XIII THE WEALD CHAPTER XIV TO ARUNDEL AND CHICHESTER CHAPTER XV CHICHESTER CHAPTER XVI SELSEY, BOSHAM AND PORCHESTER CHAPTER XVII SOUTHAMPTON CHAPTER XVIII BEAULIEU AND CHRISTCHURCH

That gap is held by Arundel; the Castle at Amberley was a palace of the Bishop of Chichester, granted to the Bishop of Selsey long before the Conquest; it was only castellated in the fourteenth century.

The apostle of the South Saxons, St Wilfrid, wrecked upon the flat and inhospitable shore of Selsey, was, as we know, their first bishop.

He established his See, however, not at Chichester, but at Selsey where it remained until the Conqueror began to reorganise England upon a Roman plan, when more than one See was removed from the village in which it had long been established to the neighbouring great town.

So it was with the Bishopric of Sussex, which in the first years of the Norman administration was removed from Selsey to Chichester.

Of the South Saxon cathedral church at Selsey we know almost nothing.

Then when in 1075 the See was removed from Selsey to Chichester the old church dedicated in honour of St Peter, which stood upon the site of the present cathedral, was used as the cathedral church, and the Benedictine nuns, to whom it then belonged were dispossessed in favour of the canons.

CHAPTER XVI SELSEY, BOSHAM AND PORCHESTER

It was my good fortune, while I was in Chichester, to be tempted to explore the peninsula of Selsey, which most authorities declare to have no beauty and little interest for the traveller to-day.

To reach Selsey and its old church of Our Lady, what remains of it, from Pagham is not an easy matter, the footpaths across the fields being sometimes a little vague.

Indeed, in the time of St Wilfrid the peninsula was probably nearly twice as big as it is to-day, and Selsey was undoubtedly a little island, probably of mud, divided from the mainland at least by the tide.

Now at this time King Ethelwalch gave to the most reverend prelate Wilfrid, land of eighty-seven families, which place is called Selsey, that is, the Island of the Sea-Calf.

" The church and monastery which St Wilfrid thus founded at Selsey, thereby establishing the bishopric of Sussex, have long since disappeared beneath the sea.

The old Norman font has been removed to the new church of St Peter at Selsey, built largely out of old materials.

Thus nothing at all remains at Selsey, not even the landscape as it was in St Wilfrid's day.

Now even that is going, or gone, for the new light railway from Chichester is bringing a new life to Selsey, which, after all, it would ill become us to grudge her.