and Lady chapel representing the later period. The nave passes from Norman to Early English in the course of its eight bays from east to west and also from the arcade through the triforium to the clerestory. About midnight of the 19th–20th of October 1906, a fire broke out in the Latham chapel adjoining the north choir aisle, in which a new organ had recently been erected, and soon involved the whole building. Specially serious damage was done in the immediate neighbourhood of the chapel, the oak-groined roof and rich fittings of the choir were wholly destroyed, but the nnely moulded arches and the magnificent tracery of the east window survived in great part. Much damage was done to the tower, and the nave roof perished, for the fire reached practically every part of the building, though the stonework of the nave suffered comparatively little. Schemes for the collection of funds and the complete restoration of the church were immediately set on foot, the architect being Mr Oldrid Scott.
Selby is the centre of a rich agricultural district, and its industries include rope and twine making, flax-scotching, boat-building, iron-founding, tanning and brewing. Tradition indicates Selby as the birth-place of Henry I., and thus accounts for the high privileges conferred upon the abbey. The town had a considerable part in the operations of the Civil Wars, being held at the outset by the Parliamentarians, and captured by the Royalists in 1644, but soon retaken by Sir Thomas Fairfax.
SELDEN, JOHN (1584-1654), English jurist, legal antiquary and oriental scholar, was born on the 16th of December 1584 at Salvington, in the parish of West Tarring, Sussex. His father, also John Selden, held a small farm. It is said that his accomplishments
as a violin-player gained him his wife, whose social
position was somewhat superior to his own. She was Margaret, the only child of Thomas Baker of Rustington, a village in the vicinity of West Tarring, and was more or less remotely descended from a knightly family of the same name in Kent. John Selden
commenced his education at the free grammar-school at Chichester, whence in 1600 he proceeded to Hart Hall, Oxford. In 1603 he was admitted a member of Clifford's Inn, London, and in 1604 migrated to the Inner Temple, and in 1612 he was called to the bar. His earliest patron was Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary, by whom he seems to have been employed in copying and abridging certain of the parliamentary records then preserved in the Tower. For some reason which has not been explained, Selden never went into court as an advocate, save on rare and exceptional occasions. But his practice in chambers as a conveyance and consulting counsel is stated to have been
large, and, if we may judge from the considerable fortune he
accumulated, it must also have been lucrative.
It was, however, as a scholar and writer that Selden won his reputation both amongst his contemporaries and with posterity. His first work, an account of the civil administration of England before the Norman Conquest, is said to have been completed when he was only two- or three-and-twenty years of age. But if this was the Analecton Anglo-Britannicon, as is generally supposed, he withheld it from the world until 1615. In 161O appeared his England's Epinomis and Janus Anglorum; Facies Altera, which dealt with the progress of English law down to Henry II.; and The Duello, or Single Combat, in which he traced the history of trial by battle in England from the Norman Conquest. In 1613 he supplied a series of notes, enriched by an immense number of quotations and references, to the first eighteen cantos of Drayton's Polyolbion. In 1614 he published Titles of Honour, which, in spite of some obvious defects and omissions, has remained to the present day the most comprehensive and trustworthy work of its kind that we possess; and in 1616 his notes on Fortescue's De laudibus legum Angliae and Ralph de Hengham's Summae magna et parvo. In 1617 his De diis Syriis was issued, and immediately established his fame as an oriental scholar among the learned in all parts of Europe. It is remarkable for its brilliant use of the comparative method, in which it was far ahead of its age, and is still consulted by students of Semitic mythology. In 1618 his History of Tithes, although only published after it had been submitted to the censorship and duly licensed, nevertheless aroused the apprehension of the bishops and provoked the intervention of the king. The author was summoned before the privy council and compelled to retract his opinions, or at any rate what were held to be his opinions. Moreover, his work was suppressed and himself forbidden to reply to any of the controversialists who had come or might come forward to answer it.
This seems to have introduced Selden to the practical side of political affairs. The discontents which a few years later broke out into civil war were already forcing themselves on public attention, and it is pretty certain that, although he was not in parliament, he was the instigator and perhaps the draftsman of the memorable protestation on the rights and privileges of the House affirmed by the Commons on the 18th of December 1621. He was with several of the members committed to prison, at first in the Tower and subsequently under the charge of Sir Robert Ducie, sheriff of London. During his detention, which only lasted a short time, he occupied himself in preparing an edition of Eadmer's History from a manuscript lent to him by his host or jailor, which he published two years afterwards. In 1623 he was returned to the House of Commons for the borough of Lancaster, and sat with Coke, Noy and Pym on Sergeant Glanville's election committee. He was also nominated reader of Lyon's Inn, an office which he declined to undertake. For this the benchers of the Inner Temple, by whom he had been appointed, fined him £20 and disqualified him from being chosen one of their number. But he was relieved from this incapacity after a few years, and became a master of the bench. In the first Parliament of Charles I. (1625), it appears from the “returns of members” printed in 1878 that, contrary to the assertion of all his biographers, he had no seat. In Charles's second parliament (1626) he was elected for Great Bedwin in Wiltshire, and took a prominent part in the impeachment of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. In the following year, in the “benevolence” case, he was counsel for Sir Edmund Hampden in the court of king's bench. In 1628 he was returned to the third parliament of Charles for Ludgershall in Wiltshire, and had a large and important share in drawing up and carrying the Petition of Right. In the session of 1629 he was one of the members mainly responsible for the tumultuous passage in the House of Commons of the resolution against the illegal levy of tonnage and poundage, and, along with Eliot, Holles, Long, Valentine, Strode, and the rest, he was sent once more to the Tower. There he remained for eight months, deprived for a part of the time of the use of books'and writing materials. He was then removed, under less rigorous conditions, to the Marshalsea, until not long afterwards owing to the good offices of Archbishop Laud he was liberated. Some years before he had been appointed steward to the earl of Kent, to whose seat, Wrest in Bedfordshire, he now retired. In 1628 at the suggestion of Sir Robert Cotton he had compiled, with the assistance of two learned coadjutors, Patrick Young and Richard James, a catalogue of the Arundel marbles. He employed his leisure at Wrest in writing De successionibus in bona defuncti secundum leges Ebraeorum and De succession in pontpicatum Ebraeorum, published in 1631. About this period he seems to have inclined towards the court rather than the popular party, and even to have secured the personal favour of the king. To him in 1635 he dedicated his Mare clausum, and under the royal patronage it was put forth as a kind of state paper. It had been written sixteen or seventeen years before; but James I. had prohibited its publication for political reasons; hence it appeared a quarter of a century after Grotius's Mare liberum, to which it was intended to be a rejoinder, and the pretensions advanced in which on behalf of the Dutch fishermen to poach in the waters off the British coasts it was its purpose to explode. The fact that Selden was not retained in the great case of ship money in 1637 by John Hampden, the cousin of his former client, may be accepted as additional evidence that his zeal in the popular cause wasnot so warm and unsuspected as it had once been. During the progress of this momentous constitutional conflict, indeed, he seems to have been absorbed in his oriental
