s the only Roman road over the South Downs,
the only road that connected London with the greater harbours of the
South Coast. Its terminus was Chichester.

[Illustration: THE MARKET CROSS, CHICHESTER]

Of the early connection of the town with Christianity there is to say
the least high probability. An inscription found in North Street, and
now preserved at Goodwood, recording the dedication of a Temple by the
College of Smiths to Neptune and Minerva, would seem to refer to that
Claudia and that Pudens mentioned by St Paul, and thus to connect them
with Regnum. However that may be, we know that it with the rest of Britain
must have been a Christian city long before the failure of the Roman
administration.

With that failure and the final departure of the Legions, Regnum fell
on evil days. Its position as the key to those harbours which had given
it its importance now exposed it to the first raids of the pirates.
These barbarians, according to legend, were Ella and his three sons,
one of whom, Cissa, is said to have given Chichester her name--Cissa's
camp, Cissa's Ceaster. Of Chichester's story during the Dark Ages we
know as little as we know of most of the cities of England, but that it
was destroyed utterly, as has been asserted, common sense refuses to
allow us to believe. It certainly continued to exist, in barbarous
fashion perhaps, but still to live, till with the conversion of the
English it began to take on a new life, and with the Conquest was
finally established as the seat of the Bishop.

The apostle of the South Saxons, St Wilfrid, wrecked upon the flat and
inhospitable shore of Selsey, was, as we know, their first bishop. He
established his See, however, not at Chichester, but at Selsey where it
remained until the Conqueror began to reorganise England upon a Roman
plan, when more than one See was removed from the village in which it
had long been established to the neighbouring great town. So it was
with the Bishopric of Sussex, which in the first years of the Norman
administration was removed from Selsey to Chichester.

Thus Chichester was restored in 1075 to the great position it had held
in the time of the Romans. Its lord was that Roger de Montgomery who
received it from the Conqueror, together with more than eighty manors,
and to him was due the castle which stood in the north-east quarter,
and the rebuilding of the Roman walls, which continually renewed and
rebuilt, still in some sort stand, upon