The first evidence for Early Medieval (or Anglo-Saxon) settlement in Lyminge was found in 1885 when the railway was being built.  Work on the cutting near Greenbanks revealed a number of burials with grave goods dating to the 6^th Century AD.  More burials were found later in another cemetery off Canterbury Road in excavations that began in 1953 and have continued intermittently up to the present day in advance of planned building work.  Many burials had weapons revealing that this was a warrior society. Then in 2010, further excavations by the University of Reading at the end of Rectory Lane found where the people buried in these cemeteries were living. Dr Gabor Thomas who led this excavation has placed this occupation as beginning as early as about 480 AD, less than 100 years after Britain ceased to be ruled directly by Rome.

Roman fort of Portus Lemanis at modern-day Lympne (© Rob Baldwin)

Records show that the people who settled in Lyminge at this time soon came to call themselves the Limenwara, and Lyminge itself means ‘The central place of the Limen folk’. This perhaps gives a clue as to who they were and where they came from. The Limen is the river later known as the East Rother. Today it flows along the line of the Royal Military Canal built on Romney Marsh in the early 19th Century. In the 5^th Century, the Limen was a river that flowed into a lagoon at what is now West Hythe. This lagoon was protected from the sea by a shingle bank that still underlies the sea defences of Romney Marsh. It was almost land-locked but not quite, and there was access to the open sea roughly where the Hythe Army Ranges now stand. At the mouth of the Limen lay the Roman fort of Portus Lemanis, the remains of which can still be seen on the slope below Lympne Castle. The name of the River Limen (or Leman) still survives to this day in the name of Lympne, the village close by, and also in the name of Lyminge which is thus clearly connected with Lympne.

Axe head from a grave in the Canterbury Road cemetery, 6^th Century AD, found in the excavations of 1954-56 (© John Piddock)

We know that Germanic troops were stationed at Portus Lemanis late in the Roman period. Under Roman rule, people paid their taxes to Rome, and in return troops were stationed in the province to protect them. We believe that people stopped paying taxes to Rome in the early years of the 5^th Century, and no doubt the troops ceased to be paid by the Roman state at this time too. But later records suggest that the local aristocracy may have simply taken over the role of employing troops to protect their estates and little may have changed in practice. Troops may have stayed in the fort at Lympne into the later 5^th Century, living there with their families. Over time, this army unit may have morphed into something that appeared to be more like a warrior band led by a local warlord, drawing recruits from Continental Europe just like the Romans,  even from as far afield as Scandinavia, but all the time becoming less uniform in appearance and forging a new identity rooted in where they lived now rather than where they or their ancestors may have come from.  We know that around this time, the fort started to collapse as a result of land-slip. It is a plausible hypothesis that the warrior band stationed at Lympne, looking for a new and safer base, relocated with their families some 4 miles inland to Lyminge. The archaeological evidence currently suggests that the site of Lyminge was otherwise unoccupied at this time. Some of the metal brooches found in the cemeteries at Lyminge also suggest that the first settlers had links that stretched as far as Scandinavia.  Some of these new inhabitants of Lyminge, though perhaps not all, were probably new arrivals, first generation immigrants whose origins lay outside Britain in the area extending from what we now call The Netherlands, across Northern Germany to Scandinavia.

Spearhead from a grave in the Canterbury Road cemetery 6^th Century AD(© John Piddock)

The people who settled at Lyminge seem to have brought their identity from Lympne, and over the following decades, it became the centre of an administrative district. At the same time, throughout Kent as a whole, there was clearly much continuity from the Roman period. The area known to the Romans as Cantium gradually developed over the course of the 6^th Century into the Kingdom of Kent, suggesting political evolution and continuity underpinned by inter-marriage rather than violent take-over, destruction of the local population and a break with the past. Within a hundred years of the first arrivals in Lyminge, we see the beginning of a great hall complex on Tayne Field. 

Conjectural reconstruction of the royal hall complex on Tayne Field c650 AD (© University of Reading) 

At the centre of this complex were large timber-framed structures over 20m long, almost certainly great feasting halls. Later in the 7^th Century, we know that Lyminge was one of the estates of the King of Kent, and there is good reason to think that these halls of the 6^th Century were royal halls also. At least one hall had a concrete floor made using crushed re-used Roman brick, demonstrating contact with France where such building methods were still known. The great rubbish pit excavated close by has revealed one of the largest collections of vessel glass fragments from this period anywhere in the country. The Kings of Kent clearly enjoyed drinking out of high quality glassware, and no doubt were importing fine wines from the Rhineland, just as the Kentish aristocracy had done for hundreds of years previously, since before the arrival of the Romans.