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.