The Sussex Coast - online book

A Literary & Historical travel guide to the Sussex Coast

	THE situation of Steyning among fertile fields near the Adur at the edge of the Weald, and under the Downs, is so beau­tiful and attractive that no one would guess how accidentally it was chosen. St. Cuthman, who lived probably in the ninth cen­tury, was wheeling his aged mother on a barrow; for a rope he had merely osiers, and he had been under the necessity of cursing some irreverent countrymen who jeered at his excellent and filial arrangements. It is no light thing to quarrel with a saint, and rain descended on their hay; the same thing, it is said, happens in that field every year to the present day. At length the osiers snapped, the wheelbarrow refused to proceed, and so the saint stopped and built a chapel of wood, by which Steyning was, in due course, to grow up. iEthelwulf, the Bishop-King, father of Alfred the Great, who pilgrimaged to Rome, and possibly started the payment of Peter's pence, was buried 146