Selsey Abbey
Capitular seal with picture of Selsey Cathedral?
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| Monastery information | |
|---|---|
| Order | Benedictine |
| Established | c. 681 |
| Disestablished | c. 1075 community moved to Chichester |
| Dedicated to | St Peter? |
| People | |
| Founder(s) | St Wilfrid |
| Site | |
| Location | Church Norton Selsey West Sussex England |
| Coordinates | 50°45′18″N 0°45′54″W / 50.754911°N 0.765111°W |
Selsey Abbey was founded by St Wilfrid in AD 681 on land donated at Selsey by the local Anglo-Saxon ruler, King Æðelwealh of Sussex, Sussex's first Christian king. The Kingdom of Sussex was the last area of Anglo-Saxon England to be evangelised.
The abbey became the seat of the Sussex bishopric, until it was moved, after a synod in 1075, to Chichester. The location of the abbey was probably at the site of, what became, the old parish church at Church Norton just north of modern-day Selsey.
The founder of Selsey Abbey was the exiled St Wilfrid of Northumbria. Wilfrid had spent most of his career in exile having quarrelled with various kings and bishops. He arrived in the kingdom of the South Saxons in 681 and remained there for five years evangelising and baptising the people. The account given by Wilfrid’s biographer Stephen in his Life of Wilfrid infers that all of the South Saxons were pagan, whereas Bede's Ecclesiastical History is somewhat more contradictory: Bede says that the local king Æðelwealh and his wife Eafe plus the leading thegns and soldiers had already been baptised in Mercia, then he goes on to say that only Queen Eafe was baptised. Kirby suggests that Stephen's Life of Wilfrid was extremely partisan, as its purpose was to magnify Wilfrid as well as vindicate him. Also that Queen Eafe was the daughter of Wulfhere the Christian king of Mercia, and that Æðelwealh and his nobles would have been baptised at the Mercian court, and on their return to Sussex, Wulfhere will have sent a number of priests with them, to baptise the ordinary people. He further speculates that Christianity may have secured a foothold in early Sussex via one of its sons, the South Saxon Damian, bishop of Rochester c. 660, but the evidence is not certain.
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