This legend combines two distinct strands of English folklore into a single tale specific to the Selsey coastline, the giant Sir Bevis, a figure drawn from the wider medieval English legend of Bevis of Hampton, a chivalric romance hero whose associated place-names and folk traditions are found scattered across southern England, and the mermaid, one of the most widespread and enduring figures in British coastal folklore, here given a specific royal lineage and a fixed, named location at the Mixon reef.
The Mixon itself is a genuine navigational hazard, a submerged sandbank and reef off Selsey Bill that has long posed real danger to shipping in the area, giving the legend's central setting a concrete, chart-marked reality beyond the purely folkloric, the kind of physically hazardous underwater feature that readily attracts exactly this sort of explanatory or cautionary sea-lore across many different coastal cultures.
The detail of the mermaid princess's descendants still being occasionally glimpsed today gives the legend a continuing, open-ended quality distinct from many folk tales that are framed as having concluded firmly in the past, inviting an ongoing possibility of sighting rather than presenting itself purely as historical story, a structure shared with the Knucker of Lyminster recorded elsewhere in this register, another of Sussex's enduring water-creature legends.
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