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.”