Talk:Cissa of Sussex

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The reign of Cissa is not mentioned by any source earlier than Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote during the years 1130 to 1154, and evidently used his imagination to fill out gaps in the historical record.

In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Cissa is a son of Ælle, who allegedly arrived in three ships, with three sons, and fought three battles. It is obvious that this story is as fictitious as that of Goldilocks and the three bears [1] or Tsar Dodon and his three sons [2]. In reality, the Germanic migration to Britain was a gradual process over a prolonged period.

Supposedly the city of Chichester is named after Cissa, but both Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had an unfortunate tendency to invent people to explain place names that they did not understand. Bede imagined that Rochester was named after an Anglo-Saxon called Hrofi, whereas the place name is actually derived from an earlier Romano-British form: Durobrivae. Likewise, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that, in 501, Port, and his two sons came in two ships and landed at Portsmouth, regardless of the fact that the port was previously called Portus Magnus. Clearly, if the annal for 501 is fiction, then the earlier annals for 477, 485, and 491 are likely to be also, not least because the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was not complied until 891.

Another place name associated with Cissa is the Iron Age hill fort of Cissbury Ring near Cissbury, which Camden said "plainly bespeaks it the work of king Cissa", but as late as it 1663 it was still called by the earlier name of Caesars Bury.

Hovite 00:48, 26 September 2005 (UTC)