Anderida

The village where I grew up was one of two located on either side of the Roman fort of Anderida (or Anderitum). Archaeologists have dated the construction of this fort to around 290 C.E., during the reign of Carausias, who had declared himself Emperor of Britain and Northern Gaul. The land on which the fort was built was originally a peninsula surrounded by sea, or at least by a lagoon separated from the open sea by a shingle bank, and the outer curtain walls were roughly elliptical in shape. Substantial parts of the Roman walls still stand. Below is a photograph (taken by me in 2007) showing the wall close to the western entrance to the fort.

The Roman wall continues round the northern side of the enclosure, towering above the road joining our village, the village of Westham, to the village of Pevensey, located on the eastern side of the Roman fort.

But to walk from one village to the other, one did not need to walk along the road: taking a direct route eastwards along the High Street in Westham, one enters the Roman fort through its western entrance, crosses the substantial grassy area enclosed by its curtain walls, to emerge through an arch into the village of Pevensey.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 491 C.E. the Saxons, led by Aelle and Cissa besieged Anderida and slew all the inhabitants.

The roman fort of Anderida then found its way back into the historical record when William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, landed at, or near, the Roman fort in 1066. Precisely where William landed has been a matter of dispute. A history teacher at my grammar school in Bexhill gave a lesson on the Norman invasion in which he argued that the landing took place near Hooe or Ninfield, at a considerable distance around the edge of the former sea inlet, or lagoon, that at the time separated Anderida from the higher ground around Bexhill and Hastings. Other landing locations, such as Bulverhythe, near Hastings, have also been suggested.

The Normans, now established in England, built a castle within the medieval fort, which the garrisons of later centuries surrounded with impressive stone walls and towers that almost completely surround the “Inner Bailey” of the castle, now known as Pevensey Castle.

Originally the castle stood on the shoreline, and those arriving or departing by boat would enter or leave the castle through the water gate visible in the photograph below, which also shows a portion of the Roman wall incorporated in the curtain wall of the medieval castle

However the lagoon into which the peninsula of Pevensey once projected silted up, with the result that the present day coastline is now established at a distance of about a mile from Pevensey Castle. Moreover the portion of the Roman curtain wall above the shoreline collapsed down the steep slope above the former beach. The village of Pevensey is now surrounded on three sides by the Pevensey Levels, an area of flat grassy fields surrounded by ditches, reclaimed from the marshes and slobland that in Roman times would probably have been largely under water at high tide.