Chichester Harbour ends just west of the town and close to the Portsmouth high road at New Fishbourne, a pleasant little place with a restored Early English church. This may be said to be the north-western limit of the Selsey Peninsula, one of the most primitive corners of southern England. The few visitors who make use of the light railway to Selsey have little or no knowledge of the lonely hamlets scattered over the wind-swept flats, in which many old customs linger and where the Saxon dialect may be heard in all its purity. [Illustration: THE LOWLANDS.] Selsey--"Seals' Island"[2]--was the scene of the first conversions to Christianity in Sussex and, for this reason, a semi-sacred land to the early mediaeval church in the south. [2] Two seals were seen on the west of the Selsea Peninsula in December, 1919, and one of them was shot for preservation in a local museum. St. Wilfrid's first visit was unpremeditated; he was shipwrecked while returning from a visit to France, where his consecration had taken place in A.D. 665. His reception was so hostile that after getting safely away he decided to return at some future date and convert the Barbarians to more gentle ways. Not for fifteen years did his opportunity come. Then, despoiled of his northern bishopric, for Wilfrid was a turbulent Churchman, he came prepared, we must suppose, for the reception usually meted out to the saints in those days. The heathen Saxons, however, were now in a different mood, for "no rain had fallen in that province for three years before his arrival, wherefore a dreadful famine ensued which cruelly destroyed the people.... It is reported that very often, forty or fifty men, being spent with want, would go together to some precipice, or to the sea-shore, and there hand in hand perish by the fall, or be swallowed-up by the waves." (Ven. Bede.) The efforts of the missionary saint met with success. The unprecedented sufferings of the people had been ignored by their tribal deities and the offer of a new faith was eagerly accepted. The King had been converted, possibly in secret, before this. The baptism of the leading chieftain was followed by the breaking of the terrible drought. The fruits of the woods came to feed the bodies of those who had accepted the food of the spirit, and "the King being made pious and gentle by God, granted him (Wilfrid) his own town in which he lived, for a bishop's see, with lands of 87 houses in Selesie afterwards added thereto, to the holy new evangelist and baptist who opened to him and all his people the way of everlasting life, and there he founded a monastery for a resting-place for his assembled brothers, which even to this day belongs to his servants." (Eddi's _Life of Bishop Wilfrid_.) The monastery site was probably the same as that of the cathedral, now beneath the waves, about a mile east of the present Selsey church. [Illustration: FISHBOURNE MANOR.]