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. For St
Wilfrid's sake, I put aside these admonishments, and one morning set
out upon the lonely road to Pagham, across a country as flat as a fen,
of old, as they say, a forest, the forest of Mainwood, and still in
spite of drainage and cultivation very bleak and lonely with marshes
here and there which are still the haunt of all kinds of wild-fowl.
It is only to the man who finds pleasure in the Somerset moors, the
fens of Cambridgeshire or the emptiness of Romney Marsh that this
corner of England will appeal, but to such an one it is full of
interest and certainly not without beauty. Pagham, however, of which I
had read, with its creek and harbour, its curious Hushing Well, its
golden sands, and extraordinary melancholy, as it were a ruin of the
sea, sadly disappointed me. Only its melancholy remains. Its harbour,
where of old we read the sea-fowl were to be seen in innumerable
flocks, and the whole place was musical with the cry of the wild-swan,
has been wholly reclaimed, and the famous Hushing Well no longer exists
at all. This last was a curious natural phenomenon and must have been
worth seeing. It consisted apparently of a great pool in the sea, one
hundred and thirty feet long by thirty feet broad, boiling and bubbling
and booming all day long. This was caused, it is said, by the air
rushing through a bed of shingle beneath which was a vast cavern from
which the sea continuously expelled the air as it rushed in. Nothing of
the sort exists at Pagham to-day; it has disappeared with the
reclamation of the harbour, which itself was formed, we are told, in
the fourteenth century by a tidal wave, when nearly three thousand
acres were inundated. The only thing which the continual fight of man
against water in this peninsula has left us that is worth seeing in
Pagham to-day is the church of St Thomas of Canterbury. This is an
Early English building much spoiled by restoration, the best thing
remaining being the beautiful arcade of the end of the twelfth century.
But the eastern window which consists of three lancets is charming, as
is the fourteenth-century chantry at the top of the north aisle,
founded in 1383 by John Bowrere. In the chancel is a curious slab with
an inscription in Lombardic characters, perhaps a memorial of a former
rector. The font is Norman. The church was probably built by one of
the early successors of St Thomas in the See of Canterbury; for Pagham
belonged to the Archbishops until the Reformation, and certain ruins of
their palace remain in a field to the south-east of the church. At
Nyetimber, on the Chichester road, a mile out of Pagham, are the ruins
of a thirteenth-century chapel.
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. The walk, however, is worth the trouble
it involves, for you may thus gather some idea of the history of this
unfortunate coast, which the sea has been eating up for at least
fifteen hundred years. 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. It was here, St Wilfrid was shipwrecked in 666,
and it is from his adventures in Sussex that we learn of the
extraordinary barbarism of the South Saxons, two generations after the
advent of St Augustine.
St Wilfrid's ship, it seems, was stranded on the mud flats, and the
quite pagan South Saxons attacked him and the crew, and it was only the
rise of the tide which floated the ship that saved them, with a loss of
five men. It was not till 681 that Wilfrid, really a fugitive, came
again into Sussex, and this time as to a refuge, for Ethelwalch, king
of the South Saxons, and his queen were then Christians, though their
people were still pagan. There was a certain monk, however, probably an
Irishman, who had a small monastery at Bosham encompassed by the sea
and the woods, and in it were five or six brethren who served God in
poverty and humility; but none of the natives cared either to follow
their course of life or to hear their preaching. Of these heathen St
Wilfrid at once became the Apostle. For, as Bede tells us, he "not only
delivered them from the misery of perpetual damnation, but also from an
inexpressible calamity of temporal death, for no rain had fallen in
that province in three years before his arrival, whereupon a dreadful
famine ensued which cruelly destroyed the people. In short, it is
reported that very often forty or fifty men, being spent with want,
would go together to some precipice, or to the sea-shore, and there
hand in hand perish by the fall, or be swallowed up by the waves. But
on the very day on which the nation received the baptism of faith there
fell a soft but plentiful rain; the earth revived again, and, the
verdure being restored to the fields, the season was pleasant and
fruitful. Thus the former superstition being rejected, and idolatry
exploded, the hearts and flesh of all rejoiced in the living God and
became convinced that He who is the true God had, through His heavenly
grace, enriched them with wealth, both temporal and spiritual. For the
bishop, when he came into the province and found so great misery from
famine, taught them to get their food by fishing; for their sea and
rivers abounded in fish, but the people had no skill to take them
except eels alone. The bishop's men having gathered eel-nets
everywhere, cast them into the sea, and by the blessing of God took
three hundred fishes of several sorts, which, being divided into three
parts, they gave a hundred to the poor, a hundred to those of whom they
had the nets, and kept a hundred for their own use. By this benefit the
bishop gained the affections of them all, and they began more readily
to hear his preaching and to hope for heavenly good, seeing that by his
help they had received that good which is temporal. 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. That place is encompassed by the sea on all
sides, except the west, where is an entrance about the cast of a sling
in width; which sort of place by the Latins is called a peninsula, by
the Greeks a chersonesus. Bishop Wilfrid, having 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, found a Scottish (most probably Irish) monk named
Dicul, who had, in a little monastery encompassed by the sea and the
woods, five or six brethren who served God in poverty and humility.
With the conversion of the South Saxons that monastery flourished, the
house grew rich, and Edward the Confessor bestowed it upon his Norman
chaplain Osbern, Bishop of Exeter, whom, of course, the Conqueror did
not dispossess. Indeed, the place became famous and appears in the
Bayeaux tapestry, in the very first picture, where we see "Harold and
his Knights riding towards Bosham" to embark for Normandy. Bosham,
indeed, was one of Harold's manors, his father, according to the
legend, having acquired it by a trick. _Da mihi basium_, says Earl
Godwin to the Archbishop Aethelnoth, thus claiming to have received
Bosham. That Earl Godwin held Bosham we are assured by the Domesday
Survey, which also speaks of the church, presumably the successor of
the old monastery of Dicul. This, as I have said, and as Domesday Book
tells us, Bishop Osbern of Exeter "holds of King William as he had held
it of King Edward." The Bishop of Exeter still held it, "a royal free
chapel" in the time of Henry I. Then was established here, in place, as
I suppose, of the monks, a college of six secular canons, the Bishop
being the Dean. Exeter, indeed, only once lost the church of Bosham,
and that in a most glorious cause, the cause of St Thomas. For when
Henry II. quarrelled with Becket [Footnote: Herbert of Bosham, possibly
a canon of Bosham, was St Thomas' secretary and devoted follower, and was
certainly born in Bosham.] he deprived the Bishop of Exeter, who took his
part, of this church and bestowed it upon the Abbot of Lisieux, who held
it till 1177, when it came once more to the Bishop of Exeter, who held it,
he and his successors till the Reformation. In 1548 the college was
suppressed, only one priest being left to serve the church, with a
curate to serve the dependent parish of Appledram.
The church, as we have it to-day upon a little sloping green hill over
the water, is of the very greatest interest. The foundations of a Roman
building have been discovered beneath the chancel, and the foundation
and basis of the chancel arch may be a part of this building. But the
greater part of the building we have is undoubtedly Saxon; the great
grey tower, the nave, the chancel arch, one of the most characteristic
works of that period, and the chancel itself, though enlarged in later
times, are without doubt buildings of Saxon England. Mr Baldwin Brown
in his fine work upon "The Arts in Early England," thus speaks of it:
"The plan, as will be seen at a glance, has been set out with more than
mediaeval indifference to exactness of measurements and squareing, and
the chancel diverges phenomenally from the axis of the nave. The
elevations are gaunt in their plainness, and the now unplastered
rubble-work is rough and uncomely, but the dimensions are ample, the
walls lofty, and the chancel arch undeniably imposing." Of the bases
here he says: "These slabs are commonly attributed to the Romans, but
it is not easy to see what part of a Roman building they can ever have
formed. The truth is that they bear no resemblance to known classical
features, while they are on the other hand, characteristically Saxon.
The nearest parallel to them is to be found in the imposts of the
chancel arch at Worth in Sussex, a place far away from Roman sites. The
Worth imposts, like the bases at Bosham, are huge and ungainly,
testifying both to the general love of bigness in the Saxon builder
and to his comparative ignorance of the normal features which in the
eleventh century were everywhere else crystallising into Romanesque.
Saxon England stood outside the general development of European
architecture, but the fact gives it none the less of interest in our
eyes."
The church of Holy Trinity, Bosham, is thus the most important Saxon
work left to us in Sussex, indeed save for the aisles and arcades and
the Norman and Early English additions to the chancel, that glorious
eastern window of five lancets, which in itself is worth a journey to
see, the clerestory, and the furniture we have here really a complete
Saxon work. The font is later Norman and not very interesting; but the
exquisite recessed tomb with the effigy of a girl lying upon it is a
noble work of the thirteenth century, said to mark the grave of
Canute's daughter. The crypt dates also from that time. Near the south
door is another fine canopied tomb, said to be that of Herbert of
Bosham. The windows are Norman in the clerestory and Early English and
Decorated elsewhere throughout the church. The stalls in the chancel
are Perpendicular. But here if anywhere in south-eastern England we
have a church dating from the Dark Age, in which happily we were
persuaded back again within the influence of the Faith and of Rome.
Bosham then for every Englishman is a holy place only second to
Glastonbury and Canterbury: it is a monument of our conversion, of the
re-entry of England into Christendom, of that Easter of ours which saw
us rise from the dead.
A few ruins, mere heaps of stones, mark the site of the college to the
north of the church. Of Earl Godwin's manor-house only the moat remains
near an ancient mill towards the sea; and there, upon the little green
between the grey church and the grey sea, one may best recall the
reverent past of this lovely spot. Little is here for pride, much to
make us humble and exceeding thankful. God was worshipped here between
the sea and the greenwood when our South Saxon forefathers were not
only the merest pagans, but so barbarous that they knew not even how to
fish, when they were so wretched that in companies they would cast
themselves into the sea because there was no light in their hearts and
nothing else to do. Out of that darkness St Wilfrid led them, but even
before he came with the light of Christ and of Rome, in some half
barbarous way in this little place men prayed and Mass was said, and
there was the means of deliverance though men knew it not, being
barbarians.
It is as though at Bosham we were able to catch a glimpse, as it were,
of all that darkness out of which we are come by the guiding of a star.
[Illustration: BOSHAM]
That Bosham was a harbour in Roman times, and that it had more than a
little to do with the founding of Regnum, and the building perhaps of
the Stane Street, I had long since convinced myself. All these creeks
and harbours were probably known and used even then, and certainly all
through the Middle Ages Bosham was of importance as a port; and the
series of creeks, the most eastern of which it served, and the most
western of which is Southampton Water, with Portsmouth Harbour between
them, was still among the greatest ports in England, easily the
greatest, I suppose, in the south country.
In order to see something of this low and muddy coast, which has seen
so much of the history of England, I set out from Bosham very early one
morning, intending to make my way through Emsworth and Havant, by the
Roman road which joins Chichester and Southampton and runs across the
north of these creeks, which may perhaps be considered as one great
port of which only the more western part is famous still.
That way has little to recommend it, and indeed I learned little, for
the modern world has obliterated with its terrible footsteps nearly all
that might have remained of our humble and yet so glorious past, and it
was still early morning when I crossed the Hampshire boundary and came
into the little town of Emsworth, once famous for its trade in foreign
wines, now, I suppose, best known as a yachting station. Emsworth was
originally of far less importance than Warblington, of which it was a
hamlet. There the fair was upon the morrow of the feast of the
Translation of St Thomas of Canterbury, to which saint the parish
church of Warblington is dedicated. This is a very beautiful and
interesting building, but it is obvious at once that it cannot always
have stood in the name of St Thomas, for part of its central tower--the
church consists of chancel, and nave, with a tower between them, north
chancel, vestry, north and south nave-aisles, and north porch--is of
Saxon workmanship. Only one stage of this, however, now remains, the
lower part having been altogether rebuilt. This tower was originally a
western tower, the Saxon church standing to the east of it. There is no
sign of Norman work here, and it seems probable that the Saxon church
remained until in the first years of the thirteenth century a new nave
and aisles were built to the west of the old tower, the lower part of
which was then removed and the tower supported by arches in order to
open a way into the nave of the old church, which thus became the
chancel of the new. It was then in all probability that the church was
newly dedicated in honour of St Thomas. The whole of the old church,
nave and chancel together, however, was destroyed before the end of the
thirteenth century, and a large new chancel built with a chapel or
vestry at the eastern end upon the north; at the same time the aisles
of the nave were rebuilt. Later in the fourteenth century the eastern
arch bearing the tower was rebuilt, and thus appeared the church which
in the main we still see. The difference in the north and south
arcades of the nave is, though, very striking here, because of the
great contrast between the exquisite and delicate beauty of the south
with its clustered columns of Purbeck and the plain round stone columns
of the north, common enough. Tradition has it that the church was built
by two maiden ladies who lived in the old castle near the church, and
that each built a side of the church according to her taste. One is
said to lie in the chapel at the east end of the south aisle, where
there is a tomb with effigy, the other in a tomb in the north aisle.
The "castle" came in 1551 to Sir Richard Cotton, whose son George
entertained Queen Elizabeth there for two days in 1586. In 1643 a
Richard Cotton held the "strong house" of Warblington against the
Parliament till it was taken by "sixty soldiers and a hundred muskets."
All that remains of the place to-day is a beautiful octagonal tower of
red brick and stone, once part of the main gateway.
Now when I had seen all this I went on into Havant, and there at the
cross-roads I found the church of St Faith close by an old sixteenth-
century half-timbered house--the Old House at Home. Havant is, in
spite of the modern world, a place of miracle; for it possesses a
spring to the south-west of the church, called, I think, St Faith's,
which never fails in summer for drought, nor in winter for frost. But
for all that the most interesting thing in the town remains the church.
This is a cruciform building with a tower over the crossing, and is
as, we have it, of Norman foundation, though it seems to stand upon a
Roman site, coins having been found when the old nave was destroyed in
1832 and Roman brick and cement and foundations. The church we see,
however, dates absolutely from the late twelfth century, and is
nowhere, it would appear, older. Unhappily much is far later, the nave
being really a modern building and even the central tower has been
entirely taken down and rebuilt, and indeed all periods of English
architecture would seem to have left their mark upon the church between
the end of the twelfth century and our own day. The manor of Havant
belonged when Domesday Survey was made to the monks of Winchester. But
it is not of them but of William of Wykeham we think here, for his
secretary, Thomas Aylward, was rector of this parish and in 1413 was
buried here in the north transept, where his brass still remains,
showing his effigy vested in a cope. He was not the only notable rector
of Havant, for in 1723 Bingham, the author of the "Antiquities of the
Christian Church," was holding the living when he died. Three years
before he had been wrecked in the South Sea Bubble, and this is
supposed to have caused his death. His work was put into Latin, and
was, I think, one of the last English works to be translated into the
universal tongue.
Out of Havant I went, nor did I stay now on my way until a little after
noon I reached Porchester; but in Bedhampton I did not forget to pray
for the soul of Elizabeth Juliers, who died there after a most
unfortunate and most wretched life in 1411. This lady, daughter of the
Marquis of Juliers and widow of John Plantagenet, Earl of Kent, took
the veil in her widowhood at Waverley. Then appears Sir Eustace
Dabrieschescourt, and she being young, in spite of her vow, marries
him. And having repented and confessed she devoted her life to penance,
being condemned daily to repeat the Gradual and the Penitential Psalms,
and every year to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas. This
penance, with others, she performed during fifty-one years. She was
married to Dabrieschescourt in the church of Wingham in Kent, and died
here in Bedhampton, and was buried in the church of St Thomas, for the
manor was her father's and part of her first dower.
Porchester, where I found myself late in the afternoon, is a very
interesting and curious place. What we really have that is ancient
there is a great walled green about six hundred feet square. We enter
this area to-day on the west, the outer gate being thus opposite to us
in the eastern wall, the castle keep and bailey on our left in the
north-west corner, and the church to the south-east. All this is
mediaeval work, but the origins of Porchester are far older than that;
the place was a fortress of the Romans.
It is certain that a Roman road ran, as I have said, from Southampton
to Chichester, which it entered by the West Gate, and met the Roman
military highway, the Stane Street which entered Chichester by the East
Gate, whither it had come from London' Bridge. This Roman road
doubtless served many a little port upon these creeks and harbours that
lie between Southampton Water and Chichester Harbour, but undoubtedly
the most important port upon that road, apart from the two cities which
it joined, was the Roman Porchester.
It has been suggested, and not without reason, that the Stane Street
itself dates only from the latter part of the Roman occupation of
Britain, that it was, in fact, a purely military way built for the
passage of troops, which until the fourth century were certainly not
needed in any quantity in southern Britain. That they were needed then
was due to the Saxon pirates. The same pagan robbers, who, when the
Legions left us never to return in the first years of the fifth
century, might seem to have overrun the whole country. Now it seems
fairly certain that Roman Porchester was a military and perhaps a
naval fortress, built not earlier than the fourth century here at the
western extremity of what the Romans called the Litus Saxonicum, and
for the purpose of defending southern Britain from the raids of these
barbarous and pagan rogues. If so, it might seem to be of one piece
with that presumably purely military Way the Stane Street, and to give
it its meaning.
At any rate, the mediaeval builder of Porchester Castle used, with the
help of rebuildings and patchings, the Roman fortifications, which did
not perhaps differ very much, and not at all in form, from those we
see. Roman Porchester was just what mediaeval Porchester was, a great
fortress, not a "city," nor a village, but a port similar to the others
that lined the Saxon shore from the Wash to Beachey Head.
Of what became of the place in Saxon times we are entirely ignorant.
The Domesday Survey speaks of it as a "halla," but in the first half of
the twelfth century the Normans built a castle in the north-west corner
of the Roman enclosure, which in 1153 Henry II. granted to Henry
Manduit, and from that time it appears as the military port, as it
were, of the capital, Winchester; Henry II. Richard I. John and Henry
III. not only frequently taking up their residence at Porchester, and
there as in a strong place, transacting the most important business,
but they all of them most frequently set out thence for the Continent
in days when a king of England was as often abroad as at home. Except
Edward I. there is scarcely an English king from Henry II. to Henry
VIII. who did not use Porchester, and Elizabeth, the last royal
visitor, held her court in the Castle.
As we see it to-day the keep of Porchester Castle resembles that of
Rochester, not only in its appearance, though there it comes short, but
in its arrangement. It is, however, surrounded by some later ruins of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the use of which has, I think,
never been ascertained.
The whole place is extraordinarily impressive, and not less so on
account of its containing a church within the Roman walls, possibly
occupying the site of a Roman sanctuary. The church of Our Lady of
Porchester, however, as we see it, was, of course, a Norman building,
built not later than 1133 when Henry I. gave it to the Austin Canons as
their priory church, but about 1145 the canons were removed to
Southwick, where a house was built for them. They must, indeed, have
been very much in the way within so important a fortress seeing how
international the interests of their congregation were. The church, of
course, remained. It was originally a cruciform building, with central
tower, but the south transept has been destroyed as has the chapel east
of the north transept where now the vestry stands. The eastern apse,
too, has been replaced by a square end. Apart from these changes,
however, the church remains largely as it was in the time of Henry I.,
the west front being especially fine, and the font with its relief of
the Baptism of Our Lord, a very notable Romanesque work. I lingered
long in Porchester, indeed till sundown. Nothing in all England rightly
understood is more reverent than this great ruin, not even the Wall.
It, too, like that great northern barrier, was built in our defence by
our saviours against our worst foes the barbarians, the pagans. It,
too, was an outpost of civilisation and of the Faith against the
darkness. Wherever Rome has passed, there a flower will blow for ever,
wherever Rome has been, there is light, wherever Rome has built, there
is something which moves us as nothing else can do, and not least here
in England of my heart upon the verge of the Saxon shore, while we
recall the past at evening and question the future, the future which
will not be known.