Qualla: Battle of Mercredesburne

Battle of Mercredesburne: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in the year 485 the Saxon warlord Aelle fought a battle with the Britons "near the bank of Mercredesburne." That is essentially all we know with any confidence. The name Mercredesburne does not survive on any modern map. The location has been variously placed in Creep Wood between Ashburnham and Penhurst, or at Binstead, or simply at "some river in Sussex." Even the date is suspect: the Chronicle was compiled four hundred years later under Alfred the Great, drawing on poetry and oral tradition, and may have miscounted the years. What we are dealing with is one of the foundation myths of the Kingdom of Sussex, sketched in faint outline in a Christian chronicle written long after the people in it were dead.

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Battle of Mercredesburne: Aelle's Three Battles

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

According to the Chronicle, Aelle arrived in Sussex in 477 with three ships and his three sons - Cymen, Wlenking, and Cissa - and landed at a place called Cymenshore. He killed the local British defenders, drove the survivors into the great forest of Andred (Andredsleag), and ove...

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Battle of Mercredesburne: What 'Mercredesburne' Means

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The place-name itself has been the strongest clue in the long search for the battlefield. The historian and archaeologist Martin Welch read Mercredesburne as something like "river of the frontier agreed by treaty" - in which case the name itself might commemorate a peace settleme...

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Battle of Mercredesburne: Town Creep and Other Theories

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The villages of Ashburnham and Penhurst in East Sussex have long held a tradition that an ancient earthwork called Town Creep, in Creep Wood between the two villages, was the site of Mercredesburne. Oral tradition surviving into the late 19th century described Town Creep as the s...

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Battle of Mercredesburne: The Problem of the Sources

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is one of the great early medieval European historical sources, but it was compiled in Alfred's Wessex in the late 9th century - four hundred years after Aelle's reign. The early Anglo-Saxons were not literate in the Latin and Greek sense; they had runes...

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Battle of Mercredesburne: A Battle in the Forest

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What remains, then, is something more like a story than a known event. A Saxon warlord landed on the Sussex coast in the late 5th century with his sons and a small fleet. He pushed inland, fought the Romano-British populations who still held what remained of post-Roman southern E...

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