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 none 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.