplinarian might expiate on his own back the sins of his benefactors."

Dominic owes his nickname Loricatus to his further bodily mortification of wearing a coat of chain mail (Latin: Lorica hamata) next to his skin as a hairshirt.