Bishop Godfrey de Lucy was constantly in residence at Bishop Sutton in the palace there.  The road passes through this delightful village a mile or more to the east of New Alresford and something remains, the ruins of the kennels it is said, of the palace.  This was doubtless “the manour-house ... a verie olde house somtyme walled round aboutte with stone now decaied well waterid with an olde ponde or moote adjoyning to it,” of which we hear in the time of Edward VI.  It seems to have been destroyed in the Civil war, but even in 1839 much remained of it.  “Within the memory of many persons now living,” writes Mr Duthy in 1839, “considerable vestiges of a strong and extensive building stood in the meadows to the north of the church, which were the dilapidated remains of an ancient palace of the Bishops of Winchester.  The walls were of great thickness and composed of flints and mortar, but it was impossible to trace the disposition of the apartments or the form of the edifice.”  Bishop Sutton had belonged to the church of Winchester since King Ine’s day, but in the early part of the eleventh century it was held by Harold, and after the Conquest by Eustace of Boulogne.  Bishop Henry de Blois regained it for the church by exchange, in whose possession it has remained but for a few brief intervals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in one of which John Evelyn bought it, until to-day.

It is probably to this fact we owe the beauty and preservation of the church here, with its fine twelfth century nave, not fundamentally altered, and its chancel still largely of the thirteenth century.  Especially notable are the two Norman doorways in the nave and curious supports of the belfry there, four naked and massive posts.

[Illustration:  SELBORNE FROM THE HANGER]

Bishop Sutton was the last place I was to see upon the old road, for a mile beyond that village I left it where it turned northward, to go east into Ripley and so by the byways to climb into the hills, and crossing them to descend steeply at evening into the village of Selborne by the Oakhanger stream just before it enters that narrow brief pass into the Weald.  There in the twilight I stayed for awhile under the yew tree in the churchyard to think of the writer, for love of whom I had made this journey all the way from Winchester.

“In the churchyard of this village,” writes Gilbert White in “The Antiquities of Selborne,” “is a yew-tree whose aspect bespeaks it to be of great age; it seems to have seen several centuries and is probably co-eval with the church, and therefore may be deemed an antiquity; the body is squat, short and thick, and measures twenty-three feet in the girth, supporting a head of suitable extent to its bulk.  This is a male tree, which in the spring sheds clouds of dust and fills the atmosphere around with its farina....  Antiquaries seem much at a loss to determine at what period this tree first obtained a place in churchyards.