Bishop of Chichester
Diocesan bishop in the Church of England
The Bishop of Chichester is the ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester in the Province of Canterbury. The diocese covers the counties of East and West Sussex. The see is based in the City of Chichester where the bishop's seat is located at the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity.
The bishop's residence is The Palace, Chichester. Since 2015, the diocesan bishop has also fulfilled the diocesan-wide role of alternative episcopal oversight, following the decision by Mark Sowerby, then Bishop of Horsham, to recognise the orders of priests and bishops who are women.
Between 1984 and 2013, the Bishop of Chichester, in addition to being the diocesan bishop, also had specific oversight of the Chichester Episcopal Area (the then Archdeaconry of Chichester), which covered the coastal region of West Sussex along with Brighton and Hove.
Earliest history at Selsey
The episcopal see at Selsey was founded by Saint Wilfrid, formerly Bishop of the Northumbrians, for the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Sussex in the late 7th century. He was granted land by Æthelwealh of Sussex to build a cathedral at Selsey. However, shortly afterwards Cædwalla of Wessex conquered the Kingdom of Sussex, but he confirmed the grant to Wilfrid. The bishop's seat was located at Selsey Abbey.
“Bishop of Chichester” enters the record as diocesan bishop in the Church of England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bishop, Chichester and Diocesan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q458461. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015, 1984 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bishop of Chichester” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.