Now then, I have always loved local and regional history, both for the detail it gives into the way people lived, and the regional diversity which plays such a part in English identity – and division it has to be said, from level 1 banter level to level 99 fury. But it’s been hard to spend a lot of time on it – after all I have a national history to write – but then along came the 2025 History Tour, and Gayle who suggested I should really do a podcast for tourers. The result was a 3 part history of Yorkshire, and this year it is the turn of Kent and Sussex – because that’s where we are all going.
Now as a Midlander I have never known very much about the South East corner of England – other than the port of Dover. We always went north where the air is clear and the accents more familiar and which has proper hills. So I only have a few impressions of it. One formed when as young man I went to the Weald and the home of a good friend, who took me to the local, where I met his friends and an ale called HSB. Which I understood later to stand for High Speed Brain damage, and I’m afraid I met his Dad in the early morning and had to discuss the origin and output of an, upset tummy shall we say. That was deeply embarrassing, the more so because he was wearing peach pyjamas.
Anyway over the last few years I have learned a lot more. I have family now in the city formerly known as Brighthelmstone, friends in Kent, Jonathan and I walked along the South Downs way, so while it’s not reached back of my hand status it is no longer quite so much of a mystery. And I have to tell you it is a land of beautiful and varied landscapes, it is stuffed with fantastic buildings, small and large. It has a rich, rich history, both economic, social but also cultural. It is a regions of many regions, shaped by its landscapes – and also by two powerful outside influences.
It has been the first point of contact from continental Europe from the very earliest times, from way back in the mists, deep prehistory when there was no English Channel. And then from Tudor times has been increasingly influenced by the economic and cultural powerhouse on its northern borders – London. So much so that merchants, professionals, courtiers and later industrialists, came to escape the smoke and find a vision of England. By the 20th century it was inspiring ranks of writers and artists – the Bloomsbury group, A A Milne and Winnie the Poo, Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood, Kipling and many more, who came to describe the remoter parts of it as some idealised version of England – blissfully unaware of how hard life was there for ordinary mortals.
Those influences will be a central theme as we go through. Another theme will be a continual fear of violence – whether that be invasion from the Beaker people, Romans, Anglo Saxons, Frisians, Vikings all the way through to Boney and Hitler; or from the violence and radicalism within – see Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Paine and Captain Swing.
Let me start by describing the three fundamental regional landscapes there. First of all the lowland coastal regions and their immediate hinterlands, all the way from Northern Kent round the Foreland lighthouse, along the south coast to East and West Sussex. These will almost always be wealthier and more heavily populated that the other regions, set on more fertile lighter soils, easier to work. Secondly there is the Weald. This is a vast, inland region of impenetrable oak woodland, which covers about 40% of our region. The very word, Weald, is cognate with the Old English for forest, and until modern times it was synonymous nationally with being remote, poor and backwards. The reason lay in its soil; either thin and infertile, or heavy and difficult to work.
Now I always assumed that Weald, and Wolds must always be uplands, because Wolds almost always are. But that’s very specifically not the case with the Weald. There is a Low and a High Weald. The low Weald focuses around the river valleys, based on heavy clays often wet and difficult to work. And there are the High Weald, again clay, often with flint, but often thinner and more infertile. The Weald then, for most of our history will be poor and remote, with very few roads and those they had were close to unusable in winter.
So we’ve got the coastal regions, and a vast blob slap bang in the middle called the Weald. But I said three regions; because the Weald is bounded by two Chalk ridges – the North Downs of Kent and Surrey, and South Downs of Sussex. These are just like my current home patch of the Chilterns, this is broken upland country of chalk scarps and dipslopes, thin soil, white and green and for the most part Sheep and Corn agriculture. If you want an impression, grab a painting by Eric Ravillious, he communicates them beautifully. One end of them makes iconic features of our coastline, given to making people like Vera Lynn break into song – the White cliffs of Dover, and the Seven Sisters.
So that’s the big three, the trilogy – though a bit like the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, it’s a trilogy in four parts really; because at the foot pf the downs is normally a strip of super fertile and easy to work Greensand. I tell you this for completeness and a sort of personal completer finisher mentality which has plagued me from an early age. I doubt I’ll mention the scarp foot again – but I thought any locals might shout at me if I didn’t. And anyway, Rudyard Kipling didn’t feel it necessary to mention it in his verse
I’m just in love with all these three
The Weald and Marsh and the Down countrie
Nor I don’t know which I love the most
The Weald or Marsh or the White Chalk coast
I suppose footscarp fertile greensand strip doesn’t quite have the poetic vibe.
Now landscape affects the built environment intimately – I mean it’s all been anodised by modernity and modern materials and styles of course, but you can still see enough to recognise a local character which is driven by timber buildings. As you wander around – or indeed drive around in a 45 seater coach – you’ll see a lot of wood and even thatch cottages. Because there was a lot of wood in the Weald, but also there’s not much good stone anywhere in our wider region. There is some, but only one of them was of a quality to be exported to other regions – a limestone called Kentish Ragstone. There was no good freestone that can be easily worked, so that was imported – like the Caen stone the Normans used to build Canterbury Cathedral.
Ok, remember Maps available on the website and so on. But there is another feature worth mentioning – which is of course the Sea which is fundamental part of this history. There are a few specific features you might like to remember. One is that the coastlines change over time – today’s coastline is different in very significant ways to the medieval version; and talking of shifting sands, Goodwin sands were an area of notoriously shifting and dangerous sand banks, leading to shipwrecks, and for a period, one of the more unusual cricket matches. The other one worth mentioning is the Downs – a roadstead off the Kent coast perfect for anchoring and sheltering from the wind, which English fleets often do.
The sea features highly in the identities of Kent, and particularly Sussex. Sussex has a County anthem, which probably owes something to Kipling’s elegy to his beloved adopted home, which includes the verse
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground – in a fair ground –
Yea Sussex by the Sea
William Ward Higgs was inspired by this in 1970 and wrote a song based on it, and Sussex by the Sea is sung at county events such as the Lewes Bonfire Night, which is wild by the way, takes you all the way back to the 16th Century –Brighton and Hove Albion games, Sussex cricket matches that sort of thing.
INSERT CLIP
Youi get the idea, very stirring. There is also a county motto which sounds to me a little mulish, but I apologise to any South Saxons if I am treading on toes – its ‘We won’t be Druv’. Kent also has a motto which is a bit more positive – Invicta – undefeated, based on a bit of history to do with Billy the Conk, which we’ll come to. Sussex only made up their county flag in 2011 – though it’s very nice – but Kent’s is much older, first attested in 1605 – the White Horse Rampant, Saxon steed on a red background. It derives from an event in the 5th century which absolutely definitely happened, scouts honour guv’, whatever the funsuckers might say.
OK let’s get on with the history shall we – although I don’t think I have very much to say until we get to the Iron Age, except two startling discoveries. One was made in 1912, by a very eminent archaeologist of the time, Charles Dawson who happened to come the remains of a skull in Sussex, which became known as Piltdown Man. It was examined in some detail by all the leading experts, with the latest instruments and the most furrowed of brows, and the announcement was made – this was the missing link! Here in little old Sussex, the missing link between ape and man. For the next 40 years Sussex was in the limelight, paleontology-wise – everyone knew who Piltdown man was, until in the late 1940s discoveries around the world seriously didn’t chime with Piltdown man, and so the box of bits was re-examined…the brows were yet more furrowed. In 1952 the announcement was made – Piltdown Man was a hoax! Someone had planted the thing, a mash up of the jawbone of a modern man, and bits of the skull of an Orang-utan. The search for the culprit was started, never to be resolved, Sussex hung its head in collective shame, until in the 1990s a new skeleton was discovered – Boxgrove man, woman, not clear but it is the oldest fossil found in the British Isles of human bones, 480-500,000 years old, Homo heidelbergensis. Sussex’s reputation was restored.
There is plenty of evidence of human occupation in the stone ages and Bronze ages – causewayed enclosures, camps and so on, and evidence of flint working and extraction on the Downs. The South East was not generally part of the megalith culture which has left such mysterious and dramatic survivals; though there is an exception in North Kent, with the Medway Megaliths. One interesting point though is that the surviving evidence of prehistoric settlement establishes a pattern that will continue for some time; it’s all focussed in the coastal regions, and not in the Weald. A good reason for that was soil that was easier to work; so for example, the Isle of Thanet, right on the tip of east Kent – no longer a real island by the way, but we don’t forget stuff easily – the Isle of Thanet has a light, chalky soil, and was particularly well settled. Coastal doesn’t automatically mean this kind of soil of course; the Isle of Sheppey in North Kent – now that’s a proper island – is heavy London clay, and so pasture predominated – its name after all, means Isle of Sheep.
The early picture on the Downs is more complicated – in South Sussex there are a number of bronze age graves with rich grave goods, but discoveries in the Weald are limited to a few Woodland camps.
There was another dramatic discovery though, at Dover, of the remains of a boat, made of planks of wood sewn together. Investigations show that it had probably been ritually taken apart and dismembered, but despite that, it turns out to have been made around 1500BC, and is therefore one of the world’s oldest sea going boat. So – the south East’s partnership with the sea had started.
Which brings us to the Iron Age. In around 320 BC Pytheas the Greek sailed around Britain, and we get the first use of Kent’s name; he talks about Kantion at one of the corners of Britain, and we are up and running. Kent is one of the three first places to gain a name that survives from Pytheas, along with Orkas – which is Orkney, and Belerion, which is Cornwall. In the period from around 100 BC, a Kentish identity begins to emerge more fully, and we can start talking with some regional detail about the south east’s openness to migration and influence – though such migrations of people and influence had happened well before, with farmers, Beaker people and so on. But when Caesar invaded Gaul in 55BC he would write of the South East as a Belgic people, a Celtic people called the Cantiaci, who in his view had been invaders, but could equally be about culture.
As Gaul now became part of the Roman world, modern historians talk about its influence on Britain in terms of three areas. A core area which is deeply influenced; and areas further away, periphery and outer which were much less or even not influenced. Kent and Sussex became very much part of that core world, and developed aspects of the Pre Roman society that had existed in Gaul. They traded for luxury goods, probably in exchange for their corn, hunting dogs and slaves. They began to develop proto towns, Oppida. Unenclosed oppida have been identified at Canterbury and at Chichester in Sussex. They appear to have a hierarchical society with a level of sophistication able to produce local coinage. For example a king called Aminus produces a silver coin around 15 AD. And the Celtic speaking people of Sussex, the Regni, became part of a wider kingdom of the Atrebates. That kingdom was established by a Belgic exile, Commius, whose son produced a coin around 15 BC.
As the threat from the Roman Empire grew, both the Cantiaci and the Atrebates were drawn into the orbit of the people that would lead the first resistance to Claudius’ invasion of 43 AD – the Catevellauni, and England’s first known freedom fighter Caractacus. Not that it did them any good; in 43 Aulus and his legions landed at three locations on the south East coast, and most certainly at Richborough. And there he found a broad, grassy Celtic trackway, and started paving England’s oldest street – Watling Street, which would much later form Alfred’s border with Guthrum, and keep Warwickshire and Leicestershire apart, among other things.
Caractacus and the Cantiaci fought the Roman advance tooth and nail on the River Medway, which is a river I will mention all the time, a fundamental divider between East and West Kent. The battle was possibly around Aylesford, but as we know during the 1st Century AD all of England became integrated into the Roman imperium. It seems reasonably accepted that despite their initially fierce resistance, the Cantiaci and Atrebates accepted Roman rule quite quickly, because they had already been part of a Roman cultural world for some time.
So, we are in ‘what did the Romans ever do for us territory’ – a few words on the Roman South East. Rome initially ruled through client kings, and most famously through Cogidumnus, who built a huge palace at Fishbourne. Client Kings are soon despatched, and oppida are converted into full fat towns, and centres of civil administrative regions based on the old tribes, called the Civitates; the Civitas for the Cantiaci, is Durovernum Cantiacorum or Canterbury and for the Regni people, it’s Noviomagus Regnorum, or Chichester.
Some other centres emerge too. A Roman settlement appears on Watling street and will become Rochester. The importance of this city will grow, and it will acquire a castle in Norman times, because it defends the entrance to the Medway, and also acquired a bridge – the lowest crossing point on the River. Richborough on the north east tip of Kent develops as a port, but over time a new port emerges as the centre of the Roman fleet, the Classis Britannica – we are talking about Dubris, or Dover, and that’s a long history.
And there are other centres along the coast, which are fortified in the third century, as the piracy and raids increase on the north sea coast. There are 5 or so of these so-called Saxon Shore forts, the best preserved of which is at Anderitum – or Pevensey, where you can still see substantial Roman Walls.
A network of roads is built, probably over Prehistoric trackways, connecting the coastal regions to London – Stane street runs from Chichester, and there’s a roman a road which runs over the Weald from Lewes to London. There was also a roman road running west to east now referred to as the Greensand way, just north of the south downs; and so the basic structure of roads is emerging which we recognise today – around the edge, along the coastal regions, and a few that bravely venture over the big mass of the Weald that lies between coast and London.
So Romano British society emerges, built around towns and villas. The villas cluster around towns, plus more rural villas along the river valleys; one of the best preserved is at Lullingstone, in north Kent, which is particularly interesting because it has a chapel from a religious cult that appears later on in Roman history – Christianity. The foundational economic structure is established – of a prosperous and highly populated coastal periphery, and a sparsely populated interior. There are relatively few villas and settlements in the Weald, which was then called Anderida, named after Roman Pevensey. What there are remains of in the Weald, though, are Roman iron works, which is an industry which will be closely associated with the Weald for many centuries, and probably initially developed to support the Classis Britannica at Dover.
Insert from https://stella.glasgow.ac.uk/readings/?oe-3
This reading is from Glasgow university, thanks for that, link in the episode notes. It is translated as
And in their days Hengest and Horsa, invited by Vortigern, king of [the] Britons, came to Britain at the place which is called Ebbsfleet.
The story goes on that these Jutish mercenaries, the brothers Hengest and Horsa, have been invited with their men in 449 to Britain by its overlord Vortigern to fight the Picts, Scotti, Anacotti, Frisians and Saxons raiding a post Roman Britain which had fragmented into a wealth of Celtic speaking kingdoms. They then realised that these little kingdoms were there for the taking, sent news back home to come over quickly and bring their mums and kids with them, and set about the three c’s – Conquering, killing, and colonising, and the Adventus Saxonum is here.
It wasn’t all plain sailing; there is a battle at Aylesford where the Britons try to put the stopper back in the bottle, and one of the brothers, Horsa, is killed. The spot where he falls is supposed to be marked by one of the of the Medway Megaliths, the White Horse Stone at Blue Bell Hill. The blood from his white steed stains the stone, and thus we have the White Horse of Kent and the Kentish flag – Horsa, on a field of blood.
Which is when the fun-sucking starts, obviously. I mean, it started early when some folk pointed out that Horsa literally means ‘horse’, so maybe the legend was talking about Hengest and his horse. But of course it’s gone much further than that, and serious history books don’t talk of Hengest and Horsa anymore, but there is was, the Kent Foundation story.
Sussex of course has its own foundation story, as the land of the South Saxons, and it’s very own glorious warrior, Aella because in 477
Ælle and his 3 sons, Cymen and Wlencing and Cissa, came to the land of Britain with 3 ships at the place which is named Cymen’s shore, and there killed many eritons and drove some to flight into the wood called Andredes leag.
Andresdes Leag is the Weald, and the Weald as refuge for the hunted, desperate and marginalised will be a theme for many a year, from fleeing Britons in the 5th century all the way through to millionaire financiers in the 21st.
According to Bede, Aella would then become the first overlord of the emerging Anglo Saxon kingdoms, a Bretwalda, which gave Sussex a very brief pre-eminence which it will not retain. They would come under increasing pressure from the West Saxons, until by the end of the 7th century were totally under their control. But, the third Bretwalda in the 6th century would be right next door, in Kent, Æthelbert.
Of course this story has been swept away as what it is, just a story constructed 400 years later by a genius who realised that to be a strong, a people needed a shared story to bring them together – his name was Alfred. The real story is one of creeping settlement of Germanic migrants, who may have come to fight or settle, and came initially where they were needed – the upper Thames valley, east Anglia, as well as the south east coast. Much more likely, then is a growing series of settlements who acquire some collective identity under a local leader around a specific place – such as the Hæstingas, the people of Hæsta, and founder of modern Hastings. These communities may well have been hybrid, Britons and Saxons, but over time the dominant culture and language would be Anglo Saxon. Britons very probably did less well as the lower wergilds for Britons in early lawcodes suggest. But DNA analysis tells us that the level of extermination suggested by the British monk Gildas in the 6th century was not the case.
Bede’s famous text which suggests that the Jutes settled Kent and the Isle of Wight is only tentatively accepted by historians these days; the idea that Jutes = Jutland is apparently not safe, not like Saxons and Angles which does seem to be an identifiable distinction between Germanic invaders. But there are differences between the artefacts found in Kent and elsewhere in England at the time so there’s clearly something going on. There had long been a suggestion that Frankish influence from France is strong, just like the days of pre Roman Gaul – and even that the Merovingian dynasty had some sort of overlordship there. Sop Kent looks complicated, but identification of Saxons with Sussex seems much more secure.
It is the early Anglo Saxon, or indeed Jutish period, that provides the basis for another bit of Kentish culture; you may have heard of it – the distinction between the man and maid of Kent, and Kentish maid and men. I don’t know how much of a thing it is these days, but the story is that in the east, east of the river Medway – Canterbury, Dover and so on – they are men and maids of Kent. West of the Medway, closer to London, they are Kentish men maids – so, Rochester for example. What is going on there? A couple of theories have been advanced; one being that maybe west Kent was settled by Saxons rather than Jutes, and so there was an ethnic difference. Another theory is that West Kent may have been ruled by Mercia rather than by a King of Kent, since Mercia had established its control over London just to their north.
Who knows; but there is other evidence of an embedded, and real distinction; Kent is unusual for an English county in having two bishoprics, in both Rochester and Canterbury; there is normally just one. So that might also suggest a split along the Medway.
Now then, what do we have to say about the Juto-Saxon South East before the conquest? Well first off, to stick with Kent, this quickly becomes the most advanced and sophisticated English kingdom – it peaks early you might say, and King Æthelberht was identified by Bede as the descendant of Hengist, and as his third Bretwalda, succeeding Ceawlin of the Gewisse, or West Saxons. Æthelberht, reigned from around 589 to 616, and is the first Anglo Saxon king that seems to have some sort of permanent stationary centre, at Canterbury.
We must be careful about this. All Roman urban centres were deserted for a while. And the idea of kings with stationary cities and palaces is most certainly anachronistic. Early England develops into a number of districts, centred around royal tribute centres. These royal centres can sometimes be identified by the use of the old Enlish ge, or district, – such as Eastry and Liminge. Trade centres associated with them were temporary and seasonal until the 8th century. Kings travelled around, exercising very distant lordship based on relationships of mutual obligation with free ceorls and Thegns, for whom they held courts and feasts as they travelled. In both Kent and Sussex, these ancient districts become embedded into the administrative structure. In Kent they become lathes, 3 in West and 4 in East Kent, each lathe subdivided further into hundreds. In Sussex they are called Rapes, a word thought to come from a rope used for measurement; there are 4 Rapes in Anglo Saxon days, again subdivided into a number of hundreds; and we’ll hear more of them when the Normans come.
But Æthelberht does seem to have a permanent centre at Canterbury. Plus, he is the first to develop a written law code. But probably even more important that those, was the lustre added to his reputation by Bertha, his wife.
Bertha was a real catch for an impoverished, small time king of a peripheral corner of Europe; because she was the daughter of a Merovingian King, and they were far and away the most prestigious kingdom in Europe, ruling much of France. Bertha was the daughter of Charlbert, king of a territory which stretched along the north western regions of France, and included Paris. How Æthelberht managed to land such a prize, especially since he was only the heir to the throne at the time, is interesting – it’s unlikely to be a Romeo and Juliet type story, obviously. It could be the strength of the trading relationship, maybe even some remembered Merovingian overlordship – or possibly, and most probably it was the influence of the Roman church. England had been lost to paganism, and Rome wanted it back.
Elite women and marriage were a critical factor in the spread of Christianity in many places, but especially so into England. Because they exerted considerable influence over their husbands, along with the entourage and chaplains they brought with them, and therefore acted as a vector for the Christian bacillus. Bertha’s marriage in 580 is a good example; the marriage deal came with the promise that she could practice her religion in Kent. She brought her chaplain, and her husband kitted out an old Roman Chapel for her at Canterbury, and had it dedicated to St Martin. There is still a church there in exactly the same place – pretty much unrecognisable inside from its origins, but still the oldest continually used Church in England.
Before long, Bertha had persuaded her husband to convert, and not only that, invite Augustine over to lead the conversion of all the pagan kingdoms. Augustine famously established his episcopal centre in Canterbury, established the first bishops in Rochester and London, founded abbeys in Canterbury, and it is from his arrival in 597 that the Cathedral dates its age. Sussex was a bit later to convert; not until 681 did St Wilifred arrived. Eddius Stephanus descried Willifred as
Affable to all, penetrating in mind, strong in body, expert at all good works, never sour in face
So, a good egg then, and I imagine a sour face would be a blocker to conversion, and he did manage to convert the heathens of Sussex. Largely for practical reasons, because when he stepped ashore it began to rain, and broke a long drought. This was a handy skill. He established his Cathedral church at Selsey near to Selsey Bill of course, one of the key promontories on the South coast. The Normans would later move it to Chichester, which remains Sussex’s cathedral church to this day.
The end of Roman Britain transformed society; gone are the villas, towns, civil society, and market economy; most of the ironworks in the weald lie unworked. Settlement is based on individual farmsteads, and the hundreds, Lathes and Rapes were organised for a society for whom subsistence farming was the norm, and the idea of a market economy had gone. So each made sure their district communities had the variety of resources and environments under their control they needed to thrive. The Rapes of Sussex show this most clearly. They are linear districts which rise from the coast up the downs and into the interior. This means they include fertile coastal land for arable, downland for sheep and Weald for wood. In a way you might think about this as the periphery exploiting the interior; most people actually live in the coastal regions, as they always have. But they each had their access to the interior, and the wood and pasture of weald and downs was immensely valuable too. Ass communities begin to exploit those resources, so population in the Weald and Downs also begins, at last, to grow.
Placenames, as always, give us a direct insight to this relationship. If you have limited land for arable, because there’s a lot of clay and your ploughs are very simple with no computer controlled, air conditioned and EU funded machinery, and if famine is never more than one or two bad harvests away, you absolutely must make the best of your good arable land. The last thing you want is to have, is space taken up in the growing season by animals; or indeed to have it covered in trees.
So you would clear some of the weald woodland and placenames with the suffix -leag, denote a clearing. Every spring you would then gather up your livestock, get yourself a few packed lunches from Mum, and drive them off into the weald to your newly created clearing, and use it as summer wood pasture, where your animals could be fattened in preparation for Blotmonath – Bloodmonth, November, when the animals you could not feed through the winter were slaughtered.
We can see such places because in Sussex placenames; they might have the suffix –fold, from Old English falod for animal enclosure – like Shearnfold. Or they might have the suffix ersc for enclosure, or in Kent the suffix –den – and there are –den names all over Kent they are very common. In your temporary summer settlement, you might set yourself up in a wooded hill – like Goudhurst; and again there are placenames with hurst in them all over.
Depending where you are, this might be a substantial animal drive over some distance. So, Tenterden in Kent is thought to be the summer pasture for the fertile arable district of Thanet – and Thanet which is 50 miles away.
- How’s about a bit of violence and animal bones? We’ve zipped forward to September 1011, and Thorkell the Tall has led a host of Vikings, none of whom have horned helmets, to Canterbury. He’d spent the previous year wandering all over East Anglish and the Midlands raiding, pillaging and slaughtering according to his idiom and his tourism, just like innocent Russian tourists of modern days, brought him to see a Cathedral. By 1011 Canterbury had developed into a big town, of possibly 6,000 souls, and it had walls. Now the Vikings weren’t good with walls, so for a while Torkell’s army of tourists had been stymied. But there was a monk within the walls, called Ælfmær He should really have been very, very grateful towards the leader of the City, the ABC, one Aelphege – because the saintly archbish had saved his life once. None the less on 29th September 1011, Ælfmær the little toerag, betrayed the city and unlocked the doors, and Vikings stormed into the walls, ravaged and pillaged in order to gather some souvenirs and mementos.
I was told as a boy that the wages of sin were death. For Ælfmær, though, the wages of sin were the Bishopric of Selsey under King Cnut. Though I imagine he’d have had a pretty tough interview with Peter by the Pearly gates.
Well the Saintly Archbishop Alphege was taken hostage because they reckoned he’d be good for a few quid and demanded he get the church to pay a massive ransom. Alphege was saintly, as I mentioned before, and argued the money should go to the poor, and for 9 months kept up his resistance as he was dragged around behind the Danish army on their travels. Until one night, in Greenwich, at a feast, some of the Vikings got a bit tipsy. I mean there wasn’t a Viking around that couldn’t hold a pint, but the ASC relates that
they were very drunk, because there was wine brought from the south.
A viking can hold their beer, not their wine it seems, because they dragged Alphege out and started abusing him with whatever they had to hand – which since they were feasting, turned out to the Ox bones. They pelted poor Alphege with Ox bones, and the odd ox skull – and those can sting, let me tell you. Until one Viking went too far – isn’t that always the way of it? Like putting beer in the punch at midnight. Anyway, he took an axe to Alphege, and that was that. The wages of Alphege’s nobility were death, but also he was made a saint, and the honour of being the first ABC to die of violence. There would be another – you know who I am talking about – and apparently he was praying to St Alphege when that happened. But we’ll come to that bloke in the next episode.
This was the second wave of Danish invasions of course, the one with Æthelred the ill counselled. Kent in particular suffered mightily from the first wave of Viking raids as well – because there it is, just sitting there temptingly, just across the North Sea, practically asking for it. By the 9th century and the first round, Kent had also lost its independence just like Sussex – firstly to Mercia and Offa in the late 8th century, despite a glorious Kentish victory at Otford in 775, and then in 825 they lost their bacon to Egbert of Wessex at the battle of Ellendun, and were ruled by West Saxon nominees. Lindisfarne gets all the glory in 793 and the Vikings, but there’s of Viking raids on Kent well before that. Offa’s charters grant privileges to churches, to give them the resources to defend themselves against the raiders.
Sussex doesn’t entirely escape the Vikings – there’s a record of a raid in 841 at Romney Marsh. But it’s Kent that really, really gets it in the neck. In 850 a huge army over wintered on the Isle of Thanet; in 854 they were back over wintering at the Isle of Sheppey. Even as late as 892 when Alfred was getting on top of them, Haesten the Viking established a fortified camp in Kent, at Appledore.
By that stage of course, Alfred had established his Alfredian burghs and things were much tougher for poor old Haesten. There were burghs in Kent probably at Rochester, Milton, and Winchelsea, and loads in Sussex – Hastings, Burpham near Arundel, Lewes and Chichester. In fact in 895 when Vikings landed at Chichester, they got a kicking, and the men of Sussex even took some of their ships off them.
In the time leading up to the Big Event at Hastings in the 11th century, the south east of Anglo Saxon England looked very different to the time of the great migrations. There were Minster churches all along the coastal regions serving wide areas, in addition to Cathedrals at Rochester, Canterbury and Selsey. Trade and regional markets had developed in a number of major towns often around Alfredian burghs – Canterbury the largest, but Lewes in Sussex had been boosted by becoming a burgh and had about 2,000 people living there; it was the leading town in the Rape of Lewes, and would become the county town of East Sussex when Sussex is divided in 1888. Chichester may have numbered 1500, Dover around 1000, Pevensey probably more than 500.
There was now a string of secondary market settlements, and in particular a number of havens along the coast which had developed fishing fleets, and a responsibility to help kings in their fight against sea borne raiders and invaders. Places like Sandwich in Kent, Fordwich, Dover, Romney, Hythe and Rye. They were given special privileges at AS kings to help them provide such ships – privileges included money making ventures like the right to administer justice and gather the fines, and in some cases to establish local mints. These are all names that will figure highly in medieval military and trading history – because in this period lies the genesis of the Cinque Ports.
All of this is about the coastal regions – the Weald remained very sparsely populated, with many of the settlements largely dominated by seasonal agriculture from the periphery. Meanwhile Landholding in the coastal regions had become much more concentrated into the hands of thegns, now resident and keen to be local bigwigs; by the 11th century, the big multiple estates of the earlier Anglo Saxon peoples had become fragmented into the kind of structure that is so familiar to us. A lord’s grand house and hall with a settlement around, a church, and a priest. By late Anglo Saxon England there were some absolutely massive landowners – and one of those, the most powerful, was the Godwinsson family. When Hardold Godwinsson became king of the English he held massive estates in Sussex; his grand palace, pictured in the Bayeux Tapestry, is now thought to be at Bosham, near Chichester. He also had substantial estates around the port of Pevensey. Which estates were about to receive a bit of a kicking.
