The East Sussex port that gave its name to the battle of 1066: home of the Haestingas and a mint town in the reign of Æthelstan, first King of the English, where William the Conqueror built his first castle in England, then the seat of a Norman lordship, a head port of the Cinque Ports, and the town nearest Battle Abbey on the battlefield inland.
Hastings lies on the East Sussex coast where a valley cuts through sandstone cliffs between the East Hill and the West Hill. It never had a sheltered natural harbour: its boats worked from the beach and from inlets that storms repeatedly rearranged, and the forest of the Weald behind it and the marshes of Pevensey and Romney on either side cut it off from the rest of Sussex and Kent. That isolation kept a local identity alive for centuries and made this stretch of coast an obvious landing place for anyone crossing from Normandy.
The town is famous for a battle fought elsewhere. On 14 October 1066 William of Normandy defeated Harold Godwinson on the ridge where the town of Battle now stands, and the name of Hastings, where the Norman army had its castle and camp, was attached to the battle by the time of Domesday Book in 1086. In the centuries that followed Hastings was a castle town, a Cinque Port and a fishing community, until the sea and French raiders ruined its harbour trade in the fourteenth century.
The name comes from the Haestingas, the followers of a man called Haesta, a people settled between Pevensey and the Kentish border. Symeon of Durham records that Offa of Mercia defeated the gens Hestingorum in 771, and by 790 Offa was confirming grants of land at Hastings to the abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris. Some historians think a sub-king named Watt, who witnesses the charters of the South Saxon king Nunna, ruled this people, but the idea rests on place-names alone.
The Haestingas kept a separate identity long after Sussex had been absorbed into Wessex: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1011 lists them beside Kent, Sussex and Surrey among the lands the Danes overran. Under the laws of Æthelstan, grandson of Alfred and first King of the English, issued around 928, Hastings was named among the towns allowed to strike coin, which shows that it was already a trading town with a market. The Chronicle's Hæstingaceaster of 1050 may mean Hastings, or, since the ending usually marks a Roman fort, the old Saxon Shore fort at Pevensey.
William's fleet landed at Pevensey on 28 September 1066, and within days his army moved east to Hastings and threw up a wooden castle on a mound, probably reusing an earlier earthwork. The Bayeux Tapestry shows labourers digging it under the words that William ordered a castle to be dug 'at Hestenga ceastra'. From this base the Normans raided the surrounding country, probably to provoke Harold into fighting quickly. A new settlement was already growing in the valley to the east; Domesday Book records a new borough there, which local tradition dates to 1069.
The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October about 10 kilometres to the north-west, on a ridge between Caldbec Hill and Telham Hill, and ended with Harold dead and his army destroyed. Contemporaries did not name it after the town: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says only that the armies met at the hoary apple tree, and Orderic Vitalis, writing in the twelfth century, called the field Senlac. Domesday Book in 1086 already spoke of the battle of Hastings, naming it after the port that had been William's base.
After the conquest William divided Sussex into rapes, each running inland from the coast and centred on a castle, and around 1068 he gave Hastings Castle and the easternmost rape to his kinsman Robert, Count of Eu, who had supplied 60 ships for the invasion. Rebuilding in stone, together with a chapel of St Mary, is said to have been ordered in 1070, and the church of St Mary within the walls later served a college of canons. The Counts of Eu held the lordship for most of the Norman period. When a later count chose his French lands over his English ones, Henry III gave the castle and honour to his queen's uncle Peter of Savoy in 1249, and from 1254 to 1262 they were held by the Lord Edward, the future Edward I of England.
The castle's military life was short. In 1216, with the future Louis VIII of France invading in support of the rebel barons, John of England ordered it slighted rather than let it fall to the French, and Henry III of England refortified it in 1220. The great storm of February 1287 brought down the soft sandstone cliff under part of the castle, and erosion carried more of it into the sea over the following centuries. Thomas Pelham bought the ruin in 1591, and it was farmed until it disappeared under undergrowth.
The abbey on the battlefield was the great medieval foundation of the Hastings country. Its twelfth-century monks claimed that William had vowed before the fight to build a monastery if he won; more likely the foundation answered the penance that papal legates imposed on the invaders in 1070. Monks came from the Benedictine abbey of Marmoutier on the Loire, and the church, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, St Mary and St Martin, was built with its high altar where Harold was believed to have fallen, although the top of the ridge had to be levelled and built up to take it. It was finished around 1094, in the reign of William II of England, who gave the monks his father's sword and coronation robe.
The Conqueror's grant freed the abbey from the bishop of Chichester and gave its abbot rights over the lands around it. Abbot Walter de Luci defended that freedom against Bishop Hilary of Chichester before Henry II of England at Colchester in 1157, producing charters of William I and Henry I of England that the king accepted as genuine; many modern historians regard the Battle charters as forged at the abbey. Its monks also wrote the Chronicle of Battle Abbey, the source of the story of the Malfosse, a hidden ditch in which many men of both armies fell and were trampled.
A town grew at the abbey gate, where a settlement probably existed by 1110, and its parish church of St Mary was consecrated in 1115; the stonemasons John of Battle and Thomas of Battle, probably born there, later worked on royal building works under Edward I. The abbey church was remodelled in the late thirteenth century and the great gatehouse added in the fourteenth. Only seventeen monks remained when the abbey was surrendered in May 1538, and Henry VIII gave it to his Master of the Horse, Sir Anthony Browne, who pulled down the church and turned the abbot's lodging into a house. A plaque now marks the site of the high altar.
Medieval Hastings was a narrow town in the valley below the castle, with its fishing boats drawn up on the shingle. The late Saxon port had lain further west, in the valley of the Priory Stream below the White Rock headland, but Danish attacks and floods in 1011 and 1014 are said to have driven its people east to the new borough. Around 1153 the geographer al-Idrisi, writing in Sicily, described Hastings as a large, flourishing and handsome town with markets, craftsmen and rich merchants.
The papal taxation survey of 1291 counted seven churches in the town. Two survive in the Old Town, All Saints at the foot of the East Hill and St Clement's, both largely rebuilt in the century after the French raids. Fish paid for them: in 1329 a priest was threatened with excommunication for failing to pay the bishop of Chichester the customary 2,000 herring, and boats still work from the beach below the old town.