ne to serve God." Such was
the end of the house William de Braose had built in the first years of
the Conquest. What remains of it will be found in the church of St
Peter in Upper Beeding, an Early English building of no great interest
save that it contains many carved stones from the Priory, a window and
a door also from the same house, upon the site of which the vicarage
now stands.

William de Braose, who made Bramber his chief seat, must have had an
enormous influence upon building in this neighbourhood, which abounds
in Norman churches such as those of Botolphs and Coombes, to say
nothing of those at Shoreham Old and New; but he was by no means the
only renewer of life here.

The most beautiful thing in the still beautiful village of Steyning is
the great church of St Andrew, but with this the Lord of Bramber has
nothing to do; the Benedictine Abbey of Fecamp rebuilt this noble
sanctuary, but its foundation is said to be due to an English saint,
St Cuthman, who, having been a shepherd boy, upon his father's death
came out of the west into Sussex bearing his mother, who was crippled,
in a kind of barrow which he dragged by a cord. A thousand queer
stories are told of him as he went on his way, happily enough it
seems, until he came to Steyning, where the cord of his barrow broke.
There he built a hut for his mother, and constructed a little church
of timber and wattles in which at last he was buried. In his life he
had performed divers miracles so that his grave became a place of
pilgrimage, and it is said to have been about this shrine that the
village and church of Steyning grew up. It remained a holy place, and
Ethelwolf, the father of Alfred, is said to have been buried there,
his body later being removed to Winchester.

That the place was of some sort of importance would seem to be
evident, for we find Edward the Confessor, granting the manor and
churches of Steyning to the Benedictines of Fecamp, Harold taking it
from them, and the Conqueror restoring it. Two churches at Steyning
are spoken of in the Domesday Survey, and it has been thought that the
second of these is really that at Warminghurst. But we find a church
in Steyning in the thirteenth century served by secular canons. This
was, however, in all probability the church of St Andrew we know,
which in 1290 was a royal free chapel answerable neither to the
Archbishop nor to the Bishop of Chichester, but to the Abbot of Fecamp
only. The College of Can