Sussex's motto means we will not be pushed around, and it shows
Sussex has been a kingdom, a county and, since 1974, not officially a ceremonial county at all, yet it still flies six gold swallows on blue and sings Sussex by the Sea at football and cricket matches. Its dialect motto, We wunt be druv, translates roughly as we will not be pushed around.
The name means land of the South Saxons, a Germanic people who settled here in the fifth and sixth centuries. Their kingdom emerged where the Romano-British Regni tribe had lived, fell to Wessex around 827, and joined the Kingdom of England in 927. The Normans divided it into six districts called rapes, which the six martlets on the flag now represent. The county later split administratively into East and West Sussex in 1889, and in 1974 lost its single lord lieutenant and sheriff. A Sussex Day on 16 June, honouring its patron St Richard of Chichester, has been celebrated since 2007.
Human history runs deep. Boxgrove has yielded some of Europe's earliest hominid remains, around 500,000 years old, and flint mines on the Downs above Worthing date from as early as 4500 BC, with Cissbury flints turning up in the eastern Mediterranean. Some archaeologists think the Roman invasion of AD 43 may have landed near Chichester Harbour, not Kent. The Romans built the palace at Fishbourne, the largest Roman residence known north of the Alps.
Geography follows the Weald and the chalk South Downs, running west to east. Blackdown is the highest point at 280 metres, and the Arun is the longest river wholly inside the county. The coastal resorts, along with Hampshire's, are the sunniest places in the United Kingdom, averaging about 1,900 hours of sunshine a year against a national 1,340. Selsey, oddly, is a tornado hotspot.
About 1.7 million people lived in Sussex in 2021, nearly a third of them in the coastal conurbation around Brighton, Worthing and Littlehampton. Three American counties borrow the name.
Source: Sussex
