eding and many tithes, among them
those of Shoreham. But about 1080 William de Braose seems to have
repented of what he had done, for he then granted to the Abbey of St
Florent in Saumur the reversion of the church of St Nicholas here,
when the last of the canons then living in his college at Beeding
should have died. It was thus that the Abbey of St Florent came to
establish a Priory at Beeding, or Sele as the monks called it, and
this about 1096; and William's son Philip confirmed them in his
father's gifts, and before the end of the twelfth century this alien
priory possessed the churches of Sele, Bramber, Washington, Old
Shoreham and New, to say nothing of the little chapel of St Peter on
the old bridge between Bramber and Beeding.

This old bridge over the Adur is worth notice, for it is said to have
been first established by the Romans upon a road of theirs that ran
under the north escarpment of the Downs from Dover to Winchester.
Certain Roman remains have indeed been found there, and the chapel of
St Peter _de veteri ponte_ was doubtless founded in order to guard it
and keep it open and in order.

Evil days fell upon the Priory with the rise of nationalism and the
wars of the fourteenth century. Like every other alien house it came
under suspicion of spying, and being near the coast, indeed, at the
very threshold of an important gate, it was seized by the Crown. At
last, in 1396, Richard II. permitted it to naturalise itself, and its
only connection thereafter with St Florent was the payment of a small
annual tribute. But the misfortunes of the Priory were not over. For
sixty years or more all went well, but in 1459 the Bishop of
Winchester bought the patronage of the place from the Duke of
Norfolk, and won leave from the Pope and the Bishop of Chichester to
suppress it and appropriate it to his new College of St Mary Magdalen
in Oxford. The suppression, however, was not to take effect till the
last monk then living should die, and this came to pass in 1480. For
thirteen years the Priory was unoccupied, and then in 1493 the Fellows
of Magdalen allowed the Carmelite Friars of Shoreham to use the place,
their own house in Shoreham having been engulfed by the sea. These
White Friars were the poorest in all Sussex; so poor were they that
they failed even to maintain themselves at Sele. In July 1538, when
the Bishop of Dover came to visit the place, he found "neither friar
nor secular, but the doors open ... and no