# Castrum Anderitum

3rd century Roman fort in the province of Britannia

Pevensey, United Kingdom

Settlement · Fortification. 290 CE

## Story

• Anderitum, also called Anderida or Anderidos, was a Saxon Shore fort at Pevensey in East Sussex, dated about AD 290, to AD 280–300, and also to the first half of the fourth century.
• The oval walls enclose almost 4 hectares, stand up to 8.1 metres high, and once held a garrison listed as the numerus Abulcorum, with coins of Carausius and Allectus in the foundations.
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records a slaughter of Britons here in 491, while another reckoning places that attack in 471, after which pottery and glass show people living inside the walls again.
• William landed in the bay on 28 September 1066 and a medieval castle grew inside the Roman circuit, later used as a prison, an Armada gun platform, and a camouflaged post in 1940.
• Stamped tiles once used to date the fort to Honorius were made around the 1906 excavation and are suspected of Charles Dawson.
• The castle is closed until March 2027, and a ticket booked before midnight the day before a visit is discounted.

## Visiting

The castle is closed until March 2027, so there is no admission until that closure ends. Tickets booked online until midnight the day before a visit are discounted, and a ticket bought on the day of the visit is full price. Tickets are valid all day within the opening hours. Admission is free for members who bring a membership card.

## History

Anderitum, also called Anderida or Anderidos, was a fort of the Saxon Shore at Pevensey in East Sussex. It occupied a peninsula in a tidal marsh, and the sea that once reached the walls now lies about a mile away, or 1.6 kilometres to the south-east, or around 2 kilometres from the present coastline. Oak piles under the wall were felled between about AD 280 and about AD 300, and the fort is also placed at about AD 290, in the usurpation of Allectus from 293 to 296, and in the first half of the fourth century.

The oval circuit encloses almost 4 hectares. The wall is up to 3.7 metres thick, survives up to 8.1 metres high, and runs for more than 500 metres, with at least 15 projecting bastions of which 10 remain. Coins of Carausius and Allectus were found in the foundations. Constantius Chlorus invaded in 296 to end that break from Rome, and nothing shows that the coastal forts, including this one, took part.

A coin of 330 to 335 found under a tower has been read as a later repair.

Tiles stamped as if for the emperor Honorius were fired about the time of the excavation of 1906 to 1908, and Charles Dawson is the person suspected of making them. The late Roman list names the numerus Abulcorum at the fort, perhaps in place of a garrison moved to Gaul, and the buildings inside have been estimated for as many as 1,000 soldiers. A timber-lined well still held a bucket, and its fill contained the bones of cattle, sheep, red deer, wild boar, birds, dogs, and cats.

After the troops left, Britons remained inside the walls. African red-slipped pottery reached the site in the fifth century and again in the seventh. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle places Ælle and his son Cissa at Andredesceaster, and the killing of the Britons there is dated both to 471 and to 491. Occupation is then put in the middle of the sixth century, after about a century of abandonment, or by the middle of the seventh, while the written record stays silent for a long stretch.

On 28 September 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, landed in Pevensey Bay and fortified the Roman walls before the Battle of Hastings on 14 October. The fleet is given as about 700 ships, as 776, and as between 700 and 1,000. He gave the castle and the Rape of Pevensey to his half-brother Robert, Count of Mortain. Stone defences, including the keep and the inner bailey, accumulated between about 1100 and about 1250, and the castle was besieged in 1088, in 1147, from 1264 to 1265, and in 1399.

In the fifteenth century the castle held prisoners, among them James I of Scotland, seized in 1406, and Joan of Navarre. A survey of 1573 found the buildings ruined, and in 1587 two heavy guns stood on an earthen platform against the Armada. In May 1940 the walls were refortified with camouflaged pillboxes and held until 1944. The castle is closed until March 2027.

## Photographs

- [The west entrance to the Roman fort — Richard Nevell from London, United Kingdom](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Pevensey_Castle_%2830%29_%2840269032085%29.jpg)
- [Pevensey Castle curtain wall — MortimerCat](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/PevenseyRomanWallC.jpg)
- [Pevensey Castle, Pevensey, East Sussex. A panoramic shot looking up at the South East wall from down in the dry moat. A large piece of fallen masonry dominates — Tim Knight](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Pevensey_Castle%2C_Pevensey%2C_East_Sussex_-_geograph.org.uk_-_166243.jpg)
- [Outer Walls, Pevensey Castle Built on top of the original Roman walls around 1101. The chimneys beyond the wall belong to the Priory House Hotel and give some — Simon Carey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Outer_Walls%2C_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_697720.jpg)
- [Outer wall Pevensey Castle These ruins where once part of the original Roman fort 'Anderida' — PAUL FARMER](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Outer_wall_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1410474.jpg)
- [Priory Court Hotel Pevensey The Priory Court Hotel is a 17th Century former vicarage that overlooks the ruins of Pevensey Castle. The road is the High Street — PAUL FARMER](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Priory_Court_Hotel_Pevensey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1412744.jpg)
- [WWII gun emplacement at Pevensey Castle On the right of the picture is the Roman wall and to the centre the gun emplacement. The picture is taken from Castle — PAUL FARMER](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/WWII_gun_emplacement_at_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1412746.jpg)
- [Bastion, Outer Walls, Pevensey Castle Parts of the outer walls date from the 4th century and were built up and strengthened during the medieval period. This — Simon Carey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Bastion%2C_Outer_Walls%2C_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1725649.jpg)
- [Pillbox, Pevensey Castle Hidden amongst the outer wall which dates back to the 4th century with medieval alterations is this pill box from World War Two. There — Simon Carey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Pillbox%2C_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1725640.jpg)
- [Plan of Pevensey Castle — Charles Reed Peers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Pevensey_Castle_plan.png)

## Sources

- [Anderitum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderitum) — Wikipedia
- [History of Pevensey Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/pevensey-castle/history/) — English Heritage
- [Pevensey Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/pevensey-castle/) — English Heritage
- [Prices and Opening Times for Pevensey Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/pevensey-castle/prices-and-opening-times/) — English Heritage
- [Pevensey Castle: a Saxon Shore fort, Norman defences, a medieval enclosure castle, and later associated remains](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1013379) — Historic England
- [Pevensey Castle, Sussex: Excavations in the Roman Fort and Medieval Keep, 1993–95](https://www.wessexarch.co.uk/our-work/pevensey-castle) — Wessex Archaeology
- [Pevensey Castle, Pevensey, East Sussex: architectural, archaeological and aerial investigation](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/8088/PevenseyCastlePevenseyEastSussexArchitecturalArchaeologicalandAerialInvestigation) — Historic England
- [Tree-ring analysis of Roman piles from Pevensey Castle, East Sussex](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/data-catalogue/resource/42aaa919b5e8e4af7419427e62e97c303e008a53ed83489fac8f239e38acf651) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Battle of Hastings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings) — Wikipedia
- [Constantius Chlorus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantius_Chlorus) — Wikipedia
- [Charles Dawson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dawson) — Wikipedia
- [Anglo-Saxon Chronicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Chronicle) — Wikipedia
- [Valerie Maxfield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Maxfield) — Wikipedia
- [Middle Ages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages) — Wikipedia
- [East Sussex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Sussex) — Wikipedia
- [MV Anderida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Anderida) — Wikipedia
- [A new publication about Pevensey Castle](https://richardthecastellan.wordpress.com/2024/08/04/a-new-publication-about-pevensey-castle/) — Richard Nevell
- [Pevensey Castle teachers’ kit](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/siteassets/home/visit/places-to-visit/pevensey-castle/schools/pevensey-teachers-kit-2023.pdf) — English Heritage
- [Pevensey Castle (30) (40269032085).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pevensey_Castle_(30)_(40269032085).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [PevenseyRomanWallC.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PevenseyRomanWallC.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Pevensey Castle, Pevensey, East Sussex - geograph.org.uk - 166243.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pevensey_Castle,_Pevensey,_East_Sussex_-_geograph.org.uk_-_166243.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Outer Walls, Pevensey Castle - geograph.org.uk - 697720.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Outer_Walls,_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_697720.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Outer wall Pevensey Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1410474.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Outer_wall_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1410474.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Priory Court Hotel Pevensey - geograph.org.uk - 1412744.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Priory_Court_Hotel_Pevensey_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1412744.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [WWII gun emplacement at Pevensey Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1412746.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WWII_gun_emplacement_at_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1412746.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Bastion, Outer Walls, Pevensey Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1725649.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bastion,_Outer_Walls,_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1725649.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Pillbox, Pevensey Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1725640.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pillbox,_Pevensey_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1725640.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Pevensey Castle plan.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pevensey_Castle_plan.png) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Anderitum, also written Anderida, Anderidos, and Anderitos, and later called Anderita, was a fort of the Saxon Shore in the Roman province of Britain. Its ruins stand at the west end of the village of Pevensey in East Sussex, on a low spur of sand and clay. In the Roman and medieval periods that spur was a peninsula in a tidal lagoon and marsh. Coastal deposition and reclamation have since made the ground around it dry, and the fort is now landlocked. One account places the present coastline about a mile away, and another places the sea 1.6 kilometres to the south-east. A third places the spur around 2 kilometres north-west of the present coastline of East Sussex. The open sea once lay along the south side, and the water reached the walls in places. The inlet ran inland as far as Hailsham and was dotted with patches of higher ground that stood as islands at high tide. Rickney, Horse Eye, North Eye, and Pevensey take their names from the Old English word for an island. No civilian settlement outside the walls has been found. The peninsula left little room for one.

The fort is named Anderidos or Anderitos in the late Roman list of offices, and Anderida was long the form most often used. The name has been read as a Latin rendering of a Celtic intensive prefix, ande-, with ritu-, a word for a ford that survives in Welsh and Cornish, so that the whole means Great Ford. Andred remained in use after the Roman period. The wood around the fort became Andredes Weald, the Forest of Andred. Romanised Britons, called Wealas in the Old English annals, were remembered in those woods, which has been taken to mean that the culture of the fort persisted in the forest after Saxon settlement.

East Sussex is the ceremonial county on this part of the Channel coast, bordered by Kent, West Sussex, and Surrey. It and West Sussex were once the single county of Sussex, the land of the South Saxons, who established themselves in the fifth century after the Roman army had gone. The coast brought later invaders as well, including the Normans after the English defeat at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Sussex was divided into six rapes. The three eastern rapes kept their county town at Lewes. Pevensey and its hinterland, the Rape of Pevensey, became one of those great lordships. Away from the coast the county is largely the Weald, the sandstone country that was once the Forest of Andred, and the South Downs.

The nine British forts of the Saxon Shore are a rare class, all in the south-east, on or near estuaries or the coast between the Wash and the Isle of Wight, with related forts in northern France and Belgium. Their walls are massive, usually with a wall walk and a parapet, and they do not share one standard plan: some are square, some polygonal, and Pevensey is oval, aligned from north-east to south-west, apparently because the wall followed the hill. Other forts of the same generation are rectilinear where the ground allowed it. One account dates the class to the third century, probably between about AD 225 and AD 285, and calls Anderitum the last of them to be built in Britain. Another dates this fort to about AD 290, from the tree rings of oak piles under the wall, found in an excavation of 1994. The piles themselves grew through a span from AD 131 to AD 270, and they appear to have been felled between about AD 280 and about AD 300, though the surviving wood will not give a single felling year. The excavation of 1993 to 1995 put the wall in AD 280 to 300, very possibly in the usurpation of Allectus from 293 to 296. A further account dates the same wall to the first half of the fourth century. A coin of 330 to 335, found under a tower in the 1930s, has been read as a major repair or rebuilding around that later time. The disagreements are left as they stand: late third century, about 290, 280 to 300, perhaps 293 to 296, and the first half of the fourth century, with a possible further campaign of work after 330.

Other forts on the south and east coasts, among them Portchester, Burgh, Richborough, and Lympne, were built or rebuilt in the same years. They share the D-shaped wall towers, then a new feature. One explanation of the burst of building is the break from Rome in 286 to 296. Carausius, who commanded the British fleet in the Channel, revolted in 286 and declared himself emperor of Britain and northern Gaul. His treasurer Allectus killed him in 293 and was himself killed in 296 when Constantius Chlorus invaded Britain to put the usurpation down. Coins of both Carausius and Allectus have been found in the wall foundations, so the fort may have been begun to hold the breakaway province against reconquest. When Constantius Chlorus landed in 296, nothing shows that Pevensey or the other coastal forts took part.

Constantius Chlorus, Marcus Flavius Valerius Constantius, was born no later than about 250, probably of humble family in the Danube province later called Dacia Ripensis, and the Byzantine nickname Chlorus, the Pale, was not used in his lifetime. He served as caesar from 293 to 305 and as augustus from 305 until his death. Around 289 he set aside Helena, the mother of Constantine, and married a daughter of the emperor Maximian. He was given Gaul, defeated Carausius there, and then defeated Allectus in Britain. He also fought the Alamanni and the Franks on the Rhine. When the persecution of Christians was ordered in 303 he had churches demolished in his territory but did not hunt worshippers down. In May 305 he became senior emperor and campaigned against the Picts beyond the Antonine Wall. He died suddenly at York on 25 July 306. The army at once acclaimed his son Constantine, and the tetrarchy that Diocletian had built began to come apart. Constantine held the whole empire by 324. The fort at Pevensey belongs to the years of that father’s rise, not to a story of the son.

The list of offices, whose western section is usually placed in the late fourth or early fifth century and may contain entries already out of date, names Anderitum among nine forts under the Count of the Saxon Shore. It is not clear that the nine were planned as one system. Some may have kept naval detachments, working with ships on the French side of the Channel. The same list names a fleet, the classis Anderidaensis, after the fort. A road of the late Roman period, probably built with the fort, linked it inland. The harbour was a sheltered landing, and a fort in that place could watch the shore and block a passage inland.

The curtain was not raised in one pour. Vertical breaks mark where lengths met. At least four gangs seem to have worked on the surviving wall, each given about 20 metres, or 66 feet, at a time, and each building in a different way, with more or fewer courses of tile or with ironstone facing where that stone was to hand. The difference may be nothing more than what the boats had landed that week. The volume of stone and mortar has been put at about 31,600 cubic metres, or 1,120,000 cubic feet. That mass would have needed about 600 boatloads or 49,000 wagonloads. Moving it by road has been reckoned at 250 wagons and 1,500 to 2,000 oxen. By sea, a continuous season of 280 days has been reckoned at 18 vessels. The labour has been put at about 160,000 man-days, which is 285 men for two years or 115 men for five.

The wall stands on a deep foundation. One account describes a ditch 15 feet, or 4.6 metres, deep, with oak piles driven in and packed with flint and clay, then a frame of oak beams with more flint and clay, and a cap of cement under the masonry. Another, from the digging of 1906 to 1908, describes footings of rammed chalk and flint, oak piles, and a framework of beams, with the inner face stepped up from a wide base. Both accounts agree on the piles and the timber frame. The surviving timbers are what the tree rings date. The core is flint and sandstone rubble, faced with coursed greensand and ironstone and banded with red tile. The wall is up to 3.7 metres thick and survives up to 8.1 metres high. An older measuring put it at about 12 feet thick and nearly 25 feet high. It was more than 500 metres, or 1,640 feet, long, and in places it still stands almost to its full height. It once carried a wall walk and a parapet. The enclosed area is almost 4 hectares, which is nearly 10 acres. The circuit is described both as an irregular oval of that size and as a rough oval aligned from north-east to south-west.

A landslip on the south-eastern side destroyed about 180 metres of the perimeter. Fallen pieces remain, but most were taken away, and shorter lengths have also fallen on the north-west and the east. In 1318 the breach was said to be 20 perches, just over 100 metres, about half the present gap, so the hole has widened since that report. The sea is the likely agent: it undercut the wall, the wall fell, and much of the rubble was washed off. A common assumption puts that loss somewhere between 1066 and the abandonment of the castle in the sixteenth century. A display and later archaeological studies put the building-up of the levels between the castle and the modern shore at the end of the Middle Ages, which would force any large attack by the sea to an earlier date. Documents of the twelfth century already speak of more usable land and of difficulty in finding water for a mill, so the retreat of the tide was under way by then. Another account says that by 1300 the sea had begun to leave the castle and that its military value fell with the water.

Bastions strengthened the wall. They are externally projecting, semicircular or D-shaped, spaced irregularly, and about 5 metres across. There were at least 15, and 10 survive. The main gate, on the south-west, the landward side, is a rectangular gatehouse set back between two solid bastions 8 metres apart. The entrance was an arch 2.7 metres wide, with an oblong guardroom on each side. The whole gate projects inside the wall and is thought to have risen two or even three storeys. In front of it a ditch 5.5 metres wide was dug, once crossed by a wooden bridge. The ditch silted up. A stretch of 40 metres toward its south-eastern end has been recut and left open. On the east a simpler gate, originally an arch about 3 metres wide, opened toward the Roman harbour, now under the village. The arch that stands there is a modern reconstruction of the Norman rebuilding. A wooden causeway from that gate into the fort was found in a partial excavation. Midway on the north-western wall a ruined postern about 2 metres wide is reached by a curved passage inside the wall. Around 1200 a postern was also built to replace a fallen stretch of the south wall and a bastion. Bastion 10, which seems to have fallen around 1200, still lies on the slope and was not washed away, which has been used to argue that other missing lengths of the south wall had already gone earlier. Bastion 3 is the only one with an upper storey above the Roman parapet, and that addition appears to be of the eleventh century. One account says the Roman tower at the north-west corner of the later inner bailey was raised as a lookout because the Normans feared a counter-attack from the north.

The digging of 1906 to 1908 found that the buildings inside, for a garrison put at up to 1,000 men with their animals and stores, were timber framed with wattle and daub. A timber-lined well about a metre square in the south-western part of the fort still held a wooden bucket with its rope. The well was later filled with rubbish. The bones in it were cattle, sheep, red deer, wild boar, wild birds, dogs, and cats, with sea shells, which is the clearest picture of what the garrison ate.

The same late list of offices records the commander at Anderitum as the praepositus of the numerus Abulcorum, an infantry unit of the frontier troops. It also attaches army and naval units named from the fort to the Vicus Julius, in the army in Gaul and stationed at Lutetia, the city that became Paris. That has been read to mean that the first garrison had been moved to Gaul by the time the list was compiled, and that the Abulci had taken their place. The Abulci appear again with the field army in Gaul and in the suppression of the rebellion of Magnentius in Pannonia Secunda in 351. Zosimus describes them in a way that makes them an elite body, serving both in the field and, probably as one detachment, at this fort. They may have been federate troops raised from allied peoples under a Roman prefect, or a single warrior band with its own leader. Similar units are listed at the other Shore forts. Their place in the coastal system was set out in the 1989 handbook of the Saxon Shore edited by Valerie Maxfield, whose work is the archaeology of the Roman army and its frontiers.

Other dating evidence was thrown out in the 1970s. The excavation of 1906 to 1908 found shattered tiles stamped HON AUG ANDRIA, and those stamps were used to give the fort to the emperor Honorius in the early fifth century. Thermoluminescence later showed that the tiles had been fired about the time of that dig. Charles Dawson, the amateur who has been blamed for the Piltdown Man hoax, is the person suspected of making them. He was born on 11 July 1864, grew up in Hastings after a childhood in Preston, trained in the law, and collected fossils. He was called the Wizard of Sussex for a run of spectacular finds, some later exposed as frauds, and he died of pernicious anaemia at Lewes on 10 August 1916. His own record says that he later produced fake evidence for the last phases of Roman occupation at Pevensey Castle. The Honorius date for the walls does not stand.

One account thinks the garrison had left by the latter half of the fourth century, and that little is known until the eleventh. Another keeps a military occupation at least to the end of the fourth century, and the list of offices still names the fort in a compilation of the late fourth or early fifth century. After the troops left Britain in the early fifth century, or in the year 410 in one telling, Britons went on living inside the walls. A pair of copper-alloy tweezers of the early fifth century, with expanded ends, is a Germanic type and may have belonged to a Saxon settler at the moment the army left or just after. Deep soil, the dark earth, built up against the inside of the Roman wall through the Roman and early medieval periods. Imports of African red-slipped ware appear here in the fifth century and again in the seventh, the first such imports known in south-east England. Glass fragments have been read as a sign of a high-status place, and the fort may have served as a royal centre. By the middle of the ninth century, or in the late Anglo-Saxon period in another account, Pevensey was a fishing port and a place that made salt.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the name given to a set of annals in Old English. The lost first version, the Common Stock, was made in the late ninth century, probably in Wessex in the circle of Alfred, who reigned from 871 to 899, and a version was in the hands of Asser by 893. Nine manuscripts survive, none of them the original. The annals run from a date of 60 BC for Julius Caesar and, in one copy, were still being added to in 1154. They are a principal source for England between the end of Roman rule and the decades after the Norman Conquest, and they are also political, written in ways that favour the house of Wessex. Pevensey’s early entries sit in that compilation.

An annal dated 477 says that Ælle came to Britain with his three sons, Cymen, Wlenking, and Cissa, in three ships, and landed at a place called Cymenshore. They killed many of the Britons and drove others into the wood called Andred’sley. A separate annal, placed at 491, says that Ælle and Cissa besieged Andredesceaster and killed all who lived there, so that not one Briton was left. One account says the chronicle records the siege and the slaughter in 471. Another keeps 491 as the year written in the annal, and then moves the event twenty years earlier, to about 471, because of a dating error traced to Gildas, on whom the chronicle draws. The fort is therefore said to have been sacked in 471 and in 491. It is uncertain whether anyone, Briton or Saxon, stayed immediately afterwards. One account has a Saxon community back by about the middle of the sixth century, leaving pottery, glass, and other objects. Another has the fort empty for about a century and then lived in again. A third puts a community back inside the walls by the middle of the seventh century, with imported pottery and glass of the middle and late Saxon periods. A teaching account says that after the killing the place drops from the written record for 600 years and probably fell to ruin, which can sit beside the objects: the annals are silent, and the ground is not. Between the fifth century and the reign of Edward the Confessor the chronicle does not mention Pevensey, and then it mentions the haven. That return has been linked to Edward’s closer ties with Normandy. Almost continuous occupation from the middle and late Saxon period has been used to argue that the burh called Haestingaceaster was here rather than at Hastings, where no significant settlement before the Conquest has been shown, and that the port-name could belong to either place. The opposite caution is that the coast at both Pevensey and Hastings has changed greatly, and that much of eleventh-century Hastings has been lost to the sea.

The Middle Ages, in the European reckoning, run from about the fifth century to the late fifteenth, from the fall of the western empire to the Renaissance and the wars of religion. The early part of that age is the time of the migrations and the new kingdoms, the South Saxons among them. The high part, after the year 1000, is the time of the stone castle, the sieges, and the royal favourites at Pevensey. The late part is the time of the prison, the decay, and the guns. The fort’s second life is that whole span.

On 28 September 1066, before dawn, three days after Harold Godwinson’s victory at Stamford Bridge, William, Duke of Normandy, brought his fleet into Pevensey Bay. Edward the Confessor had died on 5 January 1066 with no clear heir. Harold, Earl of Wessex, was crowned. William claimed that Edward had promised him the throne and that Harold had sworn to it. Harold’s brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada of Norway had already struck in the north. Hardrada’s fleet was put at more than 300 ships and perhaps 15,000 men. They took York after the Battle of Fulford on 20 September. Harold, who had held the south coast through the summer and had dismissed the militia and his fleet on 8 September so that men could bring in the harvest, marched north and killed Hardrada and Tostig at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Only 24 of the Norwegian ships were needed to carry the survivors away. The English army was battered and far from the Channel. William had mustered at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme and had been ready to cross from about 12 August, held back by weather or by Harold’s fleet. He crossed a few days after Stamford Bridge. A few of his ships were blown to Romney and fought the local levy there.

The size of the fleet is not one figure. A contemporary document claims 776 ships, and that claim may be inflated. Other accounts say about 700, between 700 and 800, and between 700 and 1,000. The army that those ships carried is likewise a range: modern estimates of 7,000 to 8,000 men including 1,000 to 2,000 cavalry, of 10,000 to 12,000, of 10,000 including 3,000 cavalry, and of 7,500, against contemporary claims running from 14,000 to 150,000 that are treated as exaggerated. About half the invading force is reckoned infantry, a quarter cavalry, and a quarter archers or crossbowmen. Only about 35 named companions can be securely placed with William at the later battle.

He sheltered the first night in a temporary fortification inside the old Roman walls, almost certainly a timber work, and one account says it was raised in less than a day from timbers cut and prepared before the voyage. He cut a ditch across the peninsula to separate the ruins from the mainland and repaired the walls. William of Jumièges, writing about 1070, says he landed at Pevensey and at once built a castle with a very strong rampart, entrusted to his warriors. William of Poitiers says he seized and fortified Pevensey first and then Hastings, as a stronghold for the men and a refuge for the ships. Orderic Vitalis says the landing met no resistance, and that Pevensey and Hastings were entrusted to a chosen body of soldiers to cover a retreat and guard the fleet. Guy of Amiens, writing about 1068, speaks of walls rebuilt to protect the ships and of castles lately destroyed that were put up again, which may mean the neglected Roman circuit or may mean a wider repair. The Bayeux Tapestry shows an uneventful landing at Pevensey. An earthwork south of bastion 3 was once read as the hasty barrier that cut off the eastern part of the fort, but a re-reading of earlier trenches dates that bank and ditch to the mid-thirteenth century, with the stone castle, not to the first morning. A slighter ditch running south from the north-eastern Roman wall is a separate feature.

The next day William marched along the coast to Hastings, burned and plundered the country round about, and waited for Harold. More fortifications were put up at Pevensey as well as the wooden castle at Hastings. Harold left much of his strength in the north, including the earls Edwin and Morcar, and brought the rest south. He seems to have spent about a week on the march, on the order of 27 miles, or 43 kilometres, a day over about 200 miles, and about a week in London. He camped at Caldbec Hill on the night of 13 October. The Battle of Hastings was fought on Saturday 14 October 1066, from about nine in the morning until dusk, on the ridge near the present town of Battle in East Sussex, about 7 miles, or 11 kilometres, north-west of Hastings. Sunset that day was at 4:54 in the afternoon. The English stood on foot in a shield wall, with few archers. Early Norman attacks failed, and the invaders then used a feigned flight, turning on the men who pursued. Harold was killed near the end of the day, probably, and most of his army broke. The number on his side is unknown. Recent estimates run from 5,000 to 13,000, and most settle on 7,000 to 8,000, a mix of the fyrd and the housecarls. About 20 named Englishmen can be placed there, among them his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine. One estimate of the dead is 2,000 on the invading side and about twice that number of Englishmen. William was crowned on Christmas Day 1066. He later founded a monastery on the battlefield, and the high altar of its church is said to mark the place where Harold fell. The inner buildings that a visitor sees at Pevensey are later than William. What he used was the Roman wall.

In 1067 William sailed from Pevensey on a progress through Normandy. While he was there he is said to have distributed lands in front of defeated English nobles, and on that occasion, or about then, he gave the castle and the Rape of Pevensey to his half-brother Robert, Count of Mortain, who died in 1095. The anchorage faced Normandy. Holding it kept a road to the Continent and denied it to another invasion. Robert, or his successor Richer de Aquila in one older account, is credited with the first lasting defences: the Roman wall put back into use, and two enclosures inside it, divided by a ditch and a timber palisade. Herringbone repairs in the Roman masonry, by then the outer bailey, belong to this Norman work. The Roman gates were rebuilt, and a new ditch was dug in front of the south-western gate. Limited excavation in 1993 and 1994 showed that the ground in the south-eastern sector, where the stone keep later stood, was artificially raised sometime before 1200, which has suggested a motte. A length of about 40 metres of partly filled ditch, up to 9 metres wide, across the north-eastern sector of the old fort may mark how far those first defences ran. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, writing about half a century later, says the duke left some of his knights to garrison Pevensey for two years.

In 1088, the year after William’s death, his eldest son Robert Curthose was duke of Normandy and his second son, William Rufus, was king of England. An attempt to put Robert on the English throne drew in the Count of Mortain and his brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. They held Pevensey against the king. Rufus led a siege by land and sea, with William de Warenne, who had fought at the Battle of Hastings and held Lewes. The walls resisted every assault. After six weeks the food was short, no help came from Robert, and the rebels took a truce. Mortain was allowed to keep Pevensey. His son William later lost it, with the rest of the English estates, for opposing Henry I, who reigned from 1100 to 1135. Henry gave most of the confiscated property to Gilbert de l’Aigle, also called Gilbert Laigle, but he seems to have kept the castle in royal hands. In the summer of 1101, when Duke Robert again threatened to invade, Henry I stayed at Pevensey and waited. One account places the forfeiture of William, Count of Mortain, in that same unsuccessful rebellion of 1101. The castle then passed to the de Aquila family and remained in the royal gift until the later Middle Ages.

During the reign of Stephen, from 1135 to 1154, the Laigle family lost Pevensey and the castle went to Gilbert de Clare, the first Earl of Pembroke. When Gilbert rebelled in 1147, Stephen blockaded the castle until the people inside were starved into surrender, and the crown took it back. Royal payments for palisades in the 1180s show that, apart from the Roman wall, the defences were still mostly earth and timber. A heckage, a service of fencing, was owed from local manors, and a palisade is named outright in 1188. The first large stone works may belong to the 1190s, when Richard I, who reigned from 1189 to 1199, paid regularly for works that the records do not name. He may have built the keep and the gatehouse. The ruins of the keep could instead belong to a Tower of Pevensey recorded in 1129 to 1130, the turris de Pevensey of the pipe roll. One reading puts a masonry keep in the south-eastern sector around 1100. Another is sceptical that the tower of 1130 is the building whose ruins remain. The excavation of 1993 to 1995 found the great stone keep, with D-shaped towers, set against the inner face of the surviving Roman wall and above occupation with pottery of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, probably around 1200. The gatehouse and the postern of the inner bailey are close to it in style and are taken to be about the same date. A structural survey found the lower storey of the gatehouse earlier than the curtain, probably in the last decade of the twelfth century, while the upper parts of gatehouse and curtain may have been built together. The traditional bracket for the gatehouse is about 1190 to 1220, or about 1200, or about 1220. These dates are all in the sources. They are not one date.

The keep uses a stretch of the Roman wall and its bastions. Only the south-eastern tower, which reused a Roman D-shaped bastion, survives nearly whole. The plan is a rectangular block about 16.8 metres by 9 metres inside, with apsidal projections on every side. It is ruined to about the first floor. It was once a tall tower entered at first-floor level. A rectangular building about 7.6 metres by 6 metres was later added in the south-eastern angle between the keep and the Roman wall. Traces of a tower outside the Roman wall, covering the north-eastern corner of the keep, were found in the same dig, with later repairs on the east: a further tower against the outer face of the collapsing Roman wall, a garderobe, and a rebuilding of the north-east tower. Those repairs sit above pottery of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries and are probably the documented works of the early fourteenth century, with occupation outside the keep dated by pottery to the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The keep was partly demolished and rebuilt in about 1325. Its base was filled with clay after the sixteenth or seventeenth century, very possibly in answer to a survey of 1587, to give cannon a platform against the Armada in 1588. Robbing of the outer towers in the eighteenth century left the east side unstable, and that side had fallen completely by the later nineteenth century. Until 1908 the lower ruin lay under a mound of earth and rubble, which led at least one nineteenth-century writer to mistake the keep for a motte. The mound of clay over the lower part was cleared in a campaign of the 1930s.

By 1216 John, who had reigned since 1199, was falling back through Sussex before an invasion led by Prince Louis of France. He ordered the castles of Pevensey and Hastings destroyed, the act called slighting. The castle took no part in Louis’s invasion, and it is uncertain whether the order was carried out. An annal of Dunstable Priory says that he slighted Pevensey in that war with the barons. A study published in 2024, using the survey of the keep and the outer bailey made in 2018, concluded that he may have wanted the castle destroyed and that it is unclear how far the wish was acted on. The inner ward was rebuilt in the 1250s, so the standing stone of that later campaign is not a simple picture of 1216.

After 1230 the castle passed through a line of royal favourites. Peter of Savoy, uncle of Eleanor of Provence, the wife of Henry III, received it in 1246. By 1254 he had probably replaced the timber defences of the inner bailey with the stone wall and towers that remain. Another account puts the start of that smaller stone bailey at about 1200 and the embattled curtain, built in the ditch and on the inner berm, at about 1250. The curtain survives almost to its original height and is faced with coursed greensand ashlar. Three semicircular towers flank it, each with a narrow stair to a basement, a branch stair into the ditch, and a room and a latrine at ground-floor level. Upper rooms, reached from the wall walk, had fireplaces. The basement of the northernmost tower has two rib-vaulted bays, the ribs keeled and set on stiff-leaf corbels. An L-shaped ditch about 20 metres wide defines the enclosure and still holds water in its northern arm. Spoil from the ditch and from the slighting of the earlier bank was spread over much of the outer bailey to a depth of up to 1.5 metres. The ditch was recut in repairs of the early twentieth century.

The inner bailey held a chapel, a well, a great hall, and lodgings, as well as the keep. The buildings inside the bailey went on being mostly wooden, and they survive as buried remains. The stone footings of the chapel were uncovered in the northern part of the bailey. About 20 metres south-east of the chapel is a stone-lined well at least 15.5 metres deep, and near it a pile of stone balls, a selection of those taken from the ditch. They are described as missiles thrown from trebuchets during the four sieges of the castle. The documented sieges are the six weeks of 1088, the starvation blockade of 1147, the long siege of 1264 to 1265, and the siege of July 1399. The gatehouse on the south-west of the inner bailey has an arched entrance between twin semicircular towers, now ruined, and it is one of the early surviving examples of that double-tower plan. Only one tower still stands to a height. The basements have ashlar walls and barrel vaults. The southern chamber is entered by a newel stair, the northern by a trapdoor. Both were used for prisoners. In the fifteenth century the wooden bridge over the outer ditch was replaced by a stone causeway. The causeway and the drawbridge pit are later medieval additions to a gatehouse probably built about 1200. A basement cell reached only through a hole in the roof has been called an oubliette, from the French for to forget, and was probably used for prisoners of low status.

Those new walls were tested at once. On 15 May 1264 Simon de Montfort beat the king’s army at the Battle of Lewes, and the royalist constable of Pevensey was ordered to surrender. He refused. A siege followed. In September local knights were called to stop the garrison raiding the countryside. Parts of the Roman outer wall were damaged, and one account says a part of that wall collapsed. The castle held. The siege was lifted only in July 1265, after the king’s victory at the Battle of Evesham, and it is called the longest siege in medieval England. The castle was handed back to Peter of Savoy. When he died in 1268 it passed to Eleanor of Provence and then stayed with the crown for about a hundred years, often as part of a queen’s dower.

From the 1270s the buildings were repeatedly close to ruin despite regular repair. They were little used, and officials were dishonest. In 1306 the constable Roger de Levelande was accused of breaking up the wooden bridge over the moat and selling the timber, and some of the warders were accused of burning the timber of a disused barn. The repairs were estimated at more than 1,000 pounds. By the end of the fourteenth century the walls were not being properly kept, though the lead of the roofs lasted until the middle of the fifteenth century.

In 1372 John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, took the castle. In 1377 he refused to garrison it against French attack, saying that if it were destroyed he had money enough to rebuild it. In 1381, during the Peasants’ Revolt, a mob broke in, burned the court records kept there, and attacked his steward. In 1394 he appointed Sir John Pelham, who died in 1429, as constable. Pelham backed Gaunt’s exiled son Henry Bolingbroke when Bolingbroke returned in 1399 to claim his inheritance and to take the crown from Richard II. After the landing, Pelham held Pevensey for him. On 25 July 1399 he wrote that he was under heavy siege by levies from three counties and asked for a remedy for the saving of the castle. When Bolingbroke was crowned as Henry IV he gave Pelham the castle and the honour of Pevensey.

In the fifteenth century the castle was a state prison. The men and women held there included James I, king of Scots, who had been seized in 1406, and Joan of Navarre, the second wife of Henry IV, accused by her stepson Henry V of plotting his death by witchcraft. One account sets those imprisonments in the years after the grant to John of Gaunt in 1372. Gaunt’s own life ended in 1399, and the seizure of James is dated 1406, so the prison years and the duke’s tenure do not match on the page. Both statements are recorded here without a forced choice.

Under the Tudors the castle went out of use. A survey of 1573 says the buildings were totally ruined. Another account says that by 1500 it had ceased to be lived in and fell quickly into decay. The threat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 brought two cannons, and a survey of 1587 records two demi-culverins, heavy guns, on a gun platform in the outer bailey. The platform is an M-shaped earthen work, facing south-east, about 90 metres north-east of the main Roman gate. It is a level platform about 20 metres long, with a slight bank on the seaward side about 0.4 metres high and about 3 metres wide. One of the cast-iron guns, made in the Weald of East Sussex, is now in the inner bailey on a modern replica carriage. The other account says simply that one of the two cannons survives at the castle. From the seventeenth century the place passed through private owners. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was valued as a picturesque ruin and drawn again and again.

In 1925 the Duke of Devonshire gave the castle to the state, and repair began so that it could be opened to the public. The war stopped that work. After the fall of France in 1940, Pevensey was again a possible landing place. In May 1940 it was refortified as an observation and command post. The outer defences were strengthened. Pillboxes for machine guns were built into the old walls, and a blockhouse for anti-tank weapons was set in the mouth of the Roman west gate. A tower was inserted on the inner side, a short distance below the eastern entrance. The towers of the inner bailey were lined with brick, given wooden floors, and used as barracks. The garrison included the Home Guard, British and Canadian troops, and units of the United States Army Air Corps, who used the castle as a radio direction centre. Occupation by regular troops and the Home Guard ran until 1944, and the place was back in peaceful use in 1945. Two pillboxes and three machine-gun posts survive, concrete faced with rubble and flint so that they would be taken for Roman or medieval masonry. The entrances of some have since been blocked. The blockhouse in front of the main Roman gate does not survive. The ministry that supervised the wartime work required the new concrete to blend with the old, which was also camouflage. After 1945 the people of the town asked that the new works be left as a monument to that episode.

The excavations that underpin the dates are a long series, not a single hole. Mark Antony Lower and Charles Roach Smith dug the Roman west gate and the north postern in 1852 and found fourth-century coins, stone balls for a catapult, and the footings of the inner-bailey chapel. The castle well was found about the same time. Further digging followed in 1906 to 1908, the years of the stamped tiles, and again in the 1920s, the 1930s, and 1964. Malcolm Lyne published the work of 1936 to 1939 and of 1964, with a reassessment of the earlier trenches. Michael Fulford and Stephen Rippon directed the work of 1993 to 1995 on and around the keep, where fallen Roman wall and concrete pillboxes of the start of the war lie together. Ian Tyers dated the Roman piles. The pottery from the dark earth, the animal bone, the shells, and the soils were reported with that excavation. A 2018 investigation, made before a new guidebook, reinterpreted the keep, surveyed the earthworks of the outer bailey, and mapped what the air photographs show, especially the wartime works. No newer dug find, of 2022 or after, has been published from the fort itself. The 2024 study is a reconsideration of the 1216 order, not a new object from the ground.

A train ferry built at Brevik in Norway, yard number 95, was launched on 11 December 1971 and delivered on 28 April 1972 under the name MV Anderida, after this fort. She was 99.70 metres long, with a beam of 16.03 metres, and she was sold while still on the stocks, then chartered for a British railway service. She entered the Dover to Dunkerque crossing on 28 August 1972. She later worked other short sea routes, suffered an engine-room fire on 17 February 1979, and was sold in 1981. Under later names she crossed Cook Strait and then ran in the Gulf of St Lawrence. In 2020 she was sold to a Greek owner and renamed Armenistis. The ship is a namesake, not a part of the fort.

The castle is closed until March 2027. When a visit is sold, a ticket booked online until midnight the day before is discounted, a ticket bought on the day is full price, a ticket is valid all day inside the opening hours, and admission is free for a member who brings a membership card.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/castrum-anderitum