The History of Old Winchelsea

By David EP Dennis

The medieval town of Old Winchelsea was destroyed by a great storm in 1287. Remarkably, it lasted for several hundred years on a shingle bank in the middle of Rye Bay in Sussex, England. This book describes the formation of the town, its incredible history of seaborne heroism, privateering and piracy, and its final destruction along with Dunwich in Suffolk, Old Romney and Broomhill in a hurricane-like tide of massive proportions. The book describes the author's two years of research into all of the causes of the climate change that led to the town's demise. In recent times nuclear power stations have been built close to the site of Old Winchelsea and Dunwich. The author questions our readiness to cope with deadly storm surges in the face of global warming and sea level rises. The loss of this bustling town with its seven hundred homes, fifty inns, prisons, churches, salt pans, tide mills, royal apartments and shipyards, is a salutary lesson for us today. What is the point of studying history if we don't learn from it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: David EP Dennis
• Release date: May 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223557890

David EP Dennis

David EP Dennis is a retired RAF officer. He lives in East Sussex, England. He is married and has three children and six grandchildren. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development and a Licentiate of City & Guilds International. David is a member of the Open University Poetry Society and a Saatchi artist. He has founded two national charities. He now engages in extensive historical research and works to inform and preserve heritage and wildlife through his photography.  David has had a remarkably wide-ranging career: as an RAF Mountain Rescue Team member, PA to the Red Arrows, many important military posts and as inspector and consultant for education and vocational training. He currently works as a Sussex Police volunteer writer. He has travelled worldwide, especially in the Arctic, Scandinavia, the Middle East, and Australia. David has just completed his studies for an Honours degree in Creative Writing, Classic and Linguistics with the Open University and his intention is to create poems, books, articles, and historical research until the universe stops him. 

Book preview

The History of Old Winchelsea

by

David EP Dennis

CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF ENGLISH MEDIEVAL PORTS

OLD WINCHELSEA (Sussex) and DUNWICH (Suffolk) – 1287

PREFACE

CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF

THE ENGLISH MEDIEVAL PORTS OF

OLD WINCHELSEA (SUSSEX) AND DUNWICH (SUFFOLK) IN 1287

This book is directly relevant to the situation we find ourselves in today, to both humanity in general and the people of the United Kingdom.

In this book you will read about the history of the Winchelsea area, presently in East Sussex, and of Dunwich in Suffolk. You will also learn about life in medieval times, storms, vulcanism, glaciology, bioluminescence, chaos theory, sea level rises and climate change. These aspects are included simply because climate, marine and geological forces destroyed medieval Old Winchelsea, the main entrepôt port for London, England between 1250 and 1287, and contributed to the destruction of Dunwich from 1287 onwards. It is my hope that this will be a ground-breaking book in both literary and literal senses.

What is often referred to as Old Winchelsea was an important port and seafaring community that developed on a coastal shingle bank promontory from 980 CE, was firmly established by 1066, and was then progressively destroyed between 1250 and 1287. This happened at the same time as the Suffolk port of Dunwich was partially destroyed. The two destructive events were linked - both being wiped out through identical sets of forces. Other locations destroyed on the same final night were the settlements of Old Romney and Broomhill. Their locations are shown on this map.

Vindelis was the Latin name for Old Winchelsea, now lost to the waves.

This book describing the life and death of Old Winchelsea, though many pages long, is only a brief overview of the tumultuous times that its citizens experienced. As a member of the Rye Harbour History Group headed by Dr. Barry Yates, I intend to carry on researching, despite the many hours it has taken so far.

Old Winchelsea was a part of the seven ports that controlled that region of the North Sea and English Channel called The Narrow Seas extending from Pevensey to Yarmouth and taking in the guarding of London at the mouth of the Thames. This was England’s vulnerable area for both invasion by and trade with Europe. It has been called the country’s Achilles’ Heel. These seven ports consisted of the five Cinque Ports (Fr.): Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney, and Hastings, along with two additional Ancient Towns, Rye and Winchelsea. Yarmouth was not a Cinque Port or Ancient Town, but its ships also acted for England many times. Yarmouth also fought the Cinque Ports for fishing rights, and there was great enmity between them. The Cinque Ports had sub-ports called ‘limbs’ or ‘members,’ such as Faversham, Tenterden and Bulverhythe.

The early port controllers were called until 13th century ‘Keepers of the Coast’. They were sometimes piratical but most acted firmly to implement legal and organisational outcomes that worked in England’s interest. Examples of early ‘Keepers’ were Earl Godwin and his son King Harold Godwinsson and Bishop Odo. In the 13th century, the title of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports was given to powerful barons like William de Warenne and Peter de Savoy, Earl of Richmond. During the great storm of 1287, the Lord Warden was Sir Stephen de Pencester. Much later the Wardens acted in a purely ceremonial role, with cloaks, swords and canopies to echo past glories. Some well-known Wardens were Admiral Blake, William Pitt, the Duke of Wellington and Winston Churchill.

In 1066, the south-east coast of England looked vastly different to the landscape of 2023. At Pevensey there were flooded salt marshes with a promontory bearing ruins of the Roman fort Anderida (built 290 CE). Some eleven miles east of the fort was a large inlet, know earlier to the Vikings as Stordisdale. Later it was called the River Asten at Bulverhythe and is now called Combe Haven. Further east was the small Priory inlet at Hastings and an extensive line of high and vertical sandstone cliffs followed by the remains of Roman salt pans at Pett Level. Next, the long shingle bank bearing the island port of Old Winchelsea, south-southeast of Rye. Past that was Broomhill and the harbour of Old Romney. A huge area of salt water stretched inland between Dungeness and Appledore with side tributaries leading to the Brede Valley and Sedlescombe. In the middle of this great area of water was Castle Toll (a possible Alfredian supply fort and place of refuge called Eorpeburnan) which was raided by Vikings in 893 CE.

There is much debate about the location of the landing in 1066 by the Norman invasion fleet and Winchelsea would have been one of many possible options for landing a large fleet. Although the Bayeux Tapestry shows the word ‘Pevensae’ as being the likely landing place, the Roman ruin was simply seen as a useful coastal marker. It had been built by the Roman Carausius, usurper Emperor of Britannia (assassinated by Allectus in 293 CE) and second usurper Allectus (died 296 CE) as a defensive mound. Recent archaeology has shown that it was constructed by driving wooden piles into the marshes and placing stone and wood defences upon those piles. Remarkably, coins dating back to the Bactrian kings in the time of Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE) have been found beneath the Roman foundations.

Mainwaring Baines, my history master at William Parker Grammar School, was also the curator of Hastings Museum. As an academic, he was of the opinion that no commander would make their troops plough through the vast Pevensey saltmarshes in a probably wet late September to reach Senlac, at what is now Battle. This is what he said in his book Historic Hastings (Mainwaring Baines, 1986).

‘As the Norman fleet neared the English shore in the mists of that September morning excitement would grow and when the great grey mass of Pevensey Castle (Anderida) was sighted, someone would be sure to identify it and the name would be passed along from ship to ship. Pevensey was the only named place in that area. The armada must have made its way slowly eastwards and landed its army on a broad front near Bulverhythe, no doubt sending out fighting patrols ahead. From all accounts they met no serious opposition. When the Bayeux Tapestry was being made 20 years later, the question of the landing place must have been raised. Promptly came the one name that any old veteran who had taken part in it would remember—Pevensey—and so it was recorded for all time. No military commander would consider a long march of twenty-six miles around the huge inlet - now Pevensey Marshes.’

Local historian Nick Austin takes up this idea in his book ‘Secrets of the Norman Invasion’ (Austin, 2021) putting forward the idea that the Norman fleet used the harbour complex at Bulverhythe, between Hastings and Pevensey, and its village of Bullington to land. His theory is that Normans and Anglo-Saxons fought the famous decisive battle near Crowhurst at the red, iron-stained headwaters of the River Asten (now the Combe Haven River).

However, academic historian Kathleen Tyson, in her three books (Tyson, 2014, 2017, 2018) on the subject, suggests the area leading into the inland lagoon at Winchelsea, with the battle taking place near Petit Iham. The sandstone heights at Petit Iham were used to build New Winchelsea when the shingle bank town of Old Winchelsea was destroyed by the sea in 1287.

These ideas and contentions arise because there has never been a single artefact found at Senlac/Battle which could be scientifically attributed to the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066. This is not that strange because no remnants have been found of the Battle of Evesham (1265) either. It is a matter of how the battlefield was picked clean of the dead by relatives of the slain, the monks, and camp followers and, of course, local plunderers. It is also a matter of how acidic the soils were, subsequent ploughing, and weather erosion, and so it is really a stroke of luck nowadays to find remnants of any medieval battles.

When we consider the sea, it is even harder to find the remains of wrecks. It is estimated that there have been around three million shipwrecks around the world and at least one hundred and fifty million souls have drowned, yet we are lucky to find anything left; and, certainly at Winchelsea, nothing has yet been found beneath the waves apart from some bricks. Despite the hope that these would turn out to be the remains of the churches on the shingle bank, archaeologists have suggested they were merely ballast from medieval ships, no longer needed and cast overboard when the ship’s tenders brought goods for transmission to the continent.

However, at Dunwich in Suffolk, which was also destroyed by storms, the University of Southampton’s hydrography department has found the ruins of the old town beneath the waves. My personal view is that we need the University of Southampton to do a thorough survey of Rye Bay once again. Since much of Old Winchelsea town was made of wood, it would also make sense for archaeologists to examine the great raft of shingle that now makes up Rye Harbour Nature Reserve and Pett beaches, along with the sands at Camber and Dungeness, to see if any deeply embedded wooden remnants can be dated to, say, 1100-1287. As the great storms you will read about in this book tore the township to pieces, so the huge masses of floating debris came ashore and would eventually have been covered by sand and shingle on beaches eternally affected by longshore drift.

The remarkable medieval town of Old Winchelsea was located in what is now Rye Bay, between Camber Sands and Pett Village cliffs. Because it stood on a giant shingle bank formed over thousands of years by the action of longshore drift on the pebbles of the English Channel, it was literally built ‘on stony ground’ and therefore could not last. However, while it did last it was the chief entrepôt port for London.

Further up the Kent coast, our government constructed Dungeness Nuclear Power Station. Even before it was finished, the government had to employ trucks to carry shingle to the beaches being stripped bare by the tide as sea levels began to rise due to global warming.

The people of Old Winchelsea could not replace their lost stones, though they tried many times to shore up their shores. Nature is not kind or unkind. It just does what it does, and we are fools if we do not respect it or try to understand it and work with it. We