A History of Old Fishbourne

Old Fishbourne sits at the head of a tidal creek running into Chichester Harbour, sheltered by the South Downs to the north. People have lived here for thousands of years, but the documented story begins with the Romans and gains its formal identity in the Domesday Book of 1086.

The Roman Period

Long before the manor existed, this land was the site of something extraordinary. Around 75 to 80 AD, a great palace was built in nearby fields, probably for Tiberius Claudius Cogidubnus, a British client king who allied himself with Rome during the invasion of 43 AD. The palace is the largest known Roman residential building north of the Alps. A generation earlier, the same site had served as a military supply base for the invasion force.

Cogidubnus was described by Tacitus as Rome's "most faithful ally." He governed multiple tribal territories from this area, and an inscription found in Chichester styles him "great king of Britain." The palace was built by imported Italian and Gaulish craftsmen, with over 100 rooms, colonnaded walkways, and the earliest formal garden found in Britain. It was destroyed by fire around 270 AD, during the Crisis of the Third Century.

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The Godwin Family and Bosham

Before the Norman Conquest, the land around Chichester Harbour was held by the Godwin family, the most powerful dynasty in late Anglo-Saxon England. Earl Godwin of Wessex held Bosham as his family seat. His son Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king, sailed from Bosham to Normandy in 1064, a voyage depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. His brother Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, held the wider Bosham estate before being exiled in 1065 and killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066, three weeks before Harold fell at Hastings.

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The Domesday Entry (1086)

When William the Conqueror's commissioners surveyed the lands of England, they recorded a holding at "Fiseborne," now Old Fishbourne. A man named Engeler held two hides of land here, part of the great manor of Bosham, under the lordship of Earl Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury. A later charter reveals that the land had been given to Engeler's father by William the Conqueror himself.

Bosham was one of the wealthiest estates in Domesday Sussex, the only one that the Conqueror retained in his own hands. Old Fishbourne was carved from it.

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Southwick Priory (12th to 16th Century)

In the early twelfth century, Engeler's son Turstin granted his inherited lands at Fishbourne to the Prior and canons of Southwick Priory. The priory was an Augustinian house, originally founded inside Portchester Castle around 1128 before relocating to Southwick in Hampshire around 1150. A twelfth-century charter records that Turstin gave "all my lands of Fisseborn, namely that which King William gave to my father Engeler."

An inquiry held in 1280 confirmed that Southwick Priory held at Fishbourne a messuage and two hides of land valued at ten pounds yearly. In 1320, a grant of free warren was recorded. The priory held Old Fishbourne for roughly four hundred years, the longest continuous period of documented ownership in the manor's history. The priory site at Southwick later became Eisenhower's D-Day headquarters in June 1944.

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Anne of Cleves and the Dissolution (1540)

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, Southwick Priory was surrendered in 1538. Two years later, in 1540, Old Fishbourne was granted to Anne of Cleves, the king's fourth wife, as part of the settlement that followed the annulment of their marriage. The grant described it as "the manor" of Old Fishbourne, the first time that word was used, formally constituting its manorial identity. Anne held the manor until her death in 1557. She is the only one of Henry VIII's six wives buried in Westminster Abbey.

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After the Tudors

The Victoria County History of Sussex, published in 1953, noted that the subsequent descent of the manor after Anne of Cleves had not been traced. This is not unusual for smaller English manors. Many passed through private hands without generating the kind of records that survive in county archives. Manorial lordships are a form of property under English law, and they do not cease to exist simply because historians cannot document every transfer.

The VCH editors in 1953 had no way of knowing that just seven years later, the area would produce one of the most important archaeological finds in southern England.

The Discovery of the Roman Palace (1960)

In 1960, a workman named Aubrey Barrett, cutting a trench for a new water main, struck Roman rubble and the unmistakable remains of a mosaic floor in nearby fields. Over the next eight years, excavations led by Barry Cunliffe revealed the largest Roman domestic building known north of the Alps.

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The Modern Era

The lordship of Old Fishbourne is held today as a private incorporeal hereditament under English law.

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Timeline