Here, as in the case of Hastings, but unlike every other Rape, the seat of government, Pevensey, was actually upon the sea.
The name of Pevensey is instructive of its antiquity. It is probably derived from Celtic roots signifying “the fortification at the far end of the wood,” which would exactly describe an important and fortified sea-coast town situated as Pevensey was situated to the forest from which it took its Roman name; for “Anderida,” or “Andresio,” certainly refers to the Weald, the Celtic forest of “Andred,” of which the Saxons made “the Andredswald.”
Incidentally one may digress to point out how crude and insufficient is the greater part of our hurried modern philology. But for an accident no one would have been able to work out the meaning of this name of Pevensey. It was gradually shortened (after passing through the strangest forms) to “Pemsey,” a comparatively recent change in the spelling, due perhaps to local patriotism, or perhaps to the affectation of some studious landlord who, in reproducing the ancient form, gave us the present spelling of the word, from which we are able to trace its ancient Celtic roots; but how many place-names up and down South England must have been wrongly ascribed to Teutonic origin from our ignorance of the local method of pronunciation!
It is doubtful whether anything of Roman structure remains in Pevensey, though much of the material used in the castle is Roman, and though the towers of that fortification are round. It is enough to remark, that after the long night of the Saxon period the town shared in the general renaissance of South England which followed the Norman Conquest. To give but one indication of this: it trebled in population in twenty years. There is little doubt that at this period, that is, throughout the end of the eleventh century, the whole of the twelfth, and beginning of the thirteenth, the harbour lay beneath the mound of the present ruins. The contour lines, slight as they are in elevation, and the nature of the soil are enough to prove this; nor is it difficult, as one stands on the height of Pevensey Castle, to reproduce the scene which must
CLIFFS NEAR EASTBOURNE
PEVENSEY TOWN
have presented itself to the eye of a man living six hundred years ago when he looked northwards and eastwards at high tide. The great marshy flats of the Level were a shallow bay covered by the sea, out of which bay there rounded in towards him a harbour protected from every side except the north-east, and even from that side exposed to no long drive of the weather. This harbour, which was naturally shallow, was probably deepened artificially, whether before or during the Roman occupation; it remained serviceable until past the close of that twelfth century which produced so many great changes in the physical condition as in the political constitutions of Western Europe. Thus Pevensey is one of the first of the lesser towns of England to receive its borough charter. It gets that charter in the ninth year of King John, and it counts as being politically the most important of the Cinque Ports, until there falls upon it the fate which has fallen upon every south-country harbour in turn. It was destroyed by that upon which it had lived, the sea. The beginning of the disaster, a mixture of drift silting up the harbour and of encroachment and breaking-down of its defences, may be dated from the middle of the thirteenth century, and after this date the decline continues with such rapidity that before the end of the French wars Pevensey is hardly a town. It has declined ever since.
You get in the Rape of Pevensey, as in that of Lewes, the universal Sussex rule that the inhabited places are first found in the neighbourhood of the sea. But this rule is modified in the case of Pevensey Rape by the ironstone of the Eastern Weald. But for the industry arising from the use of this the forest ridge of Ashdown would have remained as lonely as that of St. Leonards. As it was, many places upon either slope of the ridge are known to have been inhabited from the earliest times; for instance, Mayfield, which may properly be regarded as a foot-hill of Ashdown Forest, and as a part of the true Weald, is connected with the name of St. Dunstan, and formed one of that procession of ecclesiastical palaces which the See of Canterbury held all along the centre of the county, and of which the last westward is Slindon. Again, Rotherfield is, quite possibly, as old as Offa, or older; at least, dues from that parish were claimed by the Monastery of St. Denis near Paris, which dues were said to have been bequeathed by Bertoald, one of Offa’s lieutenants, during the lifetime of Charlemagne, and before the close of the eighth century. Frant, though we do not hear of it by name