aving this place given him,
founded therein a monastery, which his successors possess to this day,
and established a regular course of life, chiefly of the brethren he
had brought with him; for he, both in word and actions, performed the
duties of a bishop in those parts during the space of five years, until
the death of King Egfrid. And forasmuch as the aforesaid king, together
with the said place, gave him all the goods that were therein, with the
lands and men, he instructed them in the Faith of Christ and baptised
them all. Among whom were two hundred and fifty men and women slaves,
all of whom he by baptism, not only rescued from the servitude of the
devil, but gave them their bodily liberty also and exempted them from
the yoke of human servitude."

The church and monastery which St Wilfrid thus founded at Selsey,
thereby establishing the bishopric of Sussex, have long since
disappeared beneath the sea. Camden, however, tells us that
he saw the foundations at low water; they lay about a mile to
the east of the little church of Our Lady, which remained complete
until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was all
pulled down except the chancel which we see to-day in the graveyard
which it serves as chapel. It is a work of the fourteenth century, and
within is the fine sixteenth-century monument of John Lews and his
wife. The old Norman font has been removed to the new church of St
Peter at Selsey, built largely out of old materials. There, too, is an
Elizabethan chalice and paten of the sixteenth century.

Thus nothing at all remains at Selsey, not even the landscape as it was
in St Wilfrid's day. Till yesterday, however, one might realise in the
loneliness and desolation of this low, lean headland something of that
far-off time in which the great bishop came here and had to teach that
barbarous folk even to fish. 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.

By that railway indeed I returned to Chichester, and then at once set
out westward for Bosham, where I slept. Bosham is perhaps the most
interesting place in all this peninsula as well as probably the most
ancient. That Bosham was a port of the Romans seems likely, but that it
was the earliest seat of Christianity in Sussex after the advent of the
pagans is certain. There, as Bede tells us, St Wilfrid, when he came
into Sussex in 681