Insenos

Attested:  insenos in the Ravenna Cosmography, just before the start of the British section of the Cosmography, in all three surviving manuscripts, is this piece of text: Iterum sunt in ipso [northern] oceano [islands] quae dicitur vectis malaca insenos taniatide.

Where:  Most likely Oxney island.  At present there are no islands off south-eastern England, between Vectis (Wight) and Taniatide (Thanet), but see the map below of how the Channel coast might have looked in Roman times, copied from page 196 of Lafaurie (1996), or here for a more northern map, screen-captured from Margary(1947).

Name origin:  Uncertain.  PIE *senə- ‘apart, separated’ may also show up in the names Leugosena (Menai Strait) and Raxtomessasenua (Solent) suggesting a possible link to straits where low tide exposes a lot of sand.  The other natural Indo-European meaning of -senos, ‘old’, may make better sense, joined to In-, yielding a meaning of ‘old inside’.

Notes:  Oxney was not really in oceano, but it still outranks the archipelago around the eastern end of the Solent, including Hayling Island, Thorney, Portsea, Bembridge Island (still separated from the rest of the Isle of Wight by a shipping channel when the Mary Rose sank), or even the Selsey peninsula.  Rivet & Smith suggested the le de Sein off the tip of Brittany, but that seems too far away, while the Goodwin Sands seem never to have been a real island.  Selsey has been claimed, probably wrongly, as where Aelle came ashore at Cymenesora in AD 477.  Off Selsey lies a rocky reef called The Mixon, which may represent the southern tip of Selsey in Roman times, before sea levels rose.  It was much used over the centuries as a quarry conveniently accessible from the sea and may have contributed stone to the “palace” at Fishbourne, near Chichester.