Note 2592 — THE CONFIGURATION OF THE COAST OF KENT IN THE TIME OF CAESAR

Geogr. Journal, ix, 1897, p. 545.

Mr. H. E. Malden, who believes that Caesar landed somewhere near Hurst, which is in Romney Marsh, about two miles and a half west of Lympne, affirms (Journal of Philology, xvii, 1888, pp. 176-7, n. 1) that, in A.D. 893, ‘Hastings the pirate came here with his fleet ... and sailed four miles up the Rother to the Weald.’ There is not the slightest evidence that ‘Hastings’ came ‘here’ with his fleet. The record of his expedition is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ed. B. Thorpe, ii, 1861, p. 69). ‘In this year’ [893], says the chronicler, ‘the great army, of which we long before spoke ... came up to the mouth of the Limen with two hundred and fifty ships. The mouth is in the east of Kent, at the east end of the great wood which we call Andred.... The river, of which we before spoke, flows out from the weald. On the river they towed up their ships as far as the weald, four miles from the outward mouth, and there stormed a work.’ Mr. Malden (op. cit., p. 176, note) avows his belief that ‘the Romans embanked the marsh’, and immediately afterwards says that ‘the Portus Lemanis after that became accessible only from the east, inside the shingle spit opposite Hythe’. It would appear, then, that, according to Mr. Malden, the mouth of the Limen, up which the Danes sailed, was ‘opposite Hythe’. But, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, to which he refers, it was at Appledore (see p. 542, n. 4, infra); and doubtless the Danes reached it by sailing up the channel, formed by the Rhee wall (see p. 538, supra), which then connected the Limen with the sea.