Using a combination of historical mapping, photos from visits to beaches, newspaper articles, artefacts from archaeological excavations and quotations from contemporary documents, John Mills’ talk on 12 February looked along the West Sussex coast at the sites of villages and hamlets, or parts of them, washed away by the sea in the Middle Ages and recent historical period.
These included (under the sea) Rumbridge between West Wittering and present-day Medmerry Harbour, from which came the West Sussex personal surname “Rumbridger”; Charlton, off Pagham Point;, Cudlow, once a landing place with manor house and chapel, south-west of Littlehampton; and Pende, home base of merchant ships and a small port in 1270-1420 with its own port officials. Another vanished but prosperous medieval port, Wardour/ Sidlesham, a “new town” founded by the Bishop of Chichester, was at or near Sidlesham Quay in Pagham Harbour, but succumbed not to erosion but to the long drawn-out silting up of the Harbour.
The disappearance, ruin and/or inundation of chapels and churches features much in contemporary documents: for example Old Bracklesham chapel, probably drowned after 1518; Bognor’s St. Bartholomew’s chapel, last heard of in 1465; Cudlow church, a ruin and a “seamark” on the edge of the beach in 1698; old Middleton’s parish church, still visible as a ruin in the 1840s, the washed-out burials in its churchyard celebrated in a poem of 1789 by Charlotte Smith; and the “utterly ruinated” (by the sea) former Kingston chapel.
In several cases, the very bottoms of chalk-lined and timber-lined probably medieval or 16 th -17 th -century wells, occasionally re-exposed by storms at low tide, could be seen in recent years (e.g. Kingston, Middleton), and especially on Climping beach, where wells belonging to house plots in the lower part of Atherington hamlet, washed away between 1606 and 1772, can often still be seen today at low tide.
John Mills, (retired) County Archaeologist for West Sussex County Council