|
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. ==Historical context== The founder of Selsey Abbey was the exiled St Wilfrid of Northumbria.〔Bede.HE.IV.13〕 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 Bedes ''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 Stephens ''Life of Wilfrid'' was extremely partisan, as its purpose was to magnify Wilfrid as well as vindicate him.〔Kirby.The South Saxons: The Church in Saxon Sussex. pp. 169–170〕 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.〔〔Bede. HE.III.20〕 When Wilfrid arrived in Sussex, there was a small community of five or six Irish monks, led by Dicul in Bosham however it seems that they had made little headway in evangelising the local people.〔〔 It would not have been unusual to have found Irish monks in Sussex as during this period it was common to follow the ‘’Doctrine of Peregrinatio’’, a self-imposed exile to serve God.〔〔Harbison. Pilgrimage in Ireland: The Monuments and the People. Ch. 4. ''Peregrinatio: Wandering Irish Peregrini on the continent''〕〔Ladner. Images and ideas in the Middle Ages. pp. 883–884.’’The early Christian and medieval idea of estrangement, of ''peregrinatio'', which is of biblical origin, found in for instance, in the 'Second Letter to the Corinthians', in the 'First Letter of St Peter', and in 'Hebrews', as well as in the Old Testament, was a conception which saw true Christians as a band of strangers, of pilgrims, wending their way through the terrestrial world; it was an idea of homelessness or exile in this world, because of the latter's imperfect, preliminary condition and because of a desire to serve only God, by cutting all lesser ties.’’〕 Also, the South of England generally was part of the overland route for the Irish travelling to the continent.〔Kirby.The South Saxons: The Church in Saxon Sussex. p. 170.〕 At the time of Wilfrid, it would have been a financial expedient to set up a See in an existing monastery rather than build a cathedral church from scratch.〔 Kelly suggests that this may have been why the cathedra was originally set in Selsey rather than Chichester.〔 According to the Domesday Book, at the time of Edward the Confessor the diocese of Selsey had been one of the poorest bishoprics in the country.〔Barlow. The English Church 1000–1066. p. 222〕 After the Norman Conquest, however, the new Norman landholders could afford to spend large sums of money on buildings, including churches, so that the cost of translating the See to Chichester would not have been a problem.〔Wood. Domesday Quest. pp. 140 -141.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Selsey Abbey」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|