The Little History of Sussex E-Book

Kevin Newman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 214

Beschreibung

Sussex may be a comparatively narrow county from north to south but it includes a huge wealth of history.The Little History of Sussex is much the same – it packs a whole lot of history into a relatively small book. From prehistory to the present, this historic county provides reminders of our earliest ancestors and its past as a battleground for the Vikings. Whether being the gateway for the Normans, a playground for princely playboys or a home to holidaymakers, the people of Sussex have seen it all. This means it's not surprising the county still today contains residents who, at times, very much 'wunt be druv!'. The Little History of Sussex covers the county's history in a swift, engaging and lively sweep for those who like their history fresh, funny and full of intrigue.

Leseprobe

‘O, Sussex is an enchanted land! It lives within the heart.’– Vera Isabel Arlett

First published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Kevin Newman, 2023

The right of Kevin Newman to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 581 6

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

The Bandstand, Brighton.

In memory of Lance Milton

For Seth and Eddie Newman –who once were my little ones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin Newman is a Sussex-born author, historian, tour guide of the county and history teacher. He has co-written history textbooks for Oxford University Press, educational film scripts and the ‘Brilliant Brighton’ and ‘Super Sussex’ supplements for Sussex’s Argus newspaper. He has written over a dozen books on Sussex by various publishers and one on clock towers of England. He is married with two sons and lives at the base of the South Downs in West Sussex, from where the view is, to quote Sergeant Wilson of Dad’s Army, all ‘rather lovely’.

Mermaid Street, Rye.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.     Ancient Sussex

2.     Invaders’ Sussex: Romans, Saxons and Norsemen

3.     An Anglo-French Fracas and the Middle Ages

4.     The Tudors and the Squabbling Stuarts

5.     The Hanoverians: Germans, Georges, Gorgeous Architecture and ‘Going Owling’

6.     Victoria Regina, Recreation and the Railways: Sussex and the Masses

7.     Equality, Edwardians and First World War Sussex

8.     The Twenties and Thirties

9.     Front-Line Sussex: The Second World War

10.   Post-War Sussex: Cold War, Conferences, Concrete and Cars

11.   The Naughty Nineties to the Terrible Twenties

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Sussex is amazing. We often forget just how amazing, especially we who’ve lived here for many years. If our little county was an island it would be a top travel destination, with its coastal plain sloping gracefully up towards the beautiful Sussex backbone of the Downs, before its plummet steeply down the northern side in an embrace of the wide sweep of the plentiful and verdant Weald.

If imagining an additional coastline to the county seems a pointless intellectual activity, we must remember that all things change and that Sussex at one point had no coastline at all. We were surrounded; part of the continental landmass until the event around 7,000–8,000 years ago, towards the end of the Mesolithic Age, when we gained one almighty water feature. This was when the river that would have been slowly widening, rising and encroaching along what is now the English Channel decided it wanted to reach the Straits of Dover and have one hell of a watery party with what is now the North Sea. The English Channel has made up the southern extremity of Sussex ever since this watery intrusion, and gives us our character as a coastal county.

Being a coastal county in close proximity to the millions of London means that many a book has been written about Sussex, and many an approach has been attempted. This is not a lengthy academic tome, encyclopedic or geographical guide to the county. Unlike my earlier books on the county, I don’t aim here to cover numerous historical events and sites of heritage. Here instead is a brief historical sweep, peppered generously with little anecdotes of ludicrosity down the decades and little gems of loveliness from the past; things that make you proud, make you ponder the sheer abilities of our ancestors and even sometimes just leave the heart all warm and fuzzy. As a predominantly rural county, Sussex is and has always been a great provider of the South’s food and drink, so we’ve also got ‘little bits of lunching’ where you can see what our ancestors munched on.

Writing a little history of Sussex is indeed a challenging task as the county has such a long and illustrious past. The Palaeolithic era (Old Stone Age 450,000–10,000 years BC) and the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age 10,000–4500 years BC) have provided evidence of flint use here. Migrants that crossed said new English Channel by the time of the Neolithic (New Stone Age 4,500–2,300 years BC) had also developed agriculture as a way of life and had stopped being nomadic hunter-gatherers, so we have further evidence of this era too if we were to dwell on it. The oldest humans remains ever found in the UK are those of ‘Boxgrove Man’, which were found in Sussex at Eartham Quarry, near Chichester.

Our geographical location helps explains why, to quote the band One Direction, you and me have a whole lot of history. Being located at the country’s south-east tip alongside Kent, many of our earliest immigrants walked here first across where the English Channel would later flow, or sailed across to here when it did. This means we have not only the first footfalls of our ancestors but have also been the location of nation-changing events, from Roman and Saxon to Norseman invasions (including, of course, the world-famous events of 1066). We even featured predominantly in the little-known French invasion of 1216, where the coronation of our first ‘King Louis’ was nearly a reality. Sussex was at the forefront of the brunt felt in the Hundred Years War and was still being attacked under the Tudors. More peaceful centuries since and overcoming our inaccessibility by road have seen it become the location of first a palace, and eventually a palace pier as it transitioned from rural coastal backwater to royal playground and then one of the nation’s favourite coastal and rural destinations for rest, relaxion and relishing life.

Chichester Harbour, one of the lovely things of Sussex.

The site today of Chichester Castle, torn down to prevent further invaders gaining control of this part of Sussex.

Being asked to condense all this into a small guide to the county’s past, though, means the reader is given a selection from the county’s rich history that may act as an introduction for visitors wanting to know more than just where to get the best burger. This book hopefully hooks you into wanting to read more about our fascinating coastal county, which always has a wealth of surprises, even for those who think they know it well. History books of the county have made little time for exploring our most recent decades and tend to stop in the 1970s or 80s. I’ve tried to rectify this here with an exploration of the Nineties, Noughties, Tenties and even the early Twenties via local newspaper archives. The recent can be easily forgotten, and it is easy for those of us who remember Thatcher, Trumpton and Toto to forget that the 1990s are indeed the distant past for younger citizens. For example, only twenty-five years ago, our licensing laws meant that pubs had to close or stop serving beer halfway through the 1995 rugby world cup match between England and New Zealand, which seems unimaginable today. Only as recently as 1991, Sussex’s Argus newspaper was reporting on how unusual it was to have an all-female bar staff team in The Stadium pub in Hove. So, from the earliest days to our most recent, buckle up and let’s make a start on a little, but hopefully lovely, tour of the county’s past!

Brighton’s Palace Pier.

1

ANCIENT SUSSEX

As mentioned, Sussex was the site of the 1993–94 discovery of the earliest example of proto-human ever found in this country: the first ever ‘man’ to be discovered in Britain, at Eartham Pit, a quarry near Boxgrove, followed by an even older tooth. We would have also had a second example of early evidence of human life in Sussex from the Pleistocene Era (about 2 million to 11,000 years ago) had the 1912 ‘find’ of ‘Piltdown Man’ not turned out to be an elaborate hoax. The Piltdown hoax was one of the most damaging scientific hoaxes in history; the remains of a skull (and a molar tooth), were ‘discovered’ in Sheffield Park in East Sussex. Even today we don’t exactly know who was behind it, but Charles Dawson (1864–1916) seems the main suspect for the sticking together of a medieval skull, orangutan jaw and chimpanzee teeth, which he then claimed were a type of unknown early human.

The village of Piltdown, near Uckfield, has since tried to move on from the fame and later scandal that engulfed it for most of the twentieth century over the hoax, and even renamed its pub ‘The Piltdown Man’ at one point. Although Dawson is the most likely culprit, there was a team of people involved, including Sussex resident Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who played at Piltdown golf course and was also interested in hoaxes. Intriguing clues to suggest his collaboration with Dawson can be found in his novel that was published the same year as Dawson’s find, The Lost World. In this bestselling novel, there is a line saying how bones are as easy to fake as a photograph. Aptly for such a huge British cock-up, one of the authors of texts on the hoax was none other than one Frank Spencer.

LITTLE BITS OF LUDICROSITY – CHARLES DAWSON’S OTHER FAKES

Dawson’s ‘collection’ included a total of at least thirty-eight fakes and he made a number of other similar dubious ‘finds’. These included, just in Sussex, the ‘shadowy figures’ of prisoners on Hastings Castle tunnel walls, the ‘Lewes Prick Spur’, the ‘Uckfield Horseshoe’, the ‘Brighton Toad in the Hole’, the ‘Bulverhythe Hammer’, the ‘Bexhill Boat’, the ‘Pevensey Bricks’, and even a whole fake flint mine at Lavant.

Our biggest settlement and the larger of our two Sussex cities, Brighton and Hove, is also a place of ancient habitation, with genuine evidence dating back from around 3,000 years BC at what was a causewayed camp-fort at Whitehawk Hill above Brighton. This was around the time that a new wave of colonisation by the Mesolithic people from the Mediterranean occurred. Excavations led to the discovery that these dwellers loved their meat, which is certainly very different to the veggie-and-vegan-mad city of the twenty-first century. Excavations also hinted that Brightonians of the late Stone Age were possibly cannibals, due to cooked fragments of skull and, more frighteningly, that the hilltop dwellers seem to have thrown their dead bodies out with their rubbish. Other ambitious Sussex building projects from this time can be found at the long barrow at Bevis’s Thumb and the flint mines at Cissbury.

Archaeological digs all over the rest of county have unearthed some weird, wonderful and funny finds. The excavation of Combe Hill, near Jevington, in 1983 led to the discovery of a chalk phallus, not thought to be a Neolithic artefact to match the age of the Stone Age site. Neolithic marks at the top of Windover Hill, above the Long Man of Wilmington, were also believed by Sussex archaeologist E. Cecil Curwen to be in a phallic shape. We also have reminders of ancient vegetation too, as well as people. The remains of an incredible prehistoric forest of oak, hazel and alder trees can also be seen at Pett Level, east of Hastings in East Sussex, which around 5,200 years ago would have dominated the nearby landscape.

Likely to have been a hunting grounds for our Neolithic ancestors, we can still see remains of this sunken forest at extreme low tides, but with sea levels rising around 30m since Neolithic times, this is a rarity.

The route up to Mount Caburn, fortified site for much of ancient Sussex’s past.

Chichester has the terrific Trundle, but your go-to ancient Sussex site to cover numerous historical eras towards the centre of the county is Mount Caburn/Caburn Hill (the ‘Mount’ was only added in the eighteenth century when the Downs increasingly seem to have mistakenly been seen as a mountain range), near Lewes in East Sussex. My previous book, Visitors’ Historic Britain: East Sussex/Brighton & Hove, mentioned it no fewer than thirteen times throughout different time periods. It translates as either ‘castle or stronghold hill’, ‘crooked’ or ‘cold’ fort. Excavations suggest Neolithic visitations, and it was certainly in use in some way by the Bronze Age. The Middle Iron Age saw its continued visitation and it was fortified by c.100 BC (during the Iron Age). It was the site of locals taking a stand against both Roman and Viking invasion by the Saxons. A similar fort was also built at Castle Hill, Newhaven, which owing to the ever-changing Sussex coastline means that during the Iron Age it was over a mile away from the sea. The location must have been successful though as it lasted from the late Bronze Age, through the Iron Age and right up to the third century BC.

The Iron Age also saw massive hillforts built at Cissbury and the Trundle, and Caburn by this time had more than seventy households, crafts and trading. Before the Romans would make their merry way here, Sussex would first experience incomers in the form of a tribe called the Atrebates. These were a Germano-Celtic Belgae people who first migrated away from Roman expansion across the Channel around 100 BC. They settled across an area from Caburn in the east to Hampshire and Wiltshire, with an early leader in Commius (c.52 BC), who had fled France. His emigration helped encourage further interest in invasion by the Romans, who had already attempted raids to test defences of the island under Caesar a few years earlier. The Atrebates were then ruled in succession by Commius’ sons, Tinocommius and then Verica, who seemed to have a comprehensive presence around (what is today) Chichester, with his people known as the Regni by this stage. Verica managed more cordial relations with Rome but eventually fled there when tribal wars started to eat into Atrebatian territory, never to return. Rome couldn’t face this friendly territory being lost to less-friendly forces and so the invasion of AD 43 was given another reason to take place.

The view from Chanctonbury Ring.

LITTLE BITS OF LUNCHING – PIGGY PREFERENCES

The ancient Britons who lived here before the Romans invaded favoured pork as their favourite meat and cherished it as a gift from the gods, which may be why remains of boars (as the later equally pig-appreciating Saxons would refer to pigs) seem to dominate the animal remains found at the sites of Celtic temples such as Chanctonbury Ring. Andredsweald, the great forest dominating the south of England, was valued highly by ancient Britons for the numbers of pigs it could sustain. Even the Saxons’ weaponry was decorated with a little bronze boar figure – and their literature, such as Beowulf, speaks of these decorations. The Saxons would eat boar at the feast of Yule (20–21 December) and pork remained the principal Christmas meat right up to the twentieth century.

As aforementioned Castle Hill proves, Sussex has changed greatly since the days of our earliest invaders. Therefore it makes sense to pause to give an idea of the very different territory incomers experienced. The Ouse was once far more powerful and wider, and its watery forces cut through the chalk downland in this part of Sussex many millennia ago to make Lewes a ‘gap town’ in the Downs: one of the three major routes where rivers carve their way to the sea. This meant early travellers along the Downs were forced to go ‘a down’ (where the series of hills get their name from – bizarrely, in old English ‘down’ didn’t mean down as it does today). Sussex was wooded and dangerous down below the Downs, and the South Downs Way, today still such a loved route for ramblers, was the drovers’ motorway of the early Britons. This is why forts existed along its route such as at Cissbury, Wolstonbury, Caburn and Chanctonbury (bury means ‘fort’).

The Ouse cutting through these meant a crossing place was needed, which still exists today across to Cliffe. Where people had to cross, they could be traded with and so Lewes developed around the bridge, a later successor of which still exists today. A huge inland sea flowed inland up the 7 miles from the Ouse’s mouth at Seaford (it was rerouted by the 1700s to enter the sea at its current destination at Newhaven – hence the name ‘New Haven’, the area was previously just the village of Meeching) and so Lewes was a harbour town, the safest and first place you could travel around this large, broad water. It was also the first place near the coast in this part of Sussex that could be defended successfully, supported by nearby Caburn.

The sea has invaded and retreated in places, leaving once waterside castles such as Bramber, Camber, Amberley and Pevensey high and dry inland. Glynde Reach, underneath Caburn, would also have been more substantial. Conversely, settlements and households at Selsey, Worthing, Brighton and Winchelsea are now under the waves. Rye, which means ‘at an island’, is no longer as such and nor is Pevensey, which was once only accessible via a narrow causeway in Roman times.

A good rule of thumb is that Sussex’s rivers were generally wider, faster and deeper. Sussex was wetter, but not necessarily better – a higher water table and being heavily wooded north of the Downs meant travelling east to west, or north to south, was slow, muddy and difficult. The other huge change from today is that in early Sussex the population was mostly on top of the Downs. Today, thankfully, our national park is one of our most sparsely populated areas.

2

INVADERS’ SUSSEX: ROMANS, SAXONS AND NORSEMEN

LITTLE BITS OF LOVELINESS – JIM PULK, PUDDINGS AND A PRIZE OF ARUNDEL

It has been said that Sussex’s traditional puddings are not the most healthy of foods. In the past, Sussex puddings could even kill you. But that’s only if you’re a mythical ancient Sussex creature called a Knucker Dragon. In ancient stories, these winged wonders lived in a number of deep holes filled with water and said by some to be bottomless. The Knucker Dragon of Lyminster was such a wrong’un that after a rampage of killing livestock and humans one story says that the monster aggravated the King of Sussex to such an extent that he offered his daughter’s hand in marriage to any knight who could kill the beast. Consequently, a local character called Jim Pulk (or Puttock in some stories), our very own version of St George, fed the beast an indigestible Sussex pudding and while the dragon struggled with its stomach gripes Pulk slayed it with his sword, claiming a mayorship (usually of Arundel) as an additional prize.

Our major military Roman sites in Sussex are like bookends on a shelf, in that they are at either ends of the county, with twenty villas in-between. In the west, Fishbourne Roman Palace is close to the Roman walls and the Roman remains of Chichester (a visit to the Novium museum helps see these too). North of the city at Bignor is another explorable Roman villa with evidence of a barn over 200ft long. In East Sussex the extensive walls of Pevensey Castle tell the earliest chapter of a stronghold existing for over eighteen centuries. Both sets of walls were built later on in the Roman occupation of Sussex; Chichester’s walls also weren’t built at the time of the founding of the city (known as Noviomagnus Regensium or Regnum for short), which sat on a crossroads of trading routes, but in about AD 200. This hard-to-defend site gained importance due to its proximity to a second landing site for Roman invaders.

The Roman walls at Pevensey.

The Roman invasion of AD 43 firstly landed in Kent and then worked its way towards the Thames, with a second invasion spearhead landing somewhere around the Selsey area the following year. Roman military leader Vespasian, who would later become Emperor in AD 69, seems to have used Bosham as his camp to conquer the South-West of England. Puppet leader Cogidubnus was put in charge of the Regni, and Sussex seems to have prospered well under his leadership for the Romans, with a network of roads (most famously Stane Street, today the A29 heading out from Chichester to London), a bridge at Alfoldean and wealthy villas making the most of Sussex’s rural riches. Cogidubnus also seems to have prospered, becoming a Roman citizen and possibly being given Fishbourne Palace for his collaboration.

The Roman Empire may have appeared long-lasting at the time, but by the fifth century it was crumbling. Evidence of this was the construction of the great castle at Pevensey to defend the coastline from new raiders, the Saxons. Raiding of the Roman Empire in Britain or internal squabbling led to the building of not just Pevensey but a chain of Saxon shore forts. With the Roman departure from England, Roman occupation seems to have made way for invited protection parties to keep Sussex safe, and then, increasingly savagery and finally settlement. By the time a major invasion took place of the county, Sussex was already a place of Saxon settlement.

Like the second Roman invasion spearhead, Selsey (Seals’ Island) in West Sussex again seems to have been the landing site for the next Saxon set of invaders. By the fifth century Selsey stretched out much further to the south-west and the area today known as Owers Rocks out at sea is believed to be where the Saxons’ great settlement (including their cathedral) once stood. This was where the first (south) Saxon invaders who founded the county (and gave us our name – SudSeaxe – South Sax – Sussex), Aelle and sons Wlencing, Cymen and Cissa, are most commonly believed to have landed, around AD 457 (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lists this as 477 but is reckoned to be about two decades out). The first Saxons created the kingdom of Sussex and many of the names of its settlements still exist today as they battled, settled and married ever eastwards, ending their conquest at Pevensey after two decades. The remoteness, inaccessibility and belligerence of the people of the Haestingas, a mixed group of Saxons, Jutes and Danes, meant further eastwards conquest was prevented and the Haestingas seem to have remained a separate kingdom or tribe from that of the South Saxons until 771, when both Sussex and Hastings were subsumed by Mercia.

Sussex existed as a kingdom, with kings (but no queens) listed in the records from c.457, including the wonderfully named Watt, until it was subsumed again into the kingdom of Wessex to the west by 825. However, at least we have kept our name (where are you today, Wessex? Bring it on!).

There is a dearth of information about names for a century and a half after Aelle and Cissa first ruled in the fifth century until the baptism of King Athelwahl in 661. Sussex had experienced the impact of Christianity for over half a century by this time as Damian, the Bishop of Rochester, was a Sussex man.

The seventh and eighth centuries saw much fighting between the kingdoms of Sussex and Wessex. Athelwahl was killed by Caedwalla, King of Wessex from 688 to 725, and Sussex was invaded until the aldermen Berthum and Andhun repulsed him. Berthum was killed by Caedwalla for his troubles around 685. The wonderfully named King Ini (wouldn’t you love him to be followed by King Outie?) of Wessex then kept Wessex in control of its eastern neighbour and another kingdom’s monarch, Offa of Mercia (of Offa’s Dyke fame), would conquer both Sussex and the Haestingas by 771. To make things even more complex in this period, a team of kings seem to be ruling together at various times and we’re not entirely sure if some of our kings were kings in their own right, puppet rulers or even just aldermen for other kings. What we are sure about though is that the county’s capital was based at Chichester, which seems to have been captured from the earlier Romano-Britons by Aelle’s son Cissa (the ‘c’ in whose name was pronounced as ‘ch’, explaining why we don’t say ‘Ciss-chester’), or at least become its military governor. The kings resided, quite aptly, in Kingsham, just outside the city walls.

The kings of Sussex may not have left us much in the way of documentation about their reigns but the eastwards conquest of the first two – Aelle and Cissa – and the settlement of their people has left us with renamed and new places, and at least one battlefield for which we have lost all records of its location – Mercredesburn. Other mysteries from this era include whether the ‘lost’ burh of Eorpeburnan was in Sussex and who exactly the ‘Eadric’ was whose name is engraved on the sundial above the entrance to St Andrew’s church in Bishopstone. A King Eadric ruled Sussex around AD 463, and a much later (and presumably treacherous) Saxon lord called Eadric Streona of Mercia also possibly had links with Sussex via his father. Streona is one of the characters in English history who deserves more prominence in the history books than he gets just because he is such a delicious villain.