The Hundred of Bosham
Old Fishbourne was not an isolated settlement. It was part of the Hundred of Bosham, one of the wealthiest and most historically significant estates in Domesday England. Understanding Bosham is essential to understanding Old Fishbourne.
What Was a Hundred?
A hundred was the fundamental administrative division between the parish and the shire in Anglo-Saxon and medieval England. The term is first recorded in the tenth-century laws of King Edmund I. It may derive from an area of 100 hides, or from a district that provided 100 men at arms. The precise origin is uncertain.
Each hundred had its own court, which met monthly at a known meeting place, usually in the open air. The court settled private disputes and criminal matters by customary law. The hundred was also the unit through which taxes were collected and armies raised. Above the hundred was the shire, under the shire-reeve (the sheriff). Below it were the individual manors, vills, and tithings.
The Hundred of Bosham encompassed the parishes around Chichester Harbour, including Bosham itself, East and West Ashling, West Stoke, and West Thorney. The 1296 Subsidy Roll confirms that Broadbridge, Creed, and Old Fishbourne, all within the parish of Bosham, also belonged to the hundred.
Bosham Before the Conquest
Bosham was the seat of the Godwin family, the most powerful dynasty in late Anglo-Saxon England. Earl Godwin of Wessex, made the first Earl of Wessex by King Cnut around 1020, held Bosham as his family estate. His daughter Edith married King Edward the Confessor. His sons would shape the fate of England.
The family's power was immense. By the late 1050s, the Godwinsons controlled virtually all the earldoms of England: Harold held Wessex (succeeding his father in 1053), Tostig held Northumbria, Gyrth held East Anglia, and Leofwine held Essex and the adjacent counties. England was, in effect, governed by one family.
Bosham church, Holy Trinity, is one of the oldest Saxon churches in England. The lower parts of the tower and the chancel arch date from the late tenth or early eleventh century. The Venerable Bede, writing in the early eighth century, recorded that Bishop Wilfrid found a small monastery at Bosham in 681 AD, led by an Irish monk named Dicul and five or six brethren. A long-standing tradition holds that a young daughter of King Cnut drowned in a nearby millstream around 1020 and was buried in the nave. A coffin containing a child's skeleton was discovered there in 1865.
Earl Tostig
Tostig Godwinson, the third son of Earl Godwin, held the wider Bosham estate as part of his family inheritance. In 1055, he was appointed Earl of Northumbria. He governed the north with severity, introducing order but making himself deeply unpopular.
In October 1065, the thegns of Yorkshire rebelled. They descended on York, killed Tostig's officials and supporters, declared him an outlaw, and sent for Morcar, brother of the Earl of Mercia, to replace him. The rebels accused Tostig of robbing churches, depriving men of their lands and lives, and acting against the law.
Harold was sent to negotiate and concluded that his brother could not be restored. On Harold's advice, Edward the Confessor sided with the rebels. Tostig accused Harold of fomenting the rebellion. He was banished after 1 November 1065 and sailed to Flanders with his wife Judith and their children.
In exile, Tostig visited Duke William of Normandy. In May 1066, he received a fleet from Count Baldwin of Flanders, landed on the Isle of Wight, and raided the south coast as far as Sandwich. King Harold mobilised forces and Tostig retreated north, raiding Norfolk and Lincolnshire before being defeated by the northern earls. Deserted by his men, he fled to King Malcolm III of Scotland.
Stamford Bridge
In the summer of 1066, Tostig made contact with King Harald Hardrada of Norway and persuaded him to invade England. In September, a Norwegian fleet of roughly 300 ships sailed up the Humber. The invaders defeated the northern earls Edwin and Morcar at the Battle of Fulford on 20 September and occupied York.
King Harold force-marched his army from London and surprised the invaders at Stamford Bridge in the East Riding of Yorkshire on 25 September 1066. The Norwegians were largely without armour in the heat. Both Harald Hardrada and Tostig were killed. The Norwegian losses were so severe that only 24 ships were needed to carry the survivors home.
Three days after Stamford Bridge, on 28 September, William of Normandy landed at Pevensey. Harold raced south and was killed at Hastings on 14 October 1066. The two battles, three weeks apart, ended both the Norwegian and Anglo-Saxon claims to the English crown.
Harold and the Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry, the great embroidered narrative of the Norman Conquest, opens with a scene at Bosham. The Latin inscription reads: "Where Harold, Duke of the English, and his soldiers ride to Bosham." Harold is shown riding with his retinue to Bosham, entering Holy Trinity Church to pray, feasting in his hall, and then wading out to his ship with hawk and hound to embark for Normandy.
The voyage, which probably took place in 1064, is central to the Norman justification for the Conquest. According to the Norman account, Edward the Confessor sent Harold to confirm William as his heir. The English tradition suggests Harold was trying to secure the release of hostages. Whatever the purpose, Harold was blown off course, captured by Count Guy of Ponthieu, and eventually brought to William's court. There, according to the Tapestry, he swore an oath on sacred relics to support William's claim to the English throne. This oath, whether freely given or extracted under duress, became William's justification for the invasion two years later.
Bosham is one of only four places in England named on the Bayeux Tapestry. The Tapestry's depiction of the church is recognisably Holy Trinity. In 2025, excavations by the University of Exeter confirmed that a house in Bosham stands on the site of an elite Anglo-Saxon residence, identified as the location of Harold's private hall depicted in the Tapestry.
The Bosham Head
Around 1800, a twice-life-size stone head weighing 170 kilograms was found in the vicarage garden at Bosham. For two centuries, its identity was unknown. In 2013, Dr Miles Russell and Harry Manley of Bournemouth University used 3D laser scanning to identify it as part of a statue of Emperor Trajan, who reigned from 98 to 117 AD.
Russell believes the statue was erected by Trajan's successor, Emperor Hadrian, during his visit to Britain in 121 to 122 AD. It would have stood as a monumental welcome at the entrance to Chichester Harbour, a parallel to a similar Trajan statue erected by Hadrian at Ostia harbour in Rome. Only the head survives. The rest of the body may still be somewhere in the Bosham area.
The Bosham Head places another major Roman monument in the immediate vicinity of Fishbourne, reinforcing the area's Roman significance. If Russell's identification is correct, a monumental imperial statue guarded the same harbour that Cogidubnus had used to welcome the Roman invasion fleet a generation earlier.
Bosham in Domesday
In 1086, Bosham was held directly by King William. It was the only Sussex estate the Conqueror retained in his own hands; everything else in the county was distributed to his followers. This is a measure of how valuable and prestigious the estate was.
The Domesday valuation was forty pounds, though it returned fifty pounds of assayed money, equivalent to sixty-five pounds by tale. It had eight mills, two fisheries, and woodland yielding six swine. Eleven urban properties in Chichester had belonged to it. The collegiate church at Bosham was one of the wealthiest churches in Domesday England, holding over thirteen thousand acres across the country.
Before the Conquest, the great lordship of Bosham had encompassed not only the parish itself but also Thorney and Chidham to the west, Funtington and West Stoke to the north, and Fishbourne and Appledram to the east. Old Fishbourne was carved from this estate. Engeler's two hides, granted to him by William the Conqueror, were originally part of the fifty-six and a half hides that Earl Godwin had held.
Old Fishbourne's Place
Old Fishbourne sits at the eastern edge of the ancient Bosham estate, at the head of a tidal creek running into Chichester Harbour. It was a small holding within a vast lordship, two hides against Bosham's fifty-six. But its position at the harbour head, near the site of the Roman palace and on the road to Chichester, gave it a significance beyond its size.
The manorial landscape around Chichester Harbour in the medieval period was dense. Bosham, Appledram, Birdham, Donnington, Funtington, West Stoke, and Old Fishbourne all occupied different niches within the same network of tidal creeks, agricultural land, and harbour trade. Old Fishbourne's story cannot be told in isolation from this wider context.