The Auldest Tung

Timing

With regard to the question of when Saxon presence and therefore Saxon pressure built up in Anglic South Sussex it seems safe to assume that it reached at least a point of Saxon control by the date of effective Saxon take-over, 590 AD and had built up in the year’s before. Therefore counting back it, the pressure perhaps began in or before 522 AD and quite possibly on the death of Aelle himself, said to have been in 515 AD or thereabouts. It might even have begun earlier still in the years immediately after 501 AD as a reaction the arrival of that small certainly Germanic, perhaps Jutish bridgehead at Portchester/Langstone but have cranked up in the years after the death of Aelle’s son and that of successor, Cisse, said to have taken place in 567 AD but unlikely to have been so late as by then he would have been over a hundred. Far more likely is a death about 540 AD, which would, since he was not replaced, have left a hiatus of fifty years, with the three, perhaps four parts of a once unified kingdom, during that time ruled independently and therefore open to being picked off, one by one.

And then there is Pevensey, overrun in 491 AD, and the Battle of Mearcred’s Burn six year’s earlier. Counting back from Pevensey to Mearcred’s Burn gives us twelve kilometres,, seven to eight miles, which puts the battle somewhere just to the north of the then wide Pevensey inlet or somewhere on the banks of the Cuckmere River between where it then entered its estuary at Alfriston and Lower Horsebridge, ten miles to the north-west. The former is strategic in its own right, precisely the furthest point inland where sea-born attacking forces could then have landed and the latter the point where insurgent forces from the west would cross the river that marked the frontier and British defenders protecting a salient from the north to the sea would have been expected to make a stand. And there is more. From the Cuckmere along the South Down Way to East Meon it is 60 miles or fifty years, which takes us back to 535 AD. And it is also 40 year to West Dean in the downs above Chichester so 545 AD with Cisse’s death probably chronologically in between. It opens up the scenario that there might first have been Saxon encroachment, albeit slow, encircling and probably absorbing the Portchester/Langstone enclave, towards but not necessarily into Anglic territory strongly controlled under Aelle and Cisse until about 540 AD and then far greater encroachment around and even penetration into it in the years of Anglic confusion that followed. Indeed there perhaps is evidence of precisely that, not on the coast but topographically in the hills behind with waves of “downs” rippling out in slightly staccato but perhaps understandable bursts until the South Downs finally were confronted by the sea some seventy miles and sixty-years later.