The Battle of Crayford, known in early sources as the battle of Crecganford, was fought in 457 at a site identified by several scholars with the present-day town of Crayford in what was then Kent, now part of the London Borough of Bexley. The engagement pitted the Anglo-Saxon leaders Hengist and his son Æsc against the Britons, referred to in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as the "Brettas". The battle came in the turbulent decades following the initial Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, and its outcome would determine who held supremacy over the kingdom of Kent.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, composed around four hundred years after the events it describes, records that Hengist and Æsc defeated the Britons at Crecganford. The Crayford Wikipedia article notes that the battle is described as one in which Hengist defeated Vortimer, the son of the British king Vortigern, though the Battle of Aylesford article notes that the Chronicle does not name Vortimer as the opponent at this engagement. The Battle of Aylesford article records that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the Britons "were forced to forsake Kent for good" following Hengist and Oisc's bloody victory at Crayford in 457.
The consequence of the battle was decisive. With the Britons driven out of Kent entirely, Hengist became, in the words recorded by the Crayford sources, the supreme sovereign of Kent. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account is described as grim for the Britons, whose hold on the region ended permanently as a result of the defeat. Crayford itself remains one of several places proposed as the site, lying near a ford over the River Cray on what was the Roman equivalent of Watling Street, lending the identification geographical plausibility.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's stark verdict that the Britons were forced to forsake Kent for good after the bloodshed at Crecganford in 457 captures just how total the defeat was. A population that had held the region through the Roman period and beyond was, according to this account written four centuries later, swept permanently from a kingdom that would now bear the Anglo-Saxon stamp. The ford over the River Cray, around which the later town of Crayford grew and which is no longer even used, may be the very crossing point at which that irrevocable shift took place.
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