But those memories were getting worse and worse, for it was nearly two hundred years since the ships of Aella had sailed into Shoreham (which showed him to be a man of immense determination, for it is a most difficult harbour, and there were then no piers and lights)—­it was nearly two hundred years, and there was only the least little glimmering twilight left of the old day.  These barbarians were going utterly to pieces, as barbarians ever will when they are cut off from the life and splendour of the south.  They had become so cretinous and idiotic, that when St. Wilfrid came wandering among them they did not know how to get food.  There was a famine, and as their miserable religion, such as it was (probably it was very like these little twopenny-halfpenny modern heresies of their cousins, the German pessimists)—­their religion, I say, not giving them the jolly energy which all decent Western religion gives a man, they being also by the wrath of God deprived of the use of wine (though tuns upon tuns of it were waiting for them over the sea a little way off, but probably they thought their horizon was the end of the world)—­their religion, I say, being of this nature, they had determined, under the pressure of that famine which drove them so hard, to put an end to themselves, and St. Wilfrid saw them tying themselves together in bands (which shows that they knew at least how to make rope) and jumping off the cliffs into the sea.  This practice he determined to oppose.

He went to their King—­who lived in Chichester, I suppose, or possibly at Bramber—­and asked him why the people were going on in this fashion, who said to him:  “It is because of the famine.”

St. Wilfrid, shrugging his shoulders, said:  “Why do they not eat fish?”

“Because,” said the King, “fish, swimming about in the water, are almost impossible to catch.  We have tried it in our hunger a hundred times, but even when we had the good luck to grasp one of them, the slippery thing would glide from our fingers.”

St. Wilfrid then in some contempt said again: 

“Why do you not make nets?”

And he explained the use of nets to the whole Court, preaching, as it were, a sermon upon nets to them, and craftily introducing St. Peter and that great net which they hang outside his tomb in Rome upon his feast day—­which is the 29th of June.  The King and his Court made a net and threw it into the sea, and brought out a great mass of fish.  They were so pleased that they told St. Wilfrid they would do anything he asked.  He baptised them and they made him their first bishop; and he took up his residence in Selsey, and since then the people of Sussex have gone steadily forward, increasing in every good thing, until they are now by far the first and most noble of all the people in the world.