It would appear that the Saxons spread through Sussex from the west and that the Eastbourne area and Pevensey Fort itself were among the last to be overrun, with the result that most of the Roman ways were abandoned. Although no Saxon habitation site has been identified in Eastbourne, a Saxon village of long standing is known to have existed and probably nestled somewhere on the lower slopes of the downs, as a group of huts with thatched roofs and timber frames, clustered around a hall where the chief would have lived and conducted the business of the area.

Saxon Cinerary Urn

The earliest known reference to Bourne, as Eastbourne was then known, appears in an Anglo-Saxon charter of around A.D. 963 which describes a perambulation of the ancient holding of East Hale, an area including the Town Hall and land to the east of the Bourne Stream. In it there is a short catalogue of local features including "the old landing place" and the "stream" which is the earliest reference to the Bourne Stream, from which the name Bourne is derived. The reference to an old landing place suggests an early maritime trading tradition and the landing place itself was almost certainly to the east of the Wish Tower. A church at Bourne is first recorded in a chronicle of Fecamp of 1054 in which Edward I granted St. Michael's Church at "Burhna" to the Abbey of Fecamp in Normandy, and thus it was probably held until the Norman Conquest.