Page:Notes on the churches in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey.djvu/241

Rh A.D. 1075 Will. de Braiose gave the church of Sele to the abbey of St. Florence at Saumur; which latter establishment soon after settled an (alien) convent of Benedictine monks at Sele. (Monast. IV, 668.) There appears also to have been here a house of White or Carmelite Friars. (Ib. VI, 1580.) In A.D. 1492 the priory of Sele, which had been abandoned by the Benedictine monks, and in 1460 conferred upon the president and scholars of Magdalen college, Oxford, was granted by that college to the Carmelite friars of New Shoreham, whose house had been destroyed by the encroachment of the sea. (Suss. Arch. Coll. II, 66, 75.) But at the general suppression of monasteries the property seems to have reverted to the college, which now possesses the patronage of Beeding.—The Rev. E. Turner, in an interesting article on an ancient bridge at Bramber, discovered A.D. 1839 (ut sup. 63 to 77), mentions a chapel of St. Peter, which, from its vicinity to the bridge, was styled de Veteri Ponte (of the ancient bridge), but was annexed to St. Peter's church at Sele. It appears to have existed A.D. 1175, being then granted by Will, de Braoze, together with Sele and others, to Saumur priory. The List will show, that (D.B.) assigns two churches to "Beddinges" in A.D. 1086, by which time Sele priory would have been established: we may therefore consider the allusion to be to the church of St. Peter Sele, and its dependent chapel, that of St. Peter de Veteri Ponte. I am enabled to add, through the kind information of Mr. Turner, that he has recently (June 1850) ascertained, from the muniments belonging to Magdalen college Oxford, the chapel of St. Peter de Veteri Ponte to have been situated at Annington, where vestiges are still traceable of such a building, but which must have been very small. N.B. The ancient bridge, of which the remains were found in 1839, did not span the river Adur, but a tributary channel on its western side; but its existence at that spot proves a passage over the Adur towards Beeding, and here very possibly might have been the great timber bridge, which Mr. Turner shows to have been erected somewhere in the neighbourhood previous to A.D. 1232. (Ut sup. 70.) Compare also the Notes on Botolphs, Bramber, and Haningedune.—In a remote part of this parish extending into St. Leonard's Forest was a chapel, called in old documents "The Free chapel of St. Leonard," of which the earliest notice is A.D. 1320. (It is named in Val. Eccl. as "Cantaria Sancti Leonardi infra Forestum Sancti Leonardi.") "Near Shelley Park there are