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.
Thus Chichester was restored in 1075 to the great position it had held
in the time of the Romans. Its lord was that Roger de Montgomery who
received it from the Conqueror, together with more than eighty manors,
and to him was due the castle which stood in the north-east quarter,
and the rebuilding of the Roman walls, which continually renewed and
rebuilt, still in some sort stand, upon Roman foundations, and mark the
limits of the Roman town.
Of the South Saxon cathedral church at Selsey we know almost nothing.
It seems to have been established as a Benedictine house under an
abbot who was also bishop, but later the monks were replaced by secular
canons.
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