Pevensey Castle

Pevensey Castle is a

Anderitum fell into ruin following the end of the Roman occupation but was reoccupied in 1066 by the Normans, for whom it became a key strategic bulwark. A stone keep and fortification was built within the Roman walls and faced several sieges. Although its garrison was twice starved into surrender, it was never successfully stormed. The castle was occupied more or less continuously until the 16th century, apart from a possible break in the early 13th century when it was slighted during the First Barons' War. It had been abandoned again by the late 16th century and remained a crumbling, partly overgrown ruin until it was acquired by the state in 1925.

Pevensey Castle was reoccupied between 1940 and 1945, during the

Pevensey Castle was constructed by the Romans on a spur of sand and clay that stands about 10 metres (33 ft) above sea level. In Roman times this spur was a peninsula that projected into a tidal lagoon and marshes, making it a strong natural defensive position. A harbour is thought to have been situated near the south wall of the castle, sheltered by a long spit of shingle where the village of Pevensey Bay stands now. A small river, Pevensey Haven, runs along the north side of the peninsula and would originally have discharged into the lagoon, but is now largely silted up.^[1]

Since Roman times,

The castle occupies an area of about 3.67 hectares (9.1 acres). It has an oval plan on a north-east/south-west alignment, measuring 290 metres (950 ft) by 170 metres (560 ft).[5] Not only is it the largest of the nine Saxon Shore forts,^[6] but its walls and towers are the largest of any surviving Roman fort of the period.^[7] Its shape is unique among Saxon Shore forts and was presumably determined by the contours of the peninsula on which it stands.^[8]

The castle's

The D-shaped towers along the curtain wall are similar to those of several other Saxon Shore forts, although their placement is somewhat unusual.[12] Because the fort was partly surrounded by marshes and water, which provided natural defences, the Romans economised by only building towers on the more vulnerable north-eastern and far western sectors. The towers were probably used to mount artillery weapons such as catapults and heavy crossbows.^[13] Ten towers still survive, though there may originally have been more before the loss of the south wall.^[14]

The Roman fort had two principal entrances, one on the east side and the other on the west, guarded by clusters of towers. The west gate covered the landward access via the causeway that linked Pevensey to the mainland. A ditch bisected the causeway, which led up to a rectangular gatehouse with a single arch around 2.4 metres (7 ft 10 in) wide, with a D-shaped tower on each end from which archers could fire along the archway. The main entrance of the Saxon Shore fort at Portchester, built around the same period, had a very similar plan.^[13] Nothing now remains of the Roman gatehouse, which was replaced in the medieval period, while only a few stones are left of the medieval gatehouse.^[13]

The east gate, 2.8 metres (9 ft 2 in) wide, still stands; although what is visible now is principally medieval and 19th-century, the Roman original probably did not look much different.^[15] A postern gate was set into the north wall next to a section that has now collapsed. It was originally constructed in the form of a narrow curved passageway.^[11] Another postern gate may have been set into the collapsed south wall. These suggest that there may have been routes into the fort from across the marshes or access from a harbour, of which no trace remains.^[5]

The interior of the fort was artificially raised by the Romans, using earth dug from the foundation ditch, to bring it up to the level of the projecting step on the back of the wall.^[11] No evidence of significant buildings within the fort has been found by excavators. A number of Roman hearths are situated at regular intervals in the centre of the fort's interior, suggesting that they may have been the site of wooden barrack blocks.^[16] The buildings are conjectured to have been largely timber-framed wattle and daub structures which have left little trace.^[17]

The Normans divided the interior of the old Roman fort into two fortified enclosures, referred to as the inner and outer baileys. The inner bailey of the castle was, in effect, a castle within a castle, consisting of a walled fortification with a tower at each corner, surrounded by a moat and with a keep of unusual design at its eastern extremity, adjoining the old Roman curtain wall. The present stone fortifications of the inner bailey date mainly from the 13th and 14th centuries. They replaced the original wood and earth fortifications of the Norman inner bailey, which occupied a much larger area of the Roman fort's interior. Traces of the Norman bailey's ditch and earthen rampart, which stretched right across the interior of the fort, can still be seen today. The inner bailey protected the castle's most important domestic buildings, while the outer bailey was used for buildings of lesser importance such as a granary for the manor of Pevensey.^[18]

The inner bailey's moat—which is fed by a spring

Three other towers still stand on the east, north and south sides of the inner bailey's curtain wall. Built in the mid-13th century, they each had three floors which were accessed through separate entrances on each level. Lighting was provided by arrow-slits, and the upper room in each tower, which was the only one to have a fireplace, was probably used as a lodging area. A latrine was also provided. Only the north tower is known to have been completed; however, its vaulted basement was mostly destroyed around 1317 when the roof and floors of the tower collapsed into it. It is not clear whether the south and east towers were ever completed. An estimate written in 1317 reveals that the towers were thatched, lacking castellations and a proper lead roof, but it is not known whether the work itemised in the estimate was ever carried out. The interiors of the towers were substantially modified in 1940.^[21]

The interior of the inner bailey is now a broad, grassy area dominated by the stump of the keep at its eastern edge, which survives only up to its first floor. Despite the massive nature of the ruins, they preserve little of the original design apart from its unique ground plan. It consisted of a rectangular block measuring about 16.8 metres (55 ft) by 9 metres (30 ft) internally^[2] with seven projecting towers, a design found in no other medieval castle. Nothing remains of the interior and the uniqueness of its design makes it difficult to reconstruct its internal layout. Surviving 14th-century documents record that it contained a kitchen and a chapel, and had an iron door at its main entrance which was approached up a wooden stair.^[22] Like most Norman keeps, the entrance was situated on the first floor; the ground floor lacks any openings and it appears to have been constructed as a solid mass of masonry filled with clay. The near-total destruction of everything above the first floor means that the keep's original height is unknown, but it may have stood to a height of about 25 metres (82 ft) or so.^[23][a] The unusual design of the keep may have been influenced by Roman architecture.^[26]

The keep underwent at least two redesigns in the first half of the 14th century, possibly prompted by damage inflicted in earlier sieges. One of the redesigns involved constructing an adjoining square tower which some have suggested could have been used to mount a catapult; large stone balls, used as catapult ammunition, can still be seen in the inner bailey today. The building was recorded to be dilapidated for much of the 14th century despite repeated repairs, and had fallen into ruin by the 16th century. It was subjected to systematic stone-robbing for centuries; as early as 1591, it was recorded that all the best stones had been "imbeselled and carried away" and that one family had removed no fewer than 677 cartloads of ashlar facing-stone from the keep's walls. A late-18th-century engraving shows the remains of the building in a state of collapse and it had completely collapsed by the 1880s.^[27] The ruins were largely buried under a great heap of earth and clay that had been deposited sometime in the late medieval or early modern periods, which was not removed until the 1920s.^[27] The reason for the construction of this mound over the ruined keep is unclear, but it may have been related to the brief Elizabethan use of the castle as a gun position.^[27]

A number of other buildings once stood in the inner bailey, though only traces now remain. The interior of the curtain wall was lined with timber-framed domestic buildings such as the

Pevensey Castle was established as one of the nine

Coins of both Carausius and Allectus have been discovered buried in the foundations of the fort's walls. A later coin of 330–335 was found under a tower in the 1930s, suggesting that the fort may have undergone a major repair or reconstruction around that time.[30]^[12] The usurpers had inherited an existing system of coastal defence—the earlier Saxon Shore forts—and may have decided to augment it with the construction of Pevensey Castle and its close contemporary, Portus Adurni (Portchester Castle).^[31]

Anderitum appears to have been a particularly important link in the Saxon Shore forts, which extended from Hampshire to Norfolk and may have been connected by intermediate watchtowers. The Notitia Dignitatum mentions a fleet that was presumably based there, the Classis Anderidaensis. It would probably have acted in coordination with naval units based on the other side of the Channel to intercept pirate ships passing through the Channel. Like the other Saxon Shore forts, Anderitum's position at a strategic harbour would have enabled the Romans to control access to the shoreline and prevent invaders from penetrating inland.^[32] It was linked by a road built in the late Roman period, probably at the same time as the fort.^[33]

It is not known how long it took for Pevensey castle to be constructed, but it has been estimated that it took around 160,000 man-days to complete, equivalent to 285 men spending two years building it or 115 men over five years.^[30] At least four gangs of builders appear to have worked on the surviving sections of walls; each gang was given a stretch of about 20 metres (66 ft) at a time to build but executed the work in significantly different styles, for instance using differing numbers of tiled bonding-courses or ironstone facing in particular places. This may simply indicate varying levels of availability of construction materials at the time each segment was built, leading the gangs to use whatever supplies were available at that moment.^[34] The amount of construction material required was very large, equating to about 31,600 m³ (1.12 million cu ft) of stone and mortar. It is not known how it was transported to the site, but that volume of material would have needed some 600 boat loads or 49,000 wagon loads, requiring 250 wagons pulled by 1,500–2,000 oxen to move it from the quarries to Pevensey. Given the scale of the requirements for land transportation, it seems more likely that the raw materials were instead moved by sea, though even this would have been a significant operation; it has been estimated that 18 vessels would have been needed for a continuous supply operation carried out over a season of 280 days.^[35]

The curtain wall was not all built at once but was constructed in segments, as can be seen from vertical breaks in the stonework which mark where sections met. The wall is built on top of complex foundations constructed from rubble and timber set into a ditch 15 feet (4.6 m) deep. Oak piles were driven into the trench and packed with flint and clay, above which a horizontal framework of oak beams was set with more flint and clay. The foundation was finally covered over with cement before the walls were built on top.

Unlike at many other Roman forts, no civilian settlement or vicus appears to have been established outside the walls of Pevensey Castle; this was probably because the fort was at the end of a peninsula with limited room for additional construction.^[40] When the Roman army retreated from Britain in 410, civilians appear to have moved into the abandoned fort, perhaps for protection against Saxon raiders, and its name continued to be used well into the Saxon period. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 477 a Saxon raid drove local people into the forest of Andreadsleag (which from another reference seems to have stretched over 200 kilometres (120 mi) from the mouth of the River Lympne to Hampshire).^[5] Although the history of the fort at this time is unrecorded, archaeological evidence indicates that its inhabitants had wide-ranging trade links that enabled them to import wares from as far afield as Macedonia and Syria. They may have exported timber and iron from the Sussex Weald to pay for such costly goods.^[41]

In 491, the Chronicle records that the Saxons Aelle and Cissa "besieged Andredadsceaster and slew all the inhabitants; there was not even one Briton left there."^[41] It is uncertain whether habitation of the fort continued after this event,^[42] which is now thought to have happened around 471 rather than the date recorded by the Chronicle (due to a dating error by Gildas, on whose work the Chronicle draws).^[41] The fort appears to have been resettled by about the mid-6th century by a Saxon community which left evidence of its occupation in the shape of pottery, glass and other items. By the late Anglo-Saxon period, Pevensey had become a well-established fishing port and producer of salt.^[33] Whereas the modern village of Pevensey is situated entirely outside the walls, the 11th-century village appears to have been situated within the Roman walls.^[43] At the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 it had a population of 52 burgesses with a harbour and saltworks outside the walls.^[44] A civilian settlement within the castle walls evidently persisted for some considerable time after the Conquest, as a licence of 1250 refers to the Roman fortress as the "outer wall of the town".^[45]

Anderitum had fallen into ruin by the time of the Norman Conquest of England but it still remained a formidable fortification in a very strategic location, offering a natural anchorage near one of the narrowest points of the English Channel. By this time the locality was known as Pevensey, meaning "River of [a man named] Pefen" (deriving from the Anglo-Saxon personal name Pefen plus eã, "river", presumably a reference to the now largely silted-up Pevensey Haven).^[46]

When

William's choice of Pevensey as a defensive location may not have been entirely due to practical military reasons. It also had political connotations, implying that the Normans were on a level with the Romans. He followed a similar pattern elsewhere in England, building the Tower of London alongside the still-extant Roman city wall and constructing Colchester Castle on top of the ruins of the Temple of Claudius.^[49]

Following William's victory at Hastings, the county of Sussex came to be seen by the new regime as being of essential military value. It was both a frontier zone and an essential link between England and Normandy. The existing tenurial arrangements in the county were swept away and replaced by five subdivisions, or rapes, each of which was given to one of William's most important followers. Each rape was associated with a major castle, Pevensey being one of them.^[50] In 1067 William left England for Normandy via Pevensey. He also appears to have used the site to distribute lands to his Norman followers, with Pevensey Castle and the surrounding Rape of Penvensey being gifted to his half-brother Robert, Count of Mortain.^[47]

William's temporary fortification within the Roman walls was expanded to create a permanent Norman castle at Pevensey, probably during Robert's tenure sometime in the 1070s. The Roman walls were further repaired and two enclosures or baileys were created, divided by a ditch and a palisade constructed from timber.^[51] Robert also founded a small borough outside the Roman walls which was recorded as having 110 burgesses and a mint by the time the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086. This may have been the original site of the modern village of Pevensey, but it is equally possible that Robert's borough may have been the foundation site of the village of Westham to the west of the castle, whose layout has many similarities to that of other Norman new towns.^[52][53]

The Norman castle's defences were put to the test for the first time in the

Henry re-granted Pevensey Castle to Gilbert I de l'Aigle but continued to use it for his own purposes, as happened in 1101 when he spent the summer at Pevensey to deter a threatened invasion by Duke Robert of Normandy. Pevensey was confiscated again by the Crown under King Stephen, with Gilbert's family also losing the rest of their possessions. It was subsequently re-granted to Gilbert de Clare, 1st Earl of Pembroke, who switched his allegiance to Stephen's cousin and rival, the Empress Matilda, in 1141. Although Gilbert changed his loyalty back to Stephen the following year, he was taken hostage by the king in 1147 after a revolt by Gilbert's uncle, Ranulf de Gernon, 4th Earl of Chester. A promise to surrender the Clare family's castles secured Gilbert's release but as soon as he was freed, he too rebelled. In response, Stephen undertook the second siege of Pevensey Castle with a land and sea blockade. The castle once again proved impervious to direct assault but the garrison was eventually starved out.^[54][55]

Gilbert's disloyalty led to the Crown seizing the castle again and taking on the burden of repairing and maintaining it. The expenditure was recorded in still-surviving Treasury accounts which provide a valuable insight into the development of the castle during the later medieval period. In the 1180s the defences appear to have been a combination of stone walls (the old Roman structure) with Norman modifications, plus earthworks and timber palisades.^[54] They were maintained in part by some of the local manors, which were under a feudal obligation called heckage that required them to repair and keep up sections of the palisades.^[56]

Pevensey Castle appears to have acquired its first major new stone buildings in the 1190s. Their construction may be indicated by a series of substantial payments for works at the castle during the reign of

A subsequent rebuilding saw the timber palisades of the inner bailey replaced by stone walls and towers. Exactly when this happened is unclear, but it may have been under Peter of Savoy, the Earl of Richmond, who was granted the castle by Henry III in 1246. There is no record of the rebuilding but in 1254 Peter ended the feudal requirement to maintain the palisades and replaced it with cash payments.^[57] This probably reflected the replacement of the palisades with the stone walls and towers visible today. The castle faced a lengthy siege only a decade later during the Second Barons' War from the rebel baron Simon de Montfort, following Henry's defeat in the Battle of Lewes. Defeated members of the royalist army fled to Pevensey, pursued by de Montford's forces, but the garrison refused an invitation to surrender and endured over a year of besiegement. Their adversaries were unable to stop supplies reaching the castle despite digging a ditch to cut it off from the mainland; its garrison raided the surrounding countryside and sought to obtain fresh supplies of men and weapons by sea in December 1264. The costly and ineffective siege was eventually lifted in July 1265. We know the name of at least one of the defenders of the castle from Savoyard archives [it] held in Turin, that of Nantelme de Cholay, a vassal of Peter of Savoy as Seigneur de Faucigny from what is now Choulex near Geneva. We know that Cholay had allies with him since the source quotes also his “sociorum” which we can translate as allies or associates.^[58] The siege caused significant damage to the castle, with the Roman wall toppled on the south side. The parish churches at Pevensey and Westham also suffered damage, which the attackers may have caused in using them as siege castles (temporary fortresses and artillery platforms).^[59]

Peter continued to control Pevensey Castle after de Montford's defeat and death at the

The castle underwent repeated repair work during the 14th century, though poor maintenance and corruption appears to have caused its fabric to deteriorate rapidly. The main buildings of the inner bailey were totally reconstructed in 1301 but were reported to be in a ruinous condition only five years later. The castle's constable, Roger de Levelande, was accused of illicitly asset-stripping the castle by breaking up and selling the wooden bridge that connected it to the mainland. Some "wardens" were also accused of burning the timbers of a disused barn. It was estimated that the resulting damage and the ongoing structural deterioration to the curtain wall would cost over £1,000 to repair. Around 1325, the keep was partly demolished and rebuilt.^[62] It is possible that by this time the Roman curtain wall was in such a poor state that it was no longer considered part of the castle defences. Various late-13th- and early-14th-century records describe how sections of the wall had fallen down or been destroyed in sieges. The collapse of the wall on the north-west side is thought to have occurred by no later than the middle of the 13th century, and this event may have made the outer bailey indefensible thereafter.^[45]

Pevensey Castle was besieged again for the fourth and last time in its history in 1399. By this time it was controlled by Sir John Pelham, one of Gaunt's

My dear Lord ... if it please you to know of my affairs, I am here bylaid in manner of a siege, with the counties of Sussex, Surrey and a great part of Kent, so that I may not out, nor no vitals get me without much difficulty. Wherefore my dear may it please you, by the advice of your wise council, to give remedy to the salvation of your castle, and withstand the malice of the shire ... Farewell my dear Lord, the Holy Trinity keep you from your enemies, and soon send me good tidings of you. Written at Pevensey in the Castle, on Saint Jacob day last past. By ever your own poor, J. Pelham[63]

The siege failed, Bolingbroke was crowned and the new king granted the Castle and Honour of Pevensey to Pelham as a reward for his loyalty.

Elizabeth I ordered the castle's remains to be "utterlye raysed", but her order was not enforced and it remained standing.^[66] In 1587, the castle was reoccupied—though not rebuilt—to serve as a gun position against the threat of a Spanish invasion.^[65] A U-shaped earth emplacement was built in the outer bailey, facing south over the collapsed section of the Roman wall. Two iron demi-culverin cannons were installed and were in place at the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588, although the Armada failed and they were never used in anger. One of the guns, marked with a Tudor rose and the initials E.R. (Elizabeth Regina), has been preserved and can be seen in the inner bailey of the castle mounted on a replica carriage.^[29] Although the cannon was recorded at the time as being only "of small value"^[67] it is now one of only a few cast-iron cannons to have survived from the Elizabethan period.^[68] It was almost certainly manufactured locally in the Sussex Weald.^[67]

Pevensey Castle remained abandoned and crumbling from the end of the 16th century to the first quarter of the 20th. It was nearly demolished during the period of the

In 1945 the castle was returned to civilian control. The blockhouse and obstructions were demolished but it was decided to leave the machine-gun posts in place to illustrate the most recent chapter in the castle's history.[67] The castle is now managed by English Heritage and is open to the public.^[2]

Pevensey Castle has been the subject of a number of excavations and archaeological investigations over the past 300 years. The first recorded excavation on the site took place in 1710, when the vicar of Pevensey sought to dig a channel from the castle's moat, within the outer bailey, to convey water to the village. The project necessitated digging under the Roman curtain wall. This revealed how the wall had been constructed, resting on a foundation of rubble-packed oak piles and beams which were described as exhibiting "no symptoms of decay, and even the leaves of some brushwood which had been thrown in were found equally well preserved."^[73]

The Sussex Archaeological Society, now the oldest archaeological society in England,^[74] was founded within the castle's walls on 9 July 1846.^[75] Six years later, two antiquarians, Mark Antony Lower and Charles Roach Smith, were granted permission by the Duke of Devonshire to carry out an excavation of the castle with the support of sponsors and the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, which provided free transport.^[76] The excavations concentrated on the Roman west gate and north postern, with some small trial trenches dug elsewhere on the site.^[33] They began in August 1852 and continued until November, unearthing several 4th-century Roman coins, numerous stone catapult balls and the foundations of the chapel in the inner bailey.^[77] The castle well was also discovered around the same time by the castle's custodian.^[78]

Further excavations were carried out by Louis Salzmann between 1906 and 1908, concentrating on the north-west sector of the Roman fort, the east gate and the north postern. Harry Sands undertook the clearing of debris around the medieval castle keep in 1906 and more extensive excavations in 1910. Further clearing work took place under the supervision of the Ministry of Works in 1926 following the acquisition of the castle by the state. In 1936 Frank Cottrill carried out an eight-month excavation in the area of the outer bailey. B. W. Pearce excavated outside the Roman west gate in 1938 and cleared the moat of debris the following year. The Second World War ended any further work, and it was not until 1964 that limited exploration by Stuart Rigold took place outside the south-east postern of the inner bailey. In 1993–95, a team from the University of Reading led by Professor Michael Fulford carried out a series of excavations in the area of the keep and on the Roman fortress's east side.^[33] The excavations found dating evidence which indicated the Roman fort was built in the 290s, including a coin from the reign of Allectus, four decades earlier than the previously accepted date range for the fort's construction.^[79] In 2019 a geophysical survey of the outer bailey was carried out.^[80]

• Castles in Great Britain and Ireland
• List of castles in England

• Blondel, Louis (1947). "Le château de St-Jean ou du Mont-de-Vence". Annales valaisannes: Bulletin trimestriel de la Société d'histoire du Valais romand. 6 (4): 297–317.
• Brodie, Allan; Bowden, Mark (2022). "'At Pevensey doth a ruin'd Castle stand': the development of the post-Norman castle". Sussex Archaeological Collections. 159: 139–156.
• Creighton, O.H. (2002). Castles and Landscapes. Continuum.
  ISBN 978-0-8264-5896-4
  .
• OCLC 651819
  .
• Farebrother, George (1986). Hailsham at War. Hailsham History Group, University of Sussex. Centre for Continuing Education.
  ISBN 9780904242294
  .
• Fields, Nic (2006). Rome's Saxon Shore. Oxford: Osprey Publishing.
  ISBN 978-1-84603-094-9
  .
• Foot, William (2006). Beaches, Fields, Streets, and Hills: The Anti-Invasion Landscapes of England, 1940. York: Council for British Archaeology.
  ISBN 9781902771533
  .
• ISBN 9781874350552
  .
• Fulford, Michael; Tyers, Ian (1995). "The date of Pevensey and the defence of an 'Imperium Britanniarum'". Antiquity. 69 (266): 1009–1014.
  S2CID 165050691
  .
• Goodall, John (2013). Pevensey Castle. London: English Heritage.
  ISBN 978-1-85074-722-2
  .
• Marshall, John (2023). Peter of Savoy: The Little Charlemagne. Pen and Sword.
• Howard, Mary Matilda (1855). Hastings, past and present: with notices of the most remarkable places in the neighbourhood. Diplock and Smith.
  OCLC 2171080
  .
• Hull, Lise (2008). Understanding the Castle Ruins of England and Wales. McFarland.
  ISBN 9780786452767
  .
• Huscroft, Richard (2013). The Norman Conquest: A New Introduction. Routledge.
  ISBN 9781317866275
  .
• King, Richard J. (1868). A Handbook for Travellers in Kent and Sussex. John Murray.
  OCLC 2016108
  .
• Johnson, Stephen (1976). The Roman Forts of the Saxon Shore. London: Elek.
  ISBN 978-0236400249
  .
• Johnson, Stephen (1989). "Pevensey". In
  ISBN 978-0-85989-330-5
  .
• Lyne, Malcolm (2009). Excavations at Pevensey Castle, 1936 to 1964. Oxford: Archaeopress.
  ISBN 9781407306292
  .
• Lister, Raymond (1960). Decorative Cast Ironwork in Great Britain. G. Bell.
  OCLC 3124807
  .
• OCLC 181866167
  .
• Mills, David (2011). A Dictionary of British Place-Names. Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 9780199609086
  .
• Pearson, Andrew (2003). The Construction of the Saxon Shore Forts. Oxford: Archaeopress.
  ISBN 978-1-84171-487-5
  .
• Peers, Charles (1952). Pevensey Castle, Sussex. HMSO.
• Pounds, Norman J. G. (1994). The Medieval Castle in England and Wales: A Political and Social History. Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 9780521458283
  .
• Quinn, Tom (2007). The Archaeology of Britain: from Prehistory to the Industrial Age. New Holland.
  ISBN 9781845372682
  .
• ISBN 978-0-7524-6025-3
  .
• Ward, J. L. (1908). Short History and Guide of Pevensey Castle. Petley.
  OCLC 499816347
  .
• Wilson, Roger J.A. (2002). A Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain. London: Constable.
  ISBN 978-1-84119-318-2
  .

• Mark Bowden;
  Wikidata Q66757671
• Anthony Chapman (2007). "The gatehouse of Pevensey Castle" (PDF).
  Wikidata Q50310088.
• Scott Chaussée (2019), Report on the geophysical survey at Pevensey Roman Shore Fort and Castle, March 2019, GeoTechnê Prospection,
  Wikidata Q100961409
• Roy Porter (March 2020). Pevensey Castle.
  Wikidata Q101138925
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pevensey Castle.

Scholia has a topic profile for Pevensey Castle.

• Official page: English Heritage
• Roman-Britain.co.uk