Imogen Lycett Green on ancient Sussex: King Cnut in Bosham

The tide is high but I’m holding on, sings Debbie Harry in 1981. I wanna be your number one. I hum the tune on a cold winter’s day in 2026, as I watch water rising around the wheels of a red car with a Dutch number plate, parked on the seashore at Bosham in West Sussex. The tide is coming in. Where is the owner? As I queue for a cup of coffee in the teashop on the quay, I watch Brits rub the fug-fogged windows with their sleeves, schadenfreude trembling about their lips.

Legend – recorded in Henry of Huntingdon’s 12th-century Historia Anglorum – tells us that a thousand years ago, almost to the day, the infamous Danish King Cnut (or Canute), ruler of England for 19 years from 1018, stood where the red car is now. In Huntingdon’s account, the proud, barbaric Cnut commands the sea at Bosham to ‘Go back!’, but when it rises above his ankles he recognises his own fallibility and falls to his knees, praying to God, the creator of all things, including the tide.

By the 18th century, the fable is subtly changed. David Hume, in his History of England (published in six volumes between 1754 and 1761), writes that Cnut was weary of flattery from obsequious courtiers and sought to teach them a lesson in humility. “O King Cnut, you are the monarch of all,” fawn the King’s subjects – keen to secure their assets after the recent surrender of England to the Danes. In Hume’s version, Cnut sits on his throne – like the car on the foreshore – as the tide grows higher and higher. “Go back!” he cries, but of course the sea does not obey. Cnut turns to the men and says: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey.”

So which version is true? In the first, you have a king who is a king facing a God who is a God. In the second, you have a king who is a human being, and courtiers with manipulation on their minds. In both versions there are notions of certainty – the certainty of the tide, at least, and the presence of God.

This south coast delta was probably the safest place in the world until King Cnut turned up with 10,000 Vikings. The Brent geese agree. Ten thousand of these sturdy, dark bellied birds fly in from Siberia every year to overwinter in the inlets of Chichester Harbour, of which Bosham is one. Their nasal honking on this quietest of cold days echoes all the way back to Siberia. We are here, they cry! We are here! Or perhaps they are simply warning off my dog. The geese share the harbour with dozens of swans and other shore birds such as dunlin, and a swan was savaged by three dogs last November, their owner unable to call them off.

So the rising tide can be a haven as well as a threat. We all seek safety in one way or another – through relationships, job, place or identity, or even in numbers. But the only certainty is that everything changes. And just as our physical world changes, so too do ideas, which come and go like the tide, flowing in and out, bringing flotsam and jetsam, destroying and creating, carrying and letting go. It would appear that the only invasion the people of Bosham need worry about these days is the spread of ‘false watercress’ in the chalk stream, removed every summer by National Trust volunteers to allow water voles, white-clawed crayfish and damselflies to flourish. But that is not true. Invasions come in many forms. Houses cannot swim or float, and climate change’s rising sea level, pushing right up against the flint walls of the ancient village, is a threat.

Bosham’s Holy Trinity church, however, is more resilient than most. I go there just before twilight to think about the tide and Cnut. The oak door heaves open. Inside the stone church, with its simple wooden roof, winterish light beams thinly golden, illuminating war dead and a carved list of the vicars of Bosham since 841 AD. All is quiet. I experience a moment of connection with King Cnut’s daughter, who is possibly buried under the flagstones, where the Bosham vicar in 1865 found the skeleton of an eight-year-old girl, carefully laid down.

In the stillness, I imagine her small body beneath the stone, cold and forgotten, and recreate in my mind the King’s sorrow. Then I have a thought. Perhaps the minor shift in the Cnut-and-the-tide story points to the major intellectual, artistic and literary shift that precipitated the Romantic Movement. Perhaps Hume lassoed the story, 400 years after Huntingdon, to demonstrate his belief in psychological motive. ‘Reason is the slave of the passions,’ declares Hume, who, with Hobbes and Bacon, changed thinking and made way for later 18th-century writers, musicians and artists such as Wordsworth, Tchaikovsky and Turner, drawn to the sublime in nature, folklore and the individual. In this later version of the story, Cnut is no longer an imperious king but a man interested in ideas.

I walk back via the harbour to check on the red car. It is still there, safe and sound. The sea has spared it this time, retreating into the silty centre of the inlet where the swans are snoozing. The teashop is closing and, in harbour homes, lights are coming on. Thank you, Bosham – or ‘Bozzam’, as we are supposed to call you – for an illuminating day.