History
The town of Hailsham was settled before the Romans and the Anglo Saxons. In the year 490 A.D., the Saxon invaders advanced along the coast from their original landing place at Selsey and, according to the Saxon Chronicle, attacked and took the British stronghold of Anderida which was the fort the Romans had built at what is now Pevensey, a few miles from Hailsham, thereby consolidating their conquest and forming the small kingdom of the South Saxons, or Sussex.
It was on the Pevensey Levels, which extend from Hailsham to the coast, that William of Normandy made his historic landing in 1066, for, in those days, the seashore was some distance inland - about halfway between Hailsham and the present beach along Pevensey Bay - and the ancient castle stood upon an island amongst the marshes of the River Ashburn.
The manor of Hailsham is recorded in the Domesday Survey completed by the Normans twenty years later.
There was some activity in this part of Sussex during the baronial wars and in the armed rivalry between Matilda and Stephen, the castle at Pevensey being garrisoned and held by opposing sides. Men of Hailsham may have taken part in the important battle of Lewes in 1264 when Simon de Montfort’s victory resulted in the establishment of the first principles of parliamentary representation.
During the seventeenth-century civil war between Charles I and Parliament, Hailsham and this part of Sussex declared against the royalist cause.
Little is known of the town of Hailsham before the 1086 Domesday Book, but evidence of a Roman road from Leap Cross across the Common, indicates some occupation prior to this.
Read more about this topic: Hailsham
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race.”
—Eliza Archard Connor, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 9, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)