Winchelsea & Withyam in East Sussex.
Winchelsea is a small walled town in East Sussex, England, at the southern corner of the Romney Marsh, a sparsely-populated wetland area in the counties of Kent and East Sussex in the south-east of England. The present town replaced an earlier town of the same name, now known as Old Winchelsea. The town is part of the civil parish of Icklesham. Romney Marsh proper, lying north of a line between New Romney and Appledore, was in Egypt, the gift of the Nile. The silting up of the River Rother changed its course and left New Romney stranded inland hundreds of years ago. New Romney is one of the original Cinque Ports of England and was a crucial part of England's naval defence for much of its history.
The Confederation of Cinque Ports (pronounced sink ports) is a historic group of towns in Kent and Sussex, originally formed for military and trade purposes, but now entirely ceremonial. The name is Norman French for five ports - the five being Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich. They are supported by the two 'ancient towns' of Rye and Winchelsea. There are seven other members of the Confederation, which are considered to be 'Limbs' of the other towns. These are Lydd (Limb of New Romney), Folkestone, Faversham and Margate (Limbs of Dover), Deal and Ramsgate (Limbs of Sandwich) and Tenterden (Limb of Rye).
Although by the 14th Century the confederation faced wider challenges from a greater consolidation of national identity in the monarchy and Parliament, the legacy of the Saxon authority remained. The Saxon Shore Way starts at Gravesend, Kent and traces the coast as it was in Roman times as far as Hastings, East Sussex, 163 miles (262 km) in total, crossing the Marsh. Even after the 15th Century, the 'ancient towns' continued to serve with the supply of transport ships. The wall at Dymchurch was built around the same time, storms had breached the shingle barrier, which had protected it until that time. Ongoing changes in the coastline along the south east coast, from the Thames estuary to Hastings and the Isle of Wight did undoubtedly influence the significance of a number of the Cinque port towns, as port authorities, but ship building and repair, fishing, piloting, off shore rescue and sometimes even 'wrecking' continued to play a large part in the activities of the local community.
These lost communities on the Marsh are further instances of the modern decline of the rural communities, except that these probably occurred over the centuries. In 1348, for example, many villages were hit by the Black Death. Buttdarts, Eastbridge, Fairfield, Falconhurst, Galloways (south of Lydd), Hope All Saints, Midley, Orgarswick, Shorene, Shave. From 1564 the health of the marsh population suffered from malaria, then known as ague or marsh fever, which caused high mortality rates until the 1730s.
The Fens are an area of former wetlands in the counties of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk in eastern England. The region lies west and south of The Wash. Geologically, the fenlands are a silted-up bay of the North Sea that embraces the lower drainage basins of the rivers Witham, Welland, Nene and Great Ouse. As the land-ice melted, the rising sea level drowned the lower lands, ultimately establishing the World's modern coasts. At the end of the most recent glacial period, known in Britain as the Devensian, ten thousand years ago, Great Britain was joined to Europe, notably, by the ridge between Friesland and Norfolk. The topography of the bed of the North Sea indicates that the rivers of the southern part of eastern England would flow into the River Rhine, thence through the English Channel. From The Fens northward along the modern coast, the drainage flowed into the northern North Sea basin, which, in turn, drained towards the Viking Deep. Around five thousand years ago, previously inland woodland of the Fenland basin became salt-marsh, a saltwater environment, and fen, a freshwater environment. English settlers who named the various features of the place from about the yeare 450 onwards, noticed eight kinds: Wash, Marsh, Tidal Creeks, Townland, Fen, Moor, Mere, and Rivers. Hereward Leofricsson, later called Hereward the Wake, who was raised on the fen margin, opposed the loss of his inheritance to the Norman incomers in around the yeare 1070.
The Romans constructed the road, the Fen Causeway across the fens to join what would later become East Anglia and central England: Denver to Peterborough. They also linked Cambridge and Ely but generally, their road system avoided The Fens except for minor roads designed for extracting the products of the region. These were notably, salt and the products of cattle: meat and leather. Sheep were probably raised on the higher ground of the townlands and fen islands, then as in the early nineteenth century.
Like many towns on the marsh there is an impressive Norman church in the centre of town. Originally this church stood on the harbourside, and the silting of the marsh is evident where the church entrances are several feet below ground level. The church is also notable for the boat hooks still evident on the side walls of the church. The River Rother today flows into the sea below Rye; but until 1287 its mouth lay between Romney and Lydd. It was tidal far upstream, almost to Bodiam. The river mouth was wide with a huge lagoon making Rye a port at its western end. That lagoon lay behind a large island, which now makes up a large part of the Denge Marsh, on which stood the ports of Lydd and the old Winchelsea. All these ports were members of the Cinque Ports.
With the advance in shipbuilding techniques came a growth in towns such as Bristol and Liverpool and the wider development of ports such as London, Gravesend, Southampton, Chichester, Plymouth and the royal dockyards of Chatham, Portsmouth, Greenwich, Woolwich and Deptford. A further reason for the decline of many older ports may be ascribed to the development of the railway network across Britain, and the increased quantity of overseas trade it could distribute from the new major ports developing from the 18th Century.
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