From Nicholas Austin
(address witheld)

Inspector Christopher Tipping
Planning Inquiry
White Rock Theatre
Hastings

20th November 2009

Dear Mr Tipping,

I attended the public Inquiry which you are running into the link road planned between Bexhill and Hastings on Tuesday.

At that hearing I had requested to attend to ask question from Mr Munby, the professional Cultural Heritage witness, paid for by the group proposing this road. I was appalled at what I witnessed and was subjected to. I consider this an abusive process and have termed it “Academic Abuse” which I accuse you of instigating, and am therefore removing myself from this process, because the Inquiry is operating under rules that are blatantly unfair and prejudicial to the national cultural heritage. I cannot accept what you said at that Inquiry and the rules that you expect me, as a historian and archaeologist to abide by. You are dammed by your own words that are recorded in the transcript of that hearing.

At that hearing it was intended that I cross examine Mr Munby who has produced his expert report on the cultural heritage potential for the proposed route. It is known to Mr Munby and the road lobby that there is a major cultural heritage claim against the site at Wilting Manor that has existed since 1996, when the last Inspector Mr Jeaps took evidence for the road. I attended that Inquiry and the road was subsequently not built only due to good luck and failure to find funds. The claim was made in 1996 that Wilting Manor is the site of the Norman Invasion. That claim is based upon evidence in eight national treasure cultural heritage manuscripts, based upon interpretations made with local knowledge of the terrain and confirmed by the wasted manor evidence of the Domesday Book.

The core evidence in favour of this site as the site of the Norman Invasion is therefore documentary and historical, from documents upon which the Battle of Hastings site itself is based at Battle Abbey. When I sought to challenge Mr Munby on the subject of why his brief did not cover historical documents as evidence you closed down the discussion between you.

I then moved on to the issue of probability, since Mr Munby has made many statements in his evidence where he refers to archaeology and makes many unsupported suppositions. This is important, because I was told at the last Inquiry that there was no archaeology on this site at Wilting. I was told that even if it were found it was still an issue of probability. Dr Gardiner the then expert stated:

(Para 5.2 page15 of his Proof) that "Absolute proof is rarely possible in historical and archaeological studies. Historians and archaeologists are used to balancing probabilities, to assessing the strength of one argument against another."

It was my intention to challenge Mr Munby on his qualifications to make assumptions. You intervened again and stopped questioning upon the basis that this is an expert witness and therefore you as Inspector have the right to decide who you wish to accept what is probable and what is not, because you have that job.

However at this Inquiry there is no-one to counter the position being advanced by the road lobby except me on the cultural heritage issue of the Norman Invasion. I wished to challenge the probability issues raised and then you tell me, in front of everyone there, that it is my job to make my case in evidence, having excluded historical documents from the cultural heritage case that Mr Munby is presenting as an expert.

You then tell me that it is necessary for me to convince you that the Normans landed at Wilting, because that is my case. A case that you put to me in wholly simplistic terms and outside of the possibilities of a human being, without reference to the historical documents that support all the other sites associated with the Battle of Hastings.

I suffered this abuse under the hands of Mr Jeaps at the last Inquiry and am certainly not going to allow it again. My services are for cultural heritage and I have no pay master. It is your job to run a fair show and that is not happening.

What you do not realise you are doing is rigging the outcome of the Inquiry, in the same way the previous Inquiry was rigged. You are cozying up with the road lobby expert, in a blatant attempt to exclude valid historical manuscript evidence.

You expect me to provide archaeology evidence to show you the Norman camp, without reference to the documents that support it. That was the process at the last Inquiry. You are asking me to provide hard archaeological proof, whilst the people on your side of the table have a second set of rules in their favour. They do not have to provide proof in any form, simply the likelihood that the evidence that has been found is not what it might be. When I seek to establish how probability is established in the expert report, you close me down.

Perhaps this is a little difficult for you to understand, but it is the same issues that concern many cultural heritage sites such as Stonehenge or more recently the battle field at Bosworth Field. As an archaeologist you cannot prove the Druids used Stonehenge and if you ask for proof you will get none – like at Battle Abbey. Your simplistic view that I must show archaeology to prove the thesis that the Normans landed at Wilting is applying two separate and different value equations. One requires physical proof and the other from the road lobby does not. Their case need probability, but probability in my case is not allowed to be presented or challenged. If we were to accept that as a valid academic issue there would be no cultural heritage sites in the UK, they would all be under your roads.

Narrowing the form of argument to archaeology alone is a form of academic abuse, because the two sides are not on a level playing field. Nice if you can get away with it like last time, but blatantly biased and unfair.

You will see that I’m not going to trifle with you on the issues of how you run this public Inquiry. I see the potential for major damage to our country’s heritage at your hands and so I am withdrawing because there is nothing new I have to add since the last Inquiry. Your experts on the other hand have produced a LIDAR survey that effectively confirms that the trench at that Inquiry was located in a major building seen on that plan (OA121) but denied this at that time, making a nonsense of the conclusions drawn by that Inspector.

The summing up for that Inquiry post archaeological investigation is listed at http://www.secretsofthenormaninvasion.com/corresp/summary.htm parts 1 - 5 and makes pretty damning reading from a heritage preservation point of view, because that Inspector chose to ignore the evidence in 1996, for the same reason you are doing it now. You are setting up parameters for the evidence and making the case one sided.

I went into the last public Inquiry well prepared and the evidence was posted to my web site where it has become the number one learning resource in the UK for students in secondary education. I was told at that last Inquiry that archaeological evidence was needed to prove my case. I suffered nearly six weeks of abuse at the hands of a QC who sought to dismantle the argument line by line – a common ploy. So I decided to do the same with Mr Munby who is presented as the Cultural Heritage expert, who does not include manuscripts as validation for cultural heritage. His ploy and yours is simply to ignore the evidence of the last Inquiry and treat the result as a foregone conclusion.

Mr Munby has not studied the Norman Invasion, he has not studied history even. He is currently unchallenged and the nearest he has come to the Norman Invasion is working on the archaeology of a building in Porchester and the Hampshire Domesday Book. His expertise is mainly post 1300 (list enclosed of his work) long after the Invasion and he doesn’t even pretend in his statement to be an expert on the matter of the Normans. Being an expert on the Domesday Book in Hampshire is as relevant to this claim of Norman Invasion site as the telephone book – they are both lists of data. At least when I studied the subject of the wasted manors I produced a conclusion that no-one can argue with or has argued with.

I do not accept Mr Jeaps findings at the last Inquiry, because he operated his Inquiry in the same manner you are operating yours. You will therefore rely upon his findings if I simply continue and they are flawed too for the same reasons. My closing statement 1 – 5 nothing has changed there.

The people who plan to build this road knew about this major cultural heritage claim against this site at Wilting. As detailed in the other Inquiry a cheaper non intrusive route was available. I offered to show them the places where the archaeology could be found (letter enclosed) and they decided it was not necessary, because Mr Jeaps had made his previous decision based upon the application of the same academic abuse. That decision not to discuss issues with a local expert in the field is a dereliction of their duty to the community and their duty to the nation to be thorough on any site with a national cultural heritage claim against it.

I accepted the outcome of that last Inquiry because I had no choice, but now things have moved forward and I have a choice. We are twelve years later and there has not been one challenge to the academic basis of the historical proof presented in my thesis. We were told at the last Inquiry that there was no evidence on the Wilting site of any archaeological nature – the site was clean.

Now I am told by another different road expert there are 47 features which are worthy of recording – including the seven trenches dug upon my instructions at Wilting Farm. Those seven trenches produced a host of archaeology (the two in the important field through which the road is planned to pass attached) and now we are told that it isn’t the right sort of archaeology. Since when is finding archaeology that confirms the continual habitation of a site, a reason for dismissing a historical heritage claim? The presence of archaeology confirms what was previously unknown, it does not undermine the thesis.

I contend that the road proposers have not done their due diligence, because they have sought to exclude important evidence that could have been made available to them by me. They chose a route that is probably the most sensitive and damaging to the cultural heritage of England, when an alternative cheaper route was known to exist. This is not the same route as the one that Mr Jeaps was dealing with. His road went south of this site – this one is far mare damaging, because it goes right through the field where the archaeology is located in the top field.

The claim against the Wilting Farm site is not undermined by the lack of a Norman presence. There is no Norman archaeology at Battle Abbey – the battle site. There is none at Hastings Castle or the whole town of Hastings and there is none at Pevensey. I do not accept it as a valid academic exercise to seek to discredit me and my work upon the basis that there is no Norman archaeology at the site of the Norman Invasion and camp of William the Conqueror.

You and Mr Jeaps appear to have got in a mess over this and it needs public debate if you are to be overturned in your fixed way of thinking. I am not in the meantime going to be involved further in an Inquiry that has set rules that damage the national heritage potential of Hastings. Goodness knows what the authentication of this site would mean in tourism potential for the region, but that is not my concern, it should be yours. No-one even pretends that there is a Norman Invasion site anywhere else and yet you set the goalposts differently at each end of the field for the blatant benefit of road builders.

Lastly the world of History is not an isolated study. I realised very soon after the last Inquiry that I had been through an abusive process, because I was a lone voice and had acquired specialist knowledge that no-one else had taken the time to acquire. I realised that the book that gave Battle Abbey its authority, called the Chronicle of Battle Abbey, had one major flaw. It was written at the time the monks at Battle Abbey forged a charter designed to guarantee their existence continued, free of the church at large or the state.

There was a big problem, identified in the Victorian period that the Chronicle named the landing site and also there was confirmation of line of sight exchanges between the camp of William at the port of Hastings and the camp of Harold at the battle site. That evidence is confirmed in other manuscripts. Yet as anyone who has ever been to Battle Abbey will know there is no possible way that anyone at Battle Abbey could ever see the port of Hastings or anywhere near the sea.

I have spent the last twelve years researching this and now have evidence (the archaeological kind) that the site of the Battle of Hastings is not at Battle Abbey, but located in Crowhurst, where the Domesday data on my web site confirms that it should be. More importantly still is that the Invasion and Battle sites are confirmed by the Bayeux Tapestry, since the author of that work clearly identified the battle site by the ground that lay between it and the camp.

I am going to publish that information shortly and you and your masters are going to have to take that on board when you come to your decision. The Norman Invasion did not take place in isolation, but as you will realise when you stand on that top field at Wilting, it is inherently connected to the events of the Battle of Hastings. The Normans may not have left anything at the camp, but they certainly did in Crowhurst. There is documentary evidence to back this in the very Chronicle that the monks used to establish their authority. They like those who have come after never thought it would be seen or challenged.

I shall not name the exact site yet, because Crowhurst is a wide area from the Crowhurst Park Caravan site to the church. The details will become public when the Battlefield Trust has had a chance to carry out the proper investigation – this may take some time. I have also asked them to investigate the top field at Wilting, because Mr Munby has taken the view that it is not necessary to preserve or protect that archaeology. That decision would be a disaster if this road follows through.

That top field at Wilting is the core feature of the Invasion camp and has an identifiable earthworks discussed at the last Inquiry. I do not intend to go through that again with people who have absolutely no recognise expertise in the specialist subject, because that information is public. The soil has been removed physically from the bottom half of the field to the top – as witnessed by the geophysics study which found the shallow depth odd – an issue denied by the last Inquiry archaeologists who said it was natural. Anyone who visits the site at dusk can see the line where the soil has been banked up and I am expected to take that evidence of natural formation as authoritative – this is a joke if it were not so important. Archaeologists who want to suppose that this was natural movement, because they want to build a road, I have no time for.

The supposition, without any alternative site and without any historical documents that even suggest an alternative site that has any authority, the counter argument that this is probably not the site of the Norman Invasion is rapidly diminishing. I do not intend to be party to a conspiracy to build a road and deny perfectly legitimate historical evidence, when a cheaper non intrusive route has already been through the planning Inquiry process. The discovery of the correct battlefield site damns this road proposal for ever and you should agree that whether you like it or not. If you do not act to protect this site legislation should be demanded to protect sites such as this to avoid the sort of catastrophic cultural heritage mistake I am witnessing before my eyes.

Good luck with the rest of your Inquiry.

Yours sincerely

Nick Austin

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