The Little History of Sussex (eBook)

Kevin Newman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
192 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-1-80399-581-6 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

Kevin Newman is the author of over a dozen books on Sussex as well as the co-writer of a range of KS3/GCSE textbooks and other educational resources. He contributes regularly to a number of local publications such as Sussex Life, and has written various history supplements for the Argus newspaper, including Brilliant Brighton and Super Sussex. When not writing he is the lead teacher in Humanities and PSHE at a small school in Sussex and enjoys being a tour guide and owner of a history consultancy, All-Inclusive History. He is currently studying for a PhD.

Textauszug

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...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.12.2023
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Schlagworte: 1066 • adur • ancient sussex • argus newspaper • argus sussex • Arun • Arundel • Battle Of Hastings • boxgrove • brighton history • brilliant brighton • Chichester • Crawley • eastbourne • flag of sussex • georgian sussex • Hastings • history of sussex • Horsham • kingdom of sussex • Lewes • little book of sussex • mid sussex • norman sussex • prehistoric sussex • roman conquest britain • Rother • saxon sussex • super sussex • sussex day • sussex history • sussex life • tudor sussex • victorian sussex • wealden • Worthing
• ISBN-10: 1-80399-581-5 / 1803995815
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80399-581-6 / 9781803995816