The third and most probable supposition is that the name is derived from a tribe, called the Haestingas,[1] against whom it is recorded that king Offa of Sussex made war: and a charter in Dublet is quoted by Lingard, of the date of A.D . 792,by which ,under the same king,Hastings, with her marshes and Pevensey, are bestowed on the Monastery of St.Denis of Paris. This indicates as intimate a friendship betwixt the kindred nations of Franks and Saxons as had previously subsisted between the Gallic tribes on the opposite sides of the Channel; indeed it is not improbable that then the banks of the Seine were more familiar to our sailors in the days of Charlemagne than now . The Saxon town of Hastings became so important in 924 that King Athelstan established a mint here; and Ruding, in his work on Coinage, speaks of pieces coined here in the reigns of Canute, Edward the Confessor, Harold , William I., William II., and Henry I., and silver pennies were discovered at Alfriston in 1843, apparently struck at Hastings;one, a very rare coin of Hardicanute. Mr. Adet[2] gives a list of coins struck at the Sussex mints, from which I extract those .coined at Hastings in Saxon times:- -
- ↑ One of the many Saxon clans of which Sussex had more than sixty - a larger proportion than any other county - easily to be recognised by the termination of the patronymic ing. They sprang from scions of renowned families across the seas, whose dependents assumed their name. There were several instances of clans bearing the same name as their continental kindred, and the Viking Hasting may have been a member of a foreign clan , part of which had established itself and introduced its name some hundred years before his era.
- ↑ Sussex Arch. I., 38 .
