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Title: Winchester Painted by Wilfrid Ball
Author: Varley, Telford, Ball, Wilfrid
Language: English
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WINCHESTER
BY THE SAME AUTHOR AND ARTIST AS “WINCHESTER”
HAMPSHIRE
CONTAINING
75 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
SOME PRESS OPINIONS
“Author and artist have worthily combined their talent on a worthy
piece of England.”--_Daily Graphic._
“Rarely, if ever, have author and artist collaborated with such a
happy result.”--_Evening Standard._
A. AND C. BLACK, 4 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
AUSTRALASIA THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
27 RICHMOND STREET WEST, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
[Illustration: TOWER OF THE COLLEGE CHAPEL, WINCHESTER
The graceful pinnacles of ‘Two Wardens Tower,’ as the tower of College
Chapel is called, forms a picturesque feature in all views of the
southeastern quarter of the city. Originally built by Warden Thurburn in
1488, it was rebuilt in 1863, in memory of two well-known later wardens,
Barter, Warden of Winchester, and Williams, Warden of New.
The view is taken from near Wharf Bridge.]
WINCHESTER
PAINTED BY
WILFRID BALL, R.E.
DESCRIBED BY
REV. TELFORD VARLEY, M.A., B.Sc.
[Illustration: colophon]
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1910
Preface
The following volume treats in somewhat fuller detail the Winchester
sections of the larger work on Hampshire published last year under
similar auspices. Where much of the ground traversed is identical much
has been necessarily repeated, and a considerable portion of what
follows is little more than an amplification of what has been already
dealt with in the earlier volume.
The present work in no way aims at being a history, though much of it is
cast into a historical mould. Still less is it a guide-book. Its aim has
been selective, and it makes no pretence to completeness. In following
out some of the numerous avenues of Winchester interest, which seem to
open out continually in fresh and unsuspected directions as soon as one
commences to wander through her confines, many have received but a
cursory examination, and many more have been entirely ignored. The
author can only hope his readers will be able to accompany him with
pleasurable interest along those which inclination and circumstance have
led him to explore.
The authorities consulted have been numerous, and from the following
published sources of information, as well as many others, valuable
information has been obtained:--
Bede, _The English Chronicle_, The Winton Domesday, _The Liber de Hyda_,
Rudborne’s _Major Historia Wintoniae_, various of the _Annales
Monastici_, the valuable historical documents published some time back
by the Hampshire Record Society, Milner’s History, Mr. Kirby’s and Mr.
Leach’s volumes on Winchester College, Dean Kitchin’s _Winchester_ in
the Historic Towns Series, and Adams’s _Wykehamica_. The author regrets
that, through a _lapsus calami_, the title of Bramston and Leroy’s
_Historic Winchester_ was misapplied in the Hampshire volume to Dr.
Kitchin’s book. For this error he here apologises. Finally, the author
wishes here to express his thanks to many friends who in various ways
have assisted him in what has been to him a most pleasant task, viz.,
that of serving in some degree, though but inadequately, as chronicler
to his adopted city.
THE AUTHOR.
WINCHESTER, _June 1910_.
Contents
PAGE
CHAPTER I
‘WYNGESTER, THAT JOLY CITÈ’ 1
CHAPTER II
EARLY DAYS 10
CHAPTER III
THE ROMAN OCCUPATION 15
CHAPTER IV
SAXON WINCHESTER 20
CHAPTER V
THE CAPITAL OF ENGLAND 26
CHAPTER VI
ALFRED 34
CHAPTER VII
ALFRED’S DEATH AND SIXTY YEARS AFTER 43
CHAPTER VIII
ÆTHELWOLD, SAINT AND BISHOP 49
CHAPTER IX
THE CAPITAL OF THE DANISH EMPIRE 59
CHAPTER X
NORMAN WINCHESTER 73
CHAPTER XI
LATER NORMAN DAYS 87
CHAPTER XII
A GREAT BISHOP, HENRY OF BLOIS 100
CHAPTER XIII
ANGEVIN AND PLANTAGENET 109
CHAPTER XIV
FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY WINCHESTER 117
CHAPTER XV
THE MONASTIC LIFE 130
CHAPTER XVI
THE CATHEDRAL 146
CHAPTER XVII
THE COLLEGE 158
CHAPTER XVIII
WOLVESEY--ST. CROSS--THE CASTLE HALL--THE ROUND
TABLE 168
CHAPTER XIX
WINCHESTER IN LITERATURE 181
INDEX 197
List of Illustrations
FACING PAGE
1. Tower of the College Chapel, Winchester _Frontispiece_
2. St. Catherine’s Hill, Winchester 9
3. Shawford Mill 16
4. The Weirs, Winchester 25
5. Hamble 32
6. At Itchen Abbas 41
7. High Street, Winchester 48
8. St. Peter’s, Cheesehill, Winchester 57
9. Church of St. Cross 64
10. King’s Gate, Winchester 73
11. Martyr Worthy 80
12. Watersplash at Itchen Stoke 89
13. Easton 96
14. The Deanery, Winchester 105
15. Cheyney Court and Close Gate, Winchester 112
16. Brewhouse, Winchester College 121
17. Middle Gate, Winchester College 128
18. Cloisters and Fromond’s Chantry, Winchester College 137
19. Memorial Gateway, Winchester College 144
20. Second Master’s House, Winchester College 153
21. Tower of Ambulatory, Hospital of St. Cross, Winchester 160
22. Church of St. Lawrence, Winchester 169
23. Hursley Vicarage 176
24. Winchester from St. Giles’s Hill 184
WINCHESTER
CHAPTER I
‘WYNGESTER, THAT JOLY CITÈ’
Me lyketh ever, the lengerè the bet,
By Wyngester, that Joly citè.
The ton is god and wel y-set,
The folk is comely on to see;
The aier is god both inne and oute,
The citè stent under an hille;
The riverès renneth all aboute,
The ton is ruelèd upon skille.
_Benedicamus Domino,
Alleluia,
Alleluia._
Fifteenth-century verses, DE WALDEN MSS.
The magic of the city--whence comes it? Every people, every age has felt
it, this mysterious sense of personality, this deep, alluring spell
which age after age, nation after nation, has woven round the city of
its dreams. Rome, Naples, Damascus, Mecca, Seville, each of these has
been and still is a name to conjure with, while the long pent-up fervour
of national feeling with which the Hebrew of old time invested the
thought of Salem, the City of Peace, has from its very intensity and
sincerity established it in the eyes of all Christendom as the permanent
type of that New Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, the centre of all divine
influence and of every divine appeal.
And here in England, dull, matter-of-fact, money-grubbing England, have
we not too, under our leaden skies, cities also not unworthy of a claim
on our regard--cities which possess the same picturesque and appealing
elements which have, in people of warmer and more emotional type, evoked
such feelings of romantic devotion, of national pride, and the rich glow
of enthusiastic attachment? True, such feelings express themselves here
in less exuberant and conscious manner, but they exist, and have existed
all through our history, and the old fifteenth-century singer quoted
above, whose quaintly expressive verses sum up so happily even for us of
modern time the attractions of the delightful old mediaeval city which
is our common theme, was doubtless one who felt this to the full.
‘Wyngester, that Joly citè,’ that is his keynote--a note at once sincere
but restrained.
He is no pilgrim, rapt in enthusiastic devotion, singing of
urbs caelestis, urbs beata,
as he approaches the city of his passionate desire; but a plain,
sober-minded citizen, who sees in the town which shelters him a ‘Joly
citè’ of attractive aspect and pleasantly seated, surrounded by the
mingled delights of hill and stream; and, moreover, one ‘ruelèd upon
skille,’ as becomes the mother of municipalities.
And to lovers of Winchester--and who that knows it is not of these?--it
must ever be a pleasant task to follow out in detail the themes
suggested by our mediaeval singer--to enjoy one by one those attractive
features which endear it still to us, as it did to him. To clamber up
the breezy heights which gird it round, for the sake of the ‘aier’--that
air which, as the poet Keats himself remarked, is alone worth “Sixpence
a pint”; to trace the windings of the ‘riverès renning all aboute’--both
within its confines and beyond; to linger in its streets and catch the
echoes of its wonderful past, with even more appreciation than our
fifteenth-century poet was capable of feeling. For our singer, sincerely
appreciative as he was, had one sense lacking--the sense of history. The
present only appealed to him; but to us, as we thread its
quaintly-inconvenient, narrow streets, its passages and gateways, it is
something more than merely a ‘Joly citè,’ a city of comfort and good
rule; it is a city of dreams as well, a city haunted with the sense of a
mighty past, a living testimony alike to the permanence of our national
institutions and to the dignity of the associations to which they make
appeal.
Winchester, then, is a city with an atmosphere--an atmosphere of the
reality and range of historic things, through which the gazing eye can
peer, mile after mile as it were, till it loses itself in a vaguely
distant and indistinct horizon, where the mists of myth and legend blur
the outline and mingle inextricably together fact and fancy, record and
surmise.
For in Winchester antique tradition and historic association are not a
mere adjunct or picturesque accident: they are the keynote of its very
existence. In Winchester we stand on the threshold of national history;
here we may, as it were, study history _in situ_, as perhaps we can
study it nowhere else in the land--in the soil beneath our feet, in its
stones, its institutions, its quaint survivals of early or mediaeval,
Tudor or Stuart days.
Where else but in Winchester can we meet with so many picturesque
reminders of an ancient feudal past,--reminders which have survived not
because they are merely picturesque, but simply because here they have
not outlived their usefulness or natural appropriateness? The Cathedral
bedesmen, the brethren of St. Cross, the scholars of ‘Sainte Marie
College,’ the almsmen of Beaufort’s Order of Noble Poverty, the brethren
of Christe’s Hospitall, the masters of the College, and the college
queristers also, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the diocese with
their quaintly uncomfortable attire,--each and all of these wear their
distinctive garb as a matter of course, just as centuries ago every one
wore the garb distinctive of his rank or occupation. Anywhere else one
of these might excite remark: here they pass unnoticed. They are part of
the place, part of the spirit of the past, which, dead elsewhere, here
survives in vigour and undiminished vitality.
Here was the cradle of Saxon rule and Saxon civilization; here also the
cradle of national historical record. Here Saxon Alfred ruled and prayed
and wrought; here Danish Cnut took the golden crown from his brow and
laid it in token of humility upon the Holy Altar; here Norman William
wore his crown yearly at Easter-tide; here Curfew first was pealed, and
here ever since it has continued to peal; here Rufus was buried, “many
looking on and few grieving”; here Henry I. ruled and earned the title
of the ‘Lion of Justice’; here Matilda fought with Stephen in the dark
days of civil warfare; here John received the papal absolution, having
sunk the English crown to a lower depth than any other sovereign either
would or could have done; here Henry III. was born, and here he held
wild revel; here later on was founded the great college of William of
Wykeham, whose motto--“Manners makyth man”--has served as an inspiration
for generations of public school boys for over 500 years; here Henry
VIII. welcomed and fêted the puissant Emperor and second Charlemagne,
Charles V.; here his daughter Mary was married to a Spanish prince; here
James I. kept his Court, and here Raleigh received his shameful
condemnation and sentence; here, with alternate fortune, Cavalier and
Roundhead strove together, till Cromwell himself captured its citadel
and razed its fortifications to the ground; here Charles II. repeatedly
kept his Court; here he presented the Corporation with his own portrait,
and it may even be, left the citizens to pay for the gift--for the Merry
Monarch was often forgetful, and always short of money; here was
perpetrated the most infamous, perhaps, of all the crimes of the
terrible Bloody Assize, the judicial murder of Dame Alice Lisle for an
act of natural humanity; here died and here was laid to rest that most
charming and natural of women novelists, the bright and vivacious Jane
Austen.
Yes, if a poet could do for Winchester what Longfellow did for Bruges,
and could conjure up the scenes of the past and the personages whose
memories still linger here, what a rare series of absorbing pictures,
what a medley of historic personalities, what a wealth of varied types
should we see embodied before our eyes! Rude Belgic tribesmen of
pre-Roman days, Roman legionaries, rough, wild Berserkers and Danish
vikings, Saxon thegns and Norman knights, abbots and priors, merchants
and gildsmen, friars and pilgrims,--these and many more would contend
for our notice, mingled with kings and queens, prelates and chancellors,
bishops and cardinals. If historical memories can sanctify any spot in
the realm, surely Winchester must be sacred soil.
To separate Winchester from the history which is enshrined within her is
a thing impossible and unthinkable. It is in the light of her historic
past alone that Winchester can be rightly viewed; and attractive and
fair as are her buildings and her natural surroundings, it is only in
their historical setting that they can be adequately appreciated.
Let us, before we set foot within any of her streets, endeavour to get
some general mental picture of the city in which so many associations
are centred and enshrined; let us take our stand on the bold hill which
dominates the city towards the east, St. Giles’s Hill. Had we mounted up
here on the 1st of September--the feast of St. Egidius--some six or
seven centuries ago, it would have been a busy and motley throng that we
should have had to elbow our way through. Englishmen from every county,
foreigners from every land--Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, and Jews--all
mingled together in hopeless confusion. A city in miniature--street
after street of wooden booths, all enclosed in a wooden wall or
palisade--would meet the eye. And the inhabitants! What varied types
should we see--merchants and chapmen, citizens and countrymen, pedlars
and ballad-mongers, all eager and excited, bargaining, jesting,
quarrelling--a babel of tongues, peoples, and languages; while here and
there a bailiff or officer wearing a bishop’s mitre figured on his
livery passes along and scrutinizes the merchandise. No friendly
reception does he meet with, for this is the Great Fair held in honour
of St. Giles, where merchants from all parts of Europe congregate to buy
the wool for which the south of England is so famous, and during the
sixteen days that the fair lasts no merchant or shopman in Winchester,
or ten miles round, may buy or sell except within the fair itself, and
whoever is a welcome and popular figure, it is not the Lord Bishop of
Winchester nor the bishop’s bailiff, for all merchandise must first pay
toll--and heavy toll--for the bishop’s exclusive benefit, before it may
pass within the barriers, and be exposed for sale.
But to-day it will be the city, lying at our feet to the westward,
which will interest us, and there will be nothing on the hill to turn
our attention from it as we note its chief points one by one. It is a
beautiful picture of mingled red and grey that lies before us. The
Cathedral--a mass of grey stone--here presents its most interesting
aspect to us: a mass of grey stone set with pinnacles and flying
buttresses and heavy square tower. To its left lies the College, hidden
partly behind the trees of the Close and the Deanery garden, the light,
graceful ‘Two Wardens’ tower of its chapel contrasting strikingly with
the solid tower of the Cathedral--a noticeable and attractive object.
Almost between the two lies a green patch of meadow, with grey walls and
ruins round it. This is Wolvesey, with its memories of Alfred and the
English Chronicle. Beyond Wolvesey and the College we shall see St.
Cross, like the Cathedral in outward form, but a cathedral in miniature.
Close at our feet in the foreground lie the Guildhall, with its clock,
and the statue of the great Alfred, and the line of the High Street can
be clearly followed till it terminates with the West Gate at its far
extremity. On either side of the city are seen the many channels of the
river Itchen--here and there rises the tower or spire of one of the
numerous city churches--and far away on the high ground to the left
appears a clump of trees which, under the name of ‘Oliver’s Battery,’
recalls the thought of the grim Lord Protector to us. It is a pleasant
and, indeed, poetic picture at any period of the year, and perhaps most
poetic on an afternoon in late autumn, when the
[Illustration: ST. CATHERINE’S HILL, WINCHESTER
The fine bold chalk hill which dominates the river valley to the South
of Winchester, has memories of early Celtic days, of Cnut, and of the
_ancien régime_ at Winchester College. Round its summit is the ‘ring’ of
the great refuge camp of præ-Roman days which it is estimated required
some 3000 people to defend it. Cnut made a grant of ‘Hille’ and other
lands to the old minster. On the summit there was once a pilgrimage
chapel dedicated to St. Catherine. St. Catherine’s Hill was formerly the
playing area for College boys on ‘remedies’ or holidays, and the curious
‘mismaze’ cut on its summit is supposed to have been their handiwork.]
light smoke from the houses and the thin mists from the river have
mingled together to weave a silvery grey network, through which the
details of the city seem, as it were, to filter slowly and dreamily--a
harmony of haze and mist, to which the imagination can most
sympathetically attune itself, a vague dreamland scene which fancy seems
almost naturally to repeople with the shadows of the past.
CHAPTER II
EARLY DAYS
Et penitus toto orbe divisos Britannos.
Antiquity and long-continued vitality such as have fallen to
Winchester--for to go back to its early humble beginnings takes us back
very far indeed--lead us naturally to look for causes, and prompt the
questions, Why, in the first instance, did a human community settle here
at all? What through so many alternations of human vicissitude and
political circumstance has operated to maintain these intact? _Tempus
edax rerum_--Time, the devourer of constituted things, is written not so
much on its stones, as in its stones, yet Winchester remains Winchester
still. For, be it noted, there is nothing in the nature of things which
gives to cities and communities any prescriptive claim or assurance of
permanence. We have not, indeed, to travel far from Winchester to find
instructive instances, to the very contrary, among its earliest
neighbours and contemporaries. Silchester, Sarum, Portchester, its early
British contemporaries, which once flourished even as Winchester, have
long since sunk, the last named into inanition, the two former into
dissolution so complete that no trace now remains, save what little the
ploughshare or the antiquary may from time to time unearth; and that
little would probably, but for the worms’ unceasing activity, have long
since perished beyond recall. For with cities, as with the animal world,
the secret of continued vigour is the secret of continued adaptation to
environment; towns and cities, like other organized existences, are just
as old as the arteries which feed them, and as long as function is
efficiently performed, so long will there be health to perform it.
And yet as years go, Winchester is old,--how old none can say. Ancient
Neolithic interments on St. Giles’s Hill, old Celtic barrows on Morne
(_Magdalen_) Hill behind, carry us back far indeed beyond the days of
permanent settlement, and her continuous existence goes back far beyond
the days of any written historical record, yet all these years she has
retained her identity and her vigour unimpaired. What physical causes
have contributed to this we shall perhaps be better able to appreciate
if we quit St. Giles’s Hill and clamber up to the top of St. Catherine’s
Hill, the bold chalk hill which dominates the view southward from the
city. An interesting hill it is, with modern associations which we will
not stop to consider now, but turn our thoughts to the view before us.
Below us is a flat-bottomed valley, a mile or two across, with the
numerous winding channels of the river intersecting the water meadows at
our feet. To our north lies the city, seen from this point to excellent
advantage, occupying the flat of the valley, and creeping up the hill
slopes on either side, while far away in the distance the chalk upland
seems to roll away, ridge succeeding ridge, till all detail is lost in
distance.
Two thousand years or more ago, the country which we are now gazing over
would have borne a fundamentally different character, though its
superficial aspect, viewed from this point, might not, apart from signs
of human agency, have been so very dissimilar. For at that time
practically the whole of the south of England, through all the lower
levels, was a wild stretch of brake and forest all but impenetrable, the
haunt of wolf and wild boar, of beaver and badger, alternating at the
lowest points with swamps and morasses, which formed the beds of the
valleys, and either fringed the edges of the streams or mingled
composedly with them. This was the great Weald Forest, of which a few
detached patches still remain--a tangled sea of green, beneath which all
lay submerged save the chalk heights, the North and South Downs,
Salisbury Plain, and the mid Hampshire plateau over which we are now
looking.
At one spot, and practically one spot only, was this forest barrier
broken, and that was in mid Hampshire, where the great estuary of
Southampton Water and the Vale of Itchen pierced it like a wedge, and
gave fairly free access from the coast to the rich midland counties to
the north. And so up or by this natural highway the stream of
immigration from the south flowed. Celtic peoples from the north of
Europe, Goidels, Brythons, Belgans,--all in turn came this way, and
here it was, where the Vale of Itchen narrowed, that a settled community
began to form--a ganglionic point, as all such communities are, along
the nervous thread of intercourse and communication.
Down then in the valley at our feet, on the actual ground where our city
now stands, amid the morasses wherein peat abounded, and where even now
it may still be found, was the first settlement or village of
Winchester--a collection of rude hovels, of wattle-work covered with
mud, and stockaded with a stout timber palisading as additional
protection, while the hill-top, where we now stand, was converted into a
fortress or refuge-camp, to all appearance impregnable, so long as heart
and hand still existed to defend it.
Of the village below all trace has long vanished, but the lines of the
earthwork round the hill remain still broadly scarped out, and seemingly
imperishable. No mean achievement this--this great rampart over 1000
yards in circuit, and still 25 feet or more in height in places; and
when the feebleness of the resources with which those early Celtic
sappers and miners worked is borne in mind, the unserviceable pick of
deer antler, the absence of means of transport, we wonder more and more
at the magnitude of the achievement which has had such permanent result.
They dreamt not of a perishable home, who thus could build,
and to-day, though two, perhaps three, thousand years have passed since
it first gave security to the primitive Winchester settlement below,
the great camp still remains, keeping watch over the modern city like a
sentinel forgotten, but still under orders, whom no change of guard has
relieved.
One other inheritance, besides these piled-up ramparts, these first
Winchester burghers have left us, and that is a name. Cær Gwent, the
Celtic name, first Romanized into Venta Belgarum, passed in Saxon days
into Vintan-ceastir, or Venta the fortified, and so on by a natural
transition has become the Winchester of to-day. What the name means is a
venerable antiquarian puzzle, on which we prefer to hazard no opinion,
nor indeed does it greatly matter. The name, like the city itself, is
venerable in antiquity, and its origin, like that of the city itself, is
lost in the mists of the past.
And as we look round about us from this hill-top, and direct our eye up
and down this valley, we begin to realize what it is that has made
Winchester what it has been in the past, and what it is now: not merely
the accident of circumstance, the flotsam and jetsam of human migratory
tribes, floated fortuitously hither on the tidal waters of our southern
estuaries and here casually deposited, but a natural centre in a great
continuous stream of humanity, in which Celt and Belgan, Roman, Saxon,
Dane, and Norman have all pushed forward, each eager to bear his part in
the building of that great national polity, the England of to-day.
CHAPTER III
THE ROMAN OCCUPATION
Foursquare to all the winds.
The part played by physical causes, outlined above, is illustrated by
the successive stages in the Roman occupation. The two first invasions
by Julius Caesar were little more than desultory raids; the next, under
Aulus Plautius and Vespasian in A.D. 43, had important and permanent
results. Pevensey (_Anderida_), Portchester (_Portus Magnus_), and
Southampton (_Clausentum_) were all occupied in turn; up the Itchen
valley the invaders came, and its strategic position made them choose
Venta Belgarum as their military base in the south of England.
History is silent as to the actual occupation of Venta, but Bede and
others mention the occupation of the Isle of Wight, and the silence of
Roman writers on this point merely makes it clear that little resistance
was encountered here. Nor does Roman literature give us any account of
Venta; the only mention of it is in the Antonine Itineraries, the great
road-book of the Roman Empire, dating probably from about 320 A.D.; but
its importance in Roman days is to be inferred from the remains the
Romans have left behind, as well as from Bede and other indirect
evidence.
No Roman structure, except, perhaps, some part of the ancient wall still
existing, remains above ground now, but the site of the city, as marked
out by the Romans, still remains clearly shown, and the spade and
pick-axe are continually bringing to light evidences of what Winchester
was like in Roman days.
The Roman city formed a rectangle aligned almost exactly with the four
points of the compass. Intersecting it from north to south was the great
highway leading to Clausentum, and another road, practically
corresponding to the present High Street, crossed this at right angles,
dividing the whole area of the city into four rectangular blocks or
tesserae. All round this area was a wall of stout masonry, with gates at
the four points where the two main highways pierced it; upon the same
lines were reared later the walls of the Norman city, and their general
direction is clearly traceable now. A walk along Westgate Lane, North
walls, Eastgate Street, the Weirs (where portions of the ancient wall
may still be seen), College Street, Canon Street, and St. James’s Lane,
would practically carry us round the circuit of the Roman as it would of
the later mediaeval city.
The temples of the gods occupied the south-eastern area where the
Cathedral now stands, and a well in the Cathedral crypt is pointed out
to visitors as having
[Illustration: SHAWFORD MILL
Shawford Mill, near Shawford. The river channels here are fringed in
summer-time with mimulus, yellow iris, and forget-me-not, and are
delightful to ramble along.]
been connected with heathen worship in Roman times. Numerous pieces of
tesselated pavement, vases, urns, and votive objects generally, articles
of adornment, for household use and the toilet, are frequently found
even still, mingled with innumerable coins and relics of a military
nature.
More important still are the Roman roads which led from Winchester, the
routes of which are still unmistakable, and which remain the great
enduring monument both of the Roman occupation and of the Roman
civilizing instinct. Indeed, the chief service the Roman occupation did
for Winchester was to bring it into effective contact with the rest of
the country. The Belgic tribesmen had no common organization or polity;
a number of scattered and incoherent units linked together merely by the
accident of position, and a more or less common racial descent, they
resembled one of the lower animal forms, not possessing a common nerve
centre, but controlled by local ganglia and responding merely to local
stimuli. The Roman genius was to link up the whole land into one united
organism and to supply a nervous and arterial system regulated by
central control. Law and Order were the great lessons it taught the
world, and open and secure lines of communication were the necessary
preliminary of the _Pax Romana_. No succeeding age save our own has so
fully recognized the value of good and effective road communication. Our
modern roads and tracks very often merely follow routes first marked out
by Roman hands, and the common occurrence of the title ‘High Street,’
generally applied to the leading thoroughfare of town or village, is a
constant reminder to us of the debt we owe to the Romans.
Radiating from Venta Belgarum were no less than five thoroughfares, of
which four were undoubtedly important arteries. The first led to the
sea, to Clausentum, the port. It followed the line of the existing
Southampton road as far as Otterbourne, and then straight on through
Stoneham (the _ad Lapidem_ of Bede) to Clausentum. This road passed
straight through the city from south to north, and from the northern
gate of the city it branched off into two, one going north-east, along
the existing Basingstoke road to Silchester (_Calleva Attrebatum_), the
other north-west, following the line of the existing Andover road to
Cirencester (_Durocornovium_). Both these roads can be still traced for
a distance of a good many miles from Winchester. The fourth led directly
west to Sarum, and can still be followed as a well-defined track all the
way. The fifth led to Portchester (_Portus Magnus_) over Deacon Hill,
and through Morestead, but with the exception of the first few miles all
trace of it is now lost.
Details of some of these roads as given in the Antonine Itinerary
already mentioned are quoted below, and the names of the stations and
their distances apart are of more than usual interest, particularly from
the assistance they give us as regards identification of the Roman
sites.
Londinium (_London_) to Pontes (_Staines_), mille
passuum (_miles_) xxii
Pontes to Calleva Attrebatum (_Silchester_) xxii
Calleva to Venta Belgarum xxii
Venta to Clausentum (_Southampton_) x
Clausentum to Portus Magnus (_Portchester_) x
The Roman routes are not comfortable to follow now, particularly to the
cyclist; their course is invariably straight, leading direct from point
to point, over hill and valley alike, without regard to gradient or the
lie of the land. The appeal they make to the thoughtful imagination is
distinct and striking. Direct and uncompromising, they follow their
course regardless of obstacles, suggesting irresistibly the genius and
energy of the imperious people who met difficulties only to subdue them.
Primarily imperial in character, if not always military, few things
conduced so much to the settlement and growth in civilization of the
land. Commerce followed in the wake of security, and the arts of war
ministered thus as handmaid to those of peace.
CHAPTER IV
SAXON WINCHESTER
Post tenebras, lux
The Roman occupation lasted some 400 years, after which Winchester
history becomes a blank, and it is not the settlement and conquest of
the next occupiers, the Gewissas or West Sexe, but their conversion to
Christianity which begins to dispel the historical just as it did the
spiritual darkness of the period.
Of these years, could we but trust the romantic pages of Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who has preserved for us the legendary stories of the period
as preserved in the early Welsh tradition which he followed out, we
might have a complete and circumstantial history, telling us of Arthur
and his Knights, of Merlin, and Uther Pendragon, all focussed round our
own Hampshire country, with Winchester and Silchester as the chief
centres of action.
Thus arose the mediaeval tradition connecting Winchester with Arthur and
the Knights of the Round
Table--a tradition consolidated by the presence in the great Hall of
Winchester of the curious relic which popular imagination has for
hundreds of years identified with the actual Round Table round which
that famous brotherhood feasted. But of this more anon. And attractive
as are the speculations into which Geoffrey of Monmouth might lead us,
we must put him sternly by till some greater hand has winnowed the
grain--for some grain his record undoubtedly possesses--from the chaff
of credulity, if not of deliberate invention.
And so for 200 years our Winchester history remains a blank, till the
Saxon invader had in turn made his way hither, by the same natural
channel which Celt and Roman before him had followed, and a kingdom of
Wessex had grown up, rude and barbarous, but firmly planted, with the
Hame-tun (_Southampton_) as its first capital, till, with the growth of
institutions, the natural advantages of Winchester made it in turn the
centre of rule of the West Saxon kingdom.
How Jute and Angle warred in turn with Saxon and with one another: how
order was gradually evolved, and Christianity planted in Britain by
Augustine and his band of monks, we cannot here pursue in detail. It is
the coming of Christianity to Hampshire that immediately concerns us,
and with this a new chapter of great interest opens in our Winchester
story.
Augustine had landed in Kent in 597, and it is a noteworthy fact that
while Christianity had spread gradually thence to the East Saxons, to
Northumbria, and to East Anglia, the stream of influence from
Canterbury had, as it were, flowed by and left Wessex, Sussex, and
Mercia entirely untouched, so effectually had the natural barriers of
the forest belt isolated the south-west of England from Kent and even
London; and when at length Christianity was brought to Wessex it was by
a special mission from Italy and not from Canterbury at all that the
message came. Thus the founding of the Church in Wessex was an act
independent entirely of Augustinian influence; not for many years after
did the diocese acknowledge the supremacy of Canterbury, and when Bishop
Henry of Blois in the twelfth century was scheming to convert Winchester
into a separate province, with himself as Archbishop, he had at least a
historical basis on which to rest his claim. Sussex and Mercia were
evangelized later still, and the Isle of Wight last of all.
There is indeed a local tradition which connects the name of Augustine
with Winchester. In Avington Park, some five miles from the city, a
moribund oak still stands, known as the Gospel Oak, from the tradition
that Augustine himself preached the Gospel under it. But the tradition
is entirely unsupported, and certain it is that, even if it were true,
the preaching had no permanent result.
The story of the conversion of the Gewissas is told by Bede, and
deserves to be translated in full.
At that time (_A.D. 634, English Chronicle_), during the reign of
King Kynegils, the race of the West Saxons, anciently termed
Gewissas, received the faith of Christ, which was preached to them
by Birinus, who had come to Britain at the instance of Pope
Honorius. His intention had indeed been to proceed direct into the
heart of the land of the Angles, where as yet no teacher had
penetrated, in order there to sow the seeds of the faith. For which
purpose, and by direction of the Pope himself, he was consecrated
Bishop by Asterius, Bishop of Genoa. But on his arrival in Britain,
and coming in contact first of all with the Gewissas, he found them
everywhere to be in a state of the grossest heathenism, and so he
considered it to be more profitable to preach the Word to them,
rather than to go farther to seek a field to labour in.
The actual conversion of King Kynegils took place the year after, not at
Winchester, but at Dorchester, near Oxford, on the river Thames. Here
Birinus first placed his bishop’s stool; but Bede’s narrative directly
implies that he visited Winchester and dedicated a Christian church
there, which only a bishop could do; for he goes on to say that
having erected and dedicated many churches, and having by his pious
ministrations called many unto the Lord, he departed himself to Him
and was buried in that city (_Dorchester_), and many years after,
by the instrumentality of Bishop Hædda (_bishop from 676 to 703
A.D._), his body was translated thence to the city of Venta and
placed in the church of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul,
which he himself had dedicated.
We learn from the _English Chronicle_ that this Christian church was
erected not by Kynegils, who died in 643, but by Kenwalh or Kenulphus
his son. Here then we have the beginning in a sense of the Winchester
Cathedral of to-day. True, successive and more glorious buildings have
been erected on the same site, but they have been but the successors in
direct line of that primitive church of St. Peter and St. Paul, rudely
constructed, and possibly roofed with thatch, which Birinus dedicates;
and the bones of its two founders, father and son--for so we are
entitled to regard them--are traditionally preserved in the Cathedral
to-day, in two of the beautiful mortuary chests above the side screens
of the choir.
What a link with the past do the inscriptions on these chests afford us,
for the facts are perfectly historical whatever the identity of the
bones may be. What imagination is there that cannot be deeply stirred in
the very presence, as it were, of these two West Saxon chiefs Kynegils
and Kenwalh in the very church which Birinus himself first erected, and
which was dedicated to the service of God by Birinus himself? Nor was
this all, for in A.D. 648, side by side with the church, was erected a
monastery, the beginning of that religious house afterwards so famous as
the Priory of St. Swithun. Kynegils endowed it with an important grant
of land--nothing less than all the King’s land for several miles round
Winchester, the first church endowment in Wessex of which we have any
authentic record; an endowment all the more memorable as some portion of
this land, in and around the adjoining present parish of Chilcomb,
remained after some twelve and a half centuries of consecutive church
tenure in possession of the Dean and Chapter of Winchester, the
successors in direct line of the religious community
[Illustration: THE WEIRS, WINCHESTER
The delightful balustraded stone bridge at the east end of the city
replaces the very early bridge built by Bishop Swithun in King
Æthelwulf’s days. The river rushes with a glorious swirl from out the
mill just above the bridge, and all along the Weirs, from mill to mill,
is of beautiful clearness and transparency. The walk along ‘the Weirs’
takes you between the river and the old city wall.]
of St. Peter and St. Paul, right up indeed to 1899, when it was taken
over by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
The development of Winchester during the early Saxon period was steady
and continuous. This was marked in 676 by the transference by Bishop
Hædda of the Bishop’s stool from Dorchester to Winchester, and from this
point onwards Winchester became the centre of the diocese as well as the
capital of rule--a great diocese, spreading far and wide over all the
western country. When Danihel succeeded Hædda--“Danihel the most revered
bishop of the West Saxons,” as his contemporary Bede calls him--the
diocese was divided, and Sherborne became the centre of the western, as
Winchester was of the eastern see. And so Winchester history is brought
down to the days of our first really contemporary historian, the
Venerable Bede.
The pages of Bede are full of interest, not only for the light they
throw on the early history of Saxon Winchester, but also because
incidentally they establish its identity with the earlier township of
Roman and Belgan days, for, as already noted, he speaks of it as “the
city of Venta, which is called by the Saxon people _Vintan-ceastir_,”
_i.e._ Venta the fortified, implying that the Roman defences round the
city were still in existence, and giving us the first mention in
recorded history of that name of our city, which by a simple and natural
transition has become the name by which we know it still.
CHAPTER V
THE CAPITAL OF ENGLAND
This royal throne of kings ...
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth.
With the dawn of the ninth century came further development. During the
200 years or so of the so-called Heptarchy, a gradual and continuous
movement of cohesion--social as well as political--had been in progress.
The strength of the Anglo-Saxon was his courage, a determination and
persistence hardly distinguishable from obstinacy; his weakness was his
lack of imagination and his narrow political horizon. He had never
learnt to think nationally, hardly even tribally, far less imperially;
his thoughts centred themselves in the little hamlet or home settlement
where all were kin at least, if not kind. He took
the rustic murmur of his bourg
For the great wave that echoed round the world.
And if he thought of his fellow-countrymen at all, apart from family
blood-feuds which called for vengeance, it was probably in the exclusive
spirit of Jacques:
I do desire we may be better strangers.
These individualistic ideas were being slowly modified by existing
conditions: families had been grouped into tythings, tythings into
hundreds, hundreds into shires; the communal system of land tenure was
merging into the manorial system, and with the consolidation of
individual kingdoms came a struggle for political supremacy and a
movement towards national cohesion and unity. It was the glory of a
Wessex king, ruling in Winchester, to render this conception an
accomplished fact.
It was at the Court of the great Charlemagne that Egbert gained his
political training and insight. Forced as a youth to flee from Wessex,
he had been made welcome at the Emperor’s Court, and there in the centre
of great world-movements, in a Court which numbered the most
accomplished scholars of the time, Egbert began to ‘see things.’ When in
802 A.D. he was called to ascend the throne of Wessex, Charlemagne, it
is said, gave him his own sword as a parting gift, but something far
more potent--political insight and training--was his already.
Egbert set himself not only to consolidate his power in Wessex, but to
weld the separate jangling factions into one under his personal
supremacy. The details of this long struggle are part of English history
and do not concern us here: suffice it that he asserted the supremacy of
Wessex over the whole land, and it is in connection with him that the
term England--Angleland--was first used. In 829 A.D. he held a council
at Winchester and proclaimed himself King of Angleland.
Winchester thus entered on a new phase, as capital of England and not of
Wessex merely, and its importance rapidly developed.
It was well for the land that internal union was thus in sight, for with
Egbert’s reign a new danger arose. The migratory racial movements of
which the coming to Britain of Jute, Angle, and Saxon was but a phase,
had never ceased, but the conditions had altered. In earlier unsettled
days new-comers as they crossed the Swan’s Bath had been usually
welcomed as allies, now when the land had become settled, when wealth
had accumulated in town and monastery, the late-comers came in guise of
a foreign foe. Egbert’s reign saw a great revival of the descents of
these Danes or Northmen as they were called. Wherever their ‘aescas’ or
longships appeared panic seized the countryside. Murder, outrage,
conflagration, and ruin were the ordinary incidents of a Viking raid.
Men might well pray as they did, “From the fury of the Northmen, good
Lord, deliver us,” for the invader knew nothing of mercy, and his
enterprise and desperate valour were only equalled by his fiendish
delight in cruelty. Egbert struggled long, and, on the whole,
successfully, against these foes. In 839 he died, after a reign of
thirty-seven years, and his bones are still preserved in a mortuary
chest in the Cathedral of his capital.
The words on the chest are:
Hic rex Egbertus pausat
(Here rests King Egbert).
Surely Winchester, which preserves the bones of him who first strove for
and successfully realized the conception of national unity, should be
the Mecca for all true devotees of Great or Greater Britain.
Like master, like man, and great kings have always had great subjects.
Such a one was Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, whose influence was all
powerful during the next half century, and was reflected in Egbert’s
still greater grandson, Alfred. Swithun belongs essentially to
Winchester; he laboured incessantly for the kingdom, the diocese, and
the city, and his shrine became for centuries afterwards the glory of
its Cathedral, and the place of pilgrimage for thousands of pious feet.
He built churches; he protected the Cathedral and Monastery by building
a wall round it; he built a bridge across the river, outside the East
Gate of the city, where the present graceful Georgian structure stands.
As some old verses tell us:
Seynt Swithun his bishopricke to al goodnesse drough,
The towne also of Winchester he amended enough,
For he lette the strong bruge without the towne arere,
And fond thereto lym and ston and the workmen that were there.
Fate deals unkindly with some, even at times with those who deserve most
at her hands; Swithun is one of these. A man of saintly life and
far-reaching influence, his humility and aversion to display were among
his most striking personal characteristics. With an instinctive and
indeed prophetic dread of superstitious veneration being paid to his
remains after death, he gave orders that his body should be buried, not
within the Cathedral, where kings and saints reposed, but in the open
graveyard outside, among the poor and the unnoticed. But in vain: with
the monastic revival in King Edgar’s reign, one hundred years later,
came the erection of a new and more splendid cathedral. Tales of
miraculous occurrence began to be told of Swithun’s tomb, and nothing
would serve but the translation and enshrinement within the new
Cathedral of the saint, so pre-eminently national, whose bones had such
potent virtue. Accordingly, in solemn state, in the presence of King
Edgar, Archbishop Dunstan, and Bishop Æthelwold, the pious translation
was performed. Thus Swithun, never formally canonized, became by
universal consent dignified by the appellation Saint, and his mortal
remains were for centuries the object of that superstitious worship
which he himself had so earnestly dreaded. Later years obscured his
reputation even more: a tradition grew up that the saint had signified
his displeasure at the translation of his body by sending a violent
deluge of rain, which for forty days rendered his exhumation impossible.
No foundation for this impossible story can be found in any contemporary
account, and several contemporary accounts both minute and
circumstantial still exist; but the tradition has passed into a proverb,
and so the name of Swithun--his virtues, his piety, and his personality
all forgotten--serves often merely to suggest the school-boy jingle:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain;
St. Swithun’s day, if thou be’est fair,
For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.
For the general public he has ceased to be a historic personality at
all, entitled to veneration and esteem, and has come to be regarded as a
mythical being, malignant and capricious, the patron saint of discomfort
and of stormy skies.
The century which followed Egbert’s death was one of unremitting
struggle against the Danes--a struggle during which the newly formed
kingdom seemed more than once in imminent danger of being submerged.
Æthelwulf and his sons faced the danger manfully, through which, at
length, Alfred emerged victorious. The history of Winchester is in large
measure merely the history of these movements.
Æthelwulf, the priest-monarch, the son of Egbert, who succeeded him in
839, will be best remembered in Winchester as the father of Alfred, and
by the charters, particularly two of extreme interest, which he executed
here. The more important of these is still extant, and the original is
preserved in the British Museum. This is often spoken of as the origin
of tithes, but erroneously, as Æthelwulf’s gift was a gift to the Church
not of produce, but of one-tenth of his landed possessions.
The charter conferring this grant, having been duly executed, was
solemnly laid on the high altar of the Cathedral in the presence of
Swithun and the assembled Witan. The actual original of the second
charter no longer exists, but an ancient copy is preserved among the
treasures of the Cathedral Library. Even as a copy it possesses extreme
interest: it bears the names of King Adulfus (Æthelwulf), Swithun, and
the King’s four sons, Æthelbald, Æthelbert, Æthelred, and Alfred--the
two elder sons being described as ‘Dux’ (Earldorman), and each of the
two younger, mere boys at the time, as ‘Filius Regis,’ son of the King.
Each name is attested, according to Saxon custom, not by a seal, but by
a cross. The date is 854, when Alfred was five years old, and the
document is the earliest tangible link still existing between the city
and the great King.
Of Æthelwulf’s other acts, his two marriages, his journey to Rome, and
his grant to the Pope of Peter’s Pence, as a ransom to relieve the
sufferings of English pilgrims journeying thither, we cannot speak in
detail. Suffice it that Alfred was taken to Rome by him when quite
young, and was solemnly confirmed by the Pope himself. Æthelwulf died in
857, and was buried in the Cathedral. His bones rest in a mortuary chest
mingled with those of Kynegils.
Each of his four sons succeeded him, one after other, and during their
reigns the Danish incursions grew in frequency and intensity: 857 saw
them repulsed with heavy slaughter in Southampton Water; in 860 they
came again, forced their way to Winchester itself, burnt and sacked it.
The Cathedral and Monastery appear to have escaped, thanks possibly to
the strong, defending wall which Swithun had erected.
[Illustration: HAMBLE
A characteristic seaport village at the mouth of Hamble estuary--the
centre of an important crab and lobster trade. In the mud of the tidal
river lies embedded an ancient Danish “longship,” supposed to have
figured in the Danish descents of Alfred the Great’s time. The _Mercury_
Training Ship lies moored here; its masts and yards can be seen up the
river. The rich red brick and tile work of Hamble village forms in
summer-time a delightful picture from the water, with the blue of the
river and the yachts in front and the dark trees behind. Warsash lies
just opposite Hamble, and Netley just behind it.]
Æthelbert succeeded to Æthelbald, Æthelred to Æthelbert, and ever the
struggle increased in intensity. In the last year of Æthelred’s reign he
and Alfred fought no less than nine pitched battles against the Danes.
In the winter of 871 Æthelred died, as it would seem, mortally wounded
in battle, and was buried at Wimborne, and Alfred, the last of the four
brothers, became king.
CHAPTER VI
ALFRED
A prince that draws
By example more than others do by laws.
That is so just, to his great act and thought
To do, not what kings may, but what kings ought.
BEN JONSON, _The Hue and Cry_.
Alfred the Great belongs in a peculiar sense to Winchester; here he was
proclaimed king; here he lived, and ruled, and made his laws; here he
gathered round him that assemblage of divines and learned men with whose
co-operation he gave the first great impetus to a national literature;
here he commenced the English Chronicle; here he devised his plans for
constructing a navy to defend the land against foreign foes; here he
founded a monastery, the Newan Mynstre, destined to play a great and
honourable part for some 600 years after him; here his queen founded a
sister institution, the abbey of St. Mary; here he died and was buried,
leaving behind him the savour of a life strenuous, blameless, and
devoted, having shown his world that the fullest development of manly
vigour was compatible both with the saintliness of the devotee and the
culture of the book-lover and the student.
It was a rude age, the age of Alfred, but nevertheless it was a great
age, for it was, in spite of all its crudeness and brutality, an age in
which ideals were sought after, and indeed worshipped. It was Alfred’s
high distinction that he not only steered the ship of state successfully
through seemingly overwhelming dangers, but that in his own life he
exhibited to the world a realized ideal--an ideal that comparatively few
monarchs have made any attempt to strive after, and which, it is safe to
say, none ever achieved so completely. There have, indeed, been great
empire builders like Charlemagne, great law-givers like our first
Edward, saints with the spiritual elevation of St. Louis, scholars and
patrons of learning like Henry VI., but none have combined these high
qualities with such just balance and self-restraint as Alfred, who may
be truly said to have embodied in his own life the earnest,
long-continued prayer which his own words expressed:
I have sought to live worthily while I lived, and after my death to
leave to the men that should be after me my remembrance in good
works.
Alfred was born at Wantage in 849, and there is little to connect his
early life definitely with Winchester. His association in quite early
days with the king’s court, so frequently held in the city, with the
aged Swithun, who rarely left the city, not to mention the charter of
Æthelwulf, above referred to, which bears his name, all render his early
connection with Winchester more than probable. It was an active and
stirring boyhood, including one, if not two, visits to Rome, and a
solemn confirmation at the Pope’s own hands--events which must have
profoundly stirred him, young as he was. The bent of his mind was early
displayed when his mother Osberga (or, it may be, his stepmother,
Judith; Asser says the latter) showed him and his brothers an
illuminated volume--Anglo-Saxon poetry, very possibly the songs of
Caedmon--and promised the book to the one who should first learn to
repeat them. Alfred immediately sought his tutor’s help, and won the
prize, which appealed so much more keenly to him than to his elder
brothers. For all that it was as a warrior, prompt in action, resolute
in difficulty, that he first rose to distinction. At the critical
moment, while his brother, King Æthelred, delayed, he hurled himself on
the Danes, and overthrew them at the fierce battle of Ashdown, in the
Vale of the White Horse. It was but an episode in the continuous
struggle, and the end of the year saw the death of Æthelred, and Alfred
was called upon by the Witan, against his will indeed, at the age of
twenty-two to mount the throne.
It was a thankless and, as it would seem, hopeless task that the
youthful king had before him. The last thirty years had changed the face
of the land; bit by bit the Danes had made good their footing; province
after province had fallen into their possession. Edmund, the saintly
king of East Anglia, had died a martyr’s death at their hands; Alfred’s
three brothers had mounted the throne one by one, but, bravely as they
had struggled, they had merely been able to retard, not to prevent the
resistless advance. As he looked round on the blackened ruins of the
capital in which he had just been crowned, his heart might well have
sunk within him. Nor was it merely the fate of England which then hung
in the balance; that of northern Christendom equally depended on the
issue of the conflict. It is not generally recognized that during the
early years of Alfred’s reign the heroic determination of the youthful
king, and the loyal devotion of the sorely dismembered little kingdom of
Wessex--for all else in England was lost--were all that stood between
northern Europe and an ever-advancing tide of pitiless and savage
heathenism, which, had it not been stemmed, would have engulfed the
whole northern continent, with little hope of Christian enlightenment
and development, it may have been for centuries. We may well be proud of
the part that Winchester, as the capital of Wessex, played in the course
of civilization during those dark days; and when, as indeed happened 150
years after, Winchester did see the Danish kingdom realized and herself
the capital of it, it was a Christian and civilizing kingdom, and not
one of violence and unbridled slaughter, over which she was called to
preside. Well was it that Alfred was
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
It is to Alfred, to the men of Wessex, and in part to Winchester that
the cause of civilization owes the deliverance from this impending
danger.
For seven years the conflict went on, but it was a conflict almost of
despair, though Alfred met all attacks with unfailing heart and
resourcefulness. At length in 878 all seemed lost. Alfred was surprised
at Chippenham during the Twelfth Night festivities, and forced to take
refuge in the morasses of Somersetshire. The story is too well known to
need retelling here; suffice it that in less than six months Alfred had
reasserted himself, had conquered the Danes, had made peace, and had
divided the realm with them. 878, with the refuge in Athelney and the
peace of Wedmore, was the turning-point in the struggle and in the fate
of the whole nation.
The second period of the reign, the period of more peaceful
reconstruction and consolidation, for plenty of fighting still remained
to be done, centres largely round Winchester, and it is more
particularly round Wolvesey and the scanty remains of Hyde Abbey that
the memory of Alfred still most closely lingers. Wolvesey was the royal
seat. Here he formed his court; here he inaugurated his reforms; here he
laboured, studied, deliberated. The defence of his kingdom, the repair
of the material ruin caused by foreign invasion, the construction of a
fleet of ships, the promulgation of wise laws, the promotion of
education, the encouragement of literature and travel, the actual
founding of a national English literature and an English historical
record, which no other nation can find a parallel to, the endowment of
religious worship--all these in turn occupied his attention while he
dwelt at Wolvesey. The command of the seas he early recognized to be the
real defence of the land, and as soon as opportunity served he set
himself to build a fleet. The Chronicle tells us that he
commanded long ships (_aescas_) to be built against them (_the
Danes, that is_) which were full nigh twice as long as the others.
Some had sixty oars, some more; they were both swifter and
steadier, and also higher than the others. They were shaped neither
like the Frisian nor the Danish, but as it seemed to him they could
be most useful.
The Chronicle gives us also a stirring account of a sea-fight in one of
the Hampshire harbours between Alfred’s vessels and three Danish long
ships. It is a graphic and well-told narrative, too long to be quoted
here. The crews of two of the pirates were captured, and brought to the
king at Winchester. The king, who was then at Wolvesey, commanded them
to be hanged, very likely above those very walls of Wolvesey, grey and
weather-beaten, which we see now, and which in their “herring-bone”
masonry still show the hand of the Saxon builder who erected them. In
the bed of the Hamble River there lies still embedded the keel of a
‘long ship.’ One would dearly like to believe that it was one of those
very pirate vessels which were driven aground, and whose crews were
captured as related above, and the fact is not indeed impossible. Some
planks and portions of this vessel may be seen in the Westgate Museum in
Winchester, and various mementoes, such as the ceremonial casket
presented to Lord Roberts with the freedom of the city on his return
from South Africa, have in recent times been made from it.
Of Alfred’s life of study and devotion we have a pleasant picture in
Asser’s _Biography_. Asser, afterwards Bishop of Sherborne, was a monk
of St. David’s whom Alfred persuaded to come to Winchester, and to enter
his service as scribe and literary helpmate. Asser tells us that “it was
his usual custom both by night and day, amid his numerous occupations of
mind and body, either himself to read books or to listen while others
read them.” The roll of Alfred’s literary productions is a long
one--_Orosius_, the _Consolations_ of Boethius, the _Pastoral Care_ of
Pope Gregory, and Bede’s _History of the English Church_ were all
rendered into the vernacular. More important still was the English
Chronicle, of which no less an authority than Professor Freeman says,
“It is the book we should learn to reverence next after our Bible.” It
is a treasure-house of contemporary record, systematically kept and
reliable, such as no other nation, save the Hebrews, has ever possessed.
In all probability the
[Illustration: AT ITCHEN ABBAS
A village on the Itchen, five miles above Winchester, surrounded
everywhere by picturesque scenery. The ‘Gospel Oak’ in Avington Park, is
some mile or so distant. Kingsley wrote part of his _Water-Babies_ while
staying at the Plough Inn at Itchen Abbas in the course of a fishing
holiday. Big trout may often be seen lying under the bridge here.]
original was compiled and kept at Wolvesey, and copies were made for use
at various other places, as Canterbury, Hereford, Peterborough. Six
ancient copies are extant, of which four are in the British Museum. One
of the two others is an actual Winchester copy of extreme antiquity, and
is preserved in the Parker Collection of MSS. at Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge.
Alfred’s last years were devoted to founding religious houses--one at
Shaftesbury, one at Athelney, and one, which concerns us most
immediately, at Winchester, the ‘Newan Mynstre,’ and his queen,
Alswitha, founded a nunnery at Winchester also--‘Nunna Mynstre’ or St.
Mary’s Abbey.
Alfred matured his plans for the Newan Mynstre in conjunction with
Grimbald of Flanders, whom he invited over to England, and whom he
induced to remain by making him the first abbot. But he only lived to
acquire the site, for which, it is said, he paid the enormous rate of a
mark of gold per foot. The spot selected was north-west of the present
cathedral churchyard, in the angle near St. Laurence’s Church, and the
minster was completed by Edward the Elder, King Alfred’s son, who
succeeded him. The further history of the Newan Mynstre, its removal and
rebuilding as Hyde Abbey, its dissolution and its decay, will be related
in due course.
Alfred died in 901, and his remains have been thrice interred--first of
all in the ‘Ealden Mynstre,’ the old minster, as the cathedral began
then to be called; then at the completion of the Newan Mynstre they
were translated thither with solemn pomp and reverence; and again at the
reconstruction and removal of the fabric with equal pomp and
circumstance to Hyde Abbey. The abbey is now merely a ruined fragment,
and every trace of the abbey church has disappeared. The citizens of
Winchester, so careful in the main of their treasures of antiquity, have
permitted Alfred’s resting-place to be lost sight of and forgotten
altogether, and modern search has not as yet identified the spot. In
1901, the year of the millenary of his death, an attempt was made to
atone in some measure for this irreparable neglect, and the boldly
conceived statue of Alfred, erected in Winchester Broadway, in front of
the spot which his own queen’s abbey had actually occupied, is a
reminder, not unworthy so far as outward monument and statuary art can
serve, of the hallowed association of Winchester with this, the greatest
of all our English monarchs. True is it that little tangible now
remains, whether of Wolvesey, Newan Mynstre, or Hyde which we can
directly connect with him--but his story, and his work, the inspiration
of his life, and his example are things more real and more tangible in
their way even than brick or stone or carven figure, and Alfred’s memory
can never here be lost, even though his tomb remains lost sight of and
slighted, and ‘no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’
CHAPTER VII
ALFRED’S DEATH AND SIXTY YEARS AFTER
Erunt reges nutritii tui, et reginae nutrices tuae.
When Alfred died in 901 he had accomplished a great work; a work great
and lasting, as the next sixty years were to show, and during these
years the ascendancy of Wessex and of the line of Egbert was to grow
more and more undisputed, till it culminated in the reign of Edgar the
Magnificent. These days were days of rapid development in Winchester,
and the fortunes of the city at this period were closely linked with
Alswitha, Alfred’s widow, Grimbald, the monk, and the two strong kings
of Alfred’s line, Edward, his son, and Athelstan, his grandson.
As already related, Alfred had planned the important foundation of the
Newan Mynstre, and had settled the site before his death. Its completion
was the work of the early days of Edward the Elder, who, almost
immediately on ascending the throne, convened a great meeting of the
Witan at Winchester to discuss the matter at the outset. The king’s own
views were limited and parsimonious, and he was anxious to lay the
lands of the Ealden Mynstre under contribution as a means of defraying
the cost, but the venerable Grimbald, now over eighty years of age, was
inflexible. “God will not,” said he, “accept robbery for
burnt-offering,” and he carried his point. The king made a liberal
endowment for the purpose, and the walls of the minster rose apace. At
the same time the abbey of St. Mary, founded by Alswitha, was proceeded
with, and the monastic quarter of the city saw a trinity of fair
monasteries, grouped side by side, rise rapidly into prominence.
Accident served to invest the new abbey with peculiar interest and
sanctity. A Danish descent on Picardy had driven a crowd of refugees to
seek shelter across the sea, and they had crossed over to Hampshire,
bearing with them their greatest treasure--the hallowed bones of their
patron saint, St. Judocus or St. Josse. The king received them
hospitably at Winchester, and the sacred relics were solemnly and
splendidly enshrined within the partially completed church of the New
Minster. Then in 903, in the presence of a great concourse of nobles and
clergy, the dedication of the New Minster was solemnly performed by
Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury. Scarcely was this completed ere
another equally striking act was performed, viz. the translation within
the walls of the new church of the remains of the founder, the great
Alfred himself--a solemn and imposing rite, carried out with all the
pomp and dignity of impressive circumstance:
cum apparatibus regali magnificentia dignis
(with solemn pomp befitting his royal state),
as the _Liber de Hyda_ informs us.
Then in rapid succession Grimbald, Alfred’s first nominated abbot, and
Alswitha, his devoted queen and widow, were called to rest, and the
queen’s remains were piously interred side by side with those of her
husband. Thus within three years of Alfred’s death the Newan Mynstre had
risen not merely into being, but had already become invested with
ascendancy and popular prestige as the hallowed repository of the mortal
remains of a wonder-working saint, a venerated abbot, of a saintly king,
and of his royal consort. Some twenty years later, within the same abbey
church--thus already established as a venerated mausoleum--Edward the
Elder himself was also laid, after a strenuous reign, in which he had
consolidated the Anglo-Saxon power and had re-established firmly the
unity of the kingdom. Thus, as year succeeded year, Winchester grew in
extent and importance. The prestige and dignity of its ecclesiastical
foundations established it thus early as the leading centre of pious
pilgrimage in the south of England, and shopmen and merchants followed
eagerly the pilgrim stream. Accordingly Edward the Elder drew up what
may be called the first commercial code of the city--laws regulating the
selling of goods and the making of bargains in open market in the city.
In the same reign associations or confraternities of traders for mutual
support began to be formed--confraternities which, under the name of
‘gilds’ or guilds, were destined to become in time corporate municipal
bodies, with the ‘Hall of the Gild Merchant’ as the centre of civic rule
and influence. A formal mayor and corporation were to come later, but
the elements and something more of civic rule in Winchester can be thus
traced continuously back and recognized for full a thousand years.
Of Athelstan the warrior we have but little actual Winchester history to
record; he reigned from 925 to 940, and was buried not at Winchester but
at Malmesbury. To atone for this historical paucity we have one glorious
romantic legend--the legend of the fight between Guy of Warwick and
Colbrand, the Danish giant and warrior, a story which has long been a
classic fairy tale. Rudborne, in his _Major Historia Wintoniae_, copying
from the _Liber de Hyda_, solemnly records how Athelstan, invested in
his capital city by Anelafe, King of the Danes, agreed with his besieger
to decide the issue by a combat between champions, and he tells us how a
new Polyphemus,
monstrum, horrendum, informe, ingens,
Colbrand, “a giant wondrous of stature, hideous of aspect, and of
unparalleled ferocity,” came forward to champion the Danish cause, and
how the English protagonist, Guy of Warwick, his opposite in every
attribute, “prudent, self-restrained, resolute, manly in mind and
skilled to combat,”
Against great odds bare up the war
“in a certain meadow lying northward of the city, now called De Hyde
mead, then called Denemarck,” while Athelstan watched the combat
anxiously from a corner of the city walls. Swords flashed, splinters
flew, long was the conflict doubtful; each antagonist in turn prevailed,
while hearts beat fast and lips grew white with tense compression, till
right prevailed, and the head of the second Goliath was severed from its
trunk by our Saxon David.
The worthy Knighton, in his _De Eventibus Angliae_, amplifies the story,
and the details fairly scintillate at his imaginative smithy. The fight
occurs in Chiltecumbe or Chilcomb valley; Guy of Warwick takes the
field, mounted on Athelstan’s own steed and girt with arms of wondrous
potency--the sword of Constantine the Great, the spear of Saint Maurice
himself.
Colbrand, also mounted, bears with him a whole armoury--axe, and club,
and iron hook--while a waggon by his side bears a whole assortment of
miscellaneous ironmongery for him to use at need against his adversary.
It is strength, and stature, and brute force against courage and
address, and for a long time Guy appears to be at the mercy of his
adversary. The latter, however, in dealing a ponderous blow--the _coup
de grâce_ as he imagines--contrives to let his weapon slip, and as he
reaches to recover it, the English champion rushes in and severs his
hand from off his arm. Nevertheless, the issue is for long in doubt, and
it is not till darkness has all but fallen that the giant’s strength
ebbs from weakness and loss of blood, and his nimble adversary shears
off his head with one sweep of his sword. Readers of Kingsley’s
_Hereward the Wake_ will recall in the above act something more than a
reminiscence of the strong conflict between Hereward and Ironhook, the
Cornish giant. The story is indeed a Cornish legend, localised round
Athelstan and the Wessex capital. Gerald of Cornwall, a writer whose
writings exist now only in fragments, related it in his _De Gestis Regum
Westsaxonum_, and it is his account, incorporated in the _Liber de
Hyda_, which is the source of its introduction into our local history.
Yet strange as it may seem, this wildly impossible romance was accepted
for centuries as historical; Danemark mead still exists as a local name,
and an inn known as the Champions only disappeared from the reputed
locale of this wonderful conflict a few years ago.
And so through legend and historical record alike, our city’s history
moved forward step by step. King after king of Egbert’s line succeeded
to the throne and ruled in Winchester. Edred the Pious succeeded Edmund
the Magnificent and was buried in the Old Minster. Edwy the Inglorious
succeeded Edred, and died and was buried in the New Minster, and thus in
959 the realm passed under the rule of Edgar, his half-brother, Edgar
the Peaceable, whom the monks named also Edgar the Magnificent. With his
reign a fresh chapter of interest and importance opens in our city’s
history.
[Illustration: HIGH STREET, WINCHESTER
The ‘Butter Cross,’ as the City Cross is invariably denominated, forms
the most characteristic feature of the delightful old-world High Street.
Close by are the ‘Piazza,’ and a charming old timber-fronted Tudor
house, now a well-known picture shop. Behind the Cross is the opening of
‘Little Minster Passage’ leading to the Cathedral.
In 1770 it was decided to remove the Butter Cross, and it was actually
sold to a purchaser for this purpose, but the inhabitants rose in
indignation, forcibly removed the scaffolding erected round it, and so
preserved it from destruction.]
CHAPTER VIII
ÆTHELWOLD, SAINT AND BISHOP
O see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the land of righteousness,
Tho’ after it but few enquires.
THOMAS THE RHYMER.
With the death of Edwy in 959 a new chapter of interest opens, a period
of revival, of growth, of development, the golden age of Saxon
Winchester, during which the Saxon city was at its zenith of importance,
the reign of Edgar the Peaceable and Magnificent.
The monkish chroniclers have for the most part painted Edgar in glossy
colours; they sang his virtues, his magnificence, his piety, his love
for Holy Church. They spoke of him as a second Solomon, and the
comparison was in its way not inapt, for, like Solomon, he enjoyed peace
and loved display; like Solomon, he allowed his private life to drag him
to a low level; and, like Solomon, he left a son behind him, who was to
see his kingdom rent asunder and a better than he bearing sway in it.
But it is neither Edgar, who, with all his faults, ruled wisely, nor his
son, Æthelred, of Evil Counsel, who, with all his vices, did not, who
are the leading figures of interest at this juncture; neither is it the
great Dunstan, of whom we get fleeting glances, Dunstan, the great
archbishop, the master-mind of his time, in whose hands the would-be
masterful and imperious king was indeed but as clay unto the potter,
little though he realized it. It is Æthelwold the bishop, Æthelwold the
saint and revivalist, Æthelwold the builder and lover of learning, who
is the dominating figure, and it is rather by the commencement and
completion of his work than by the accessions or deaths of kings that
the limits of the period are to be assigned.
For estimating the course of Winchester history at this important and
interesting stage we have fortunately more than an abundance--a wealth
of historical materials. Not only do the _English Chronicle_ and all the
leading monkish chroniclers contain full references, but numerous other
local sources of history, _e.g._ Rudborne, the various Winchester
annalists, and the _Liber de Hyda_, exist, which deal fully with it.
Besides these we have a minutely circumstantial life of Æthelwold
himself, and, perhaps most interesting of all, a remarkable account by
the same author, Wulfstan, precentor of Winchester, describing, in
curiously involved and almost interminable Latin elegiacs, the wonders
of the new Winchester cathedral which Æthelwold built, and the splendour
of various great and striking ceremonies which he saw performed within
it.
Æthelwold did more than merely leave his mark on Winchester; he
transformed it. He found its ecclesiastical life poor, self-centred, and
stagnant; he left it active, influential, creative; he found the Old
Minster, with its cathedral church, bare, distanced, and neglected,
eclipsed and outshone by Alfred’s later foundation, the Newan Mynstre.
He left it not merely with an acknowledged ascendancy, but a new fabric,
the finest in the land, the pride of the city, and almost one of the
wonders of the age, a centre of pilgrimage of great resort and renown,
with a new shrine containing a new patron saint, the wonder-working
shrine of St. Swithun. He found the domestic buildings small, damp,
unhealthy; he rebuilt them and brought to them a supply of pure water,
irrigating the city and its river valley by streams whose courses still
remain, to all intents and purposes, unchanged. _Nullum tetigit quod non
ornavit_ might well have been the epitaph over his tomb.
Ecclesiastical life in England had, in fact, never really recovered from
the Danish _débâcle_ of the later ninth century: monasteries had been
burnt, plundered, impoverished: recovery had been but slow and partial:
slackness and sloth were almost universal. It is not known how far in
the earlier English monasteries the Benedictine rule and the common
cœnobitic life had ever been strictly followed, but when Dunstan rose to
influence there were practically no religious houses where monks were to
be found; in their place non-resident canons, or seculars, as they were
called, had become the established order of things, and the various
annalists have painted for us in vivid colours the laxity and debased
standard of the ordinary church life of the day. The canons, or
‘seculars,’ released from the severe toil and discipline of the
Benedictine rule, allowed themselves numerous indulgences, and were in
many cases even married. Loving comfort and ease, they neglected the
church, and the daily services were grudgingly carried out by deputy, by
‘vicars’ paid, and paid poorly at that, to conduct the services while
the absentee canons expended the income of their ‘prebends’ elsewhere at
their ease. Thus Wulfstan tells us--
There were then in the Old Minster, wherein is the bishop’s stool,
canons of disreputable manners and morals, so swollen with pride
and insolence that numbers of them would not condescend to
celebrate the masses when their regular turn came, who turned
adrift the wives they had unlawfully married, and took others in
their stead, and who gave themselves up to gluttony and
drunkenness.
It is always interesting to note the snowball principle of accretion in
the various annalists’ accounts, and the fifteenth-century Winchester
annalist improves upon this picture, depicting them as
... canons, canonical only in name, who neglected their duties in
the church, and left the pious labours of vigils and the service of
the altar to be performed vicariously, absenting themselves from
the sight of the church, or even, so to speak, from the sight of
God. Bare was the church within and without. The vicars, scarcely
able to keep body and soul together, could not give: the
prebendaries would not. Hardly could you find one who, except on
compulsion, would offer a shabby altar cloth or present a chalice
worth a few shillings.
Be this as it may--and the monkish chroniclers would not be likely to
spare the seculars--the standard of life was terribly lax, and Dunstan,
originally abbot of Glastonbury, then Bishop of Worcester, and finally
archbishop, set out, with King Edgar’s sanction, on the path of reform,
and Æthelwold assisted heart and soul in the movement.
In their respective abbeys, Glastonbury and Abingdon, and in these only,
monks had been re-established. Now the movement for the replacing of
seculars by monks became general, and when in 963 he was consecrated
Bishop of Winchester by Dunstan, Æthelwold set himself to revive the
monastic orders in the three Winchester houses and elsewhere in the
land.
The canons of the Old Minster, however, flatly refused to adopt the
monastic life and discipline, and finally Æthelwold brought monks from
Abingdon to replace them. Wulfstan relates their coming thus:--
It happened on a Sabbath in the beginning of Lent, as the monks
from Abingdon were standing at the entrance to the church, that the
canons were finishing mass, chanting together, “Serve the Lord with
fear and rejoice unto Him with reverence. Take up the discipline,
lest ye perish from the right way,” as if they should say, “We will
not serve the Lord, nor keep His discipline; do you do it in your
turn, lest, like us, ye perish from the way which opens the
heavenly realms to those who follow righteousness.” Accepting this
as an omen, one of them exclaimed, “Why do we stand still outside
the church? Let us do as these canons exhort us; let us enter and
follow the paths of righteousness.”
The canons, however, struggled hard for reinstatement. They appealed to
the king, who inclined to temporize with them, and a great meeting of
the Witan was convened at Winchester, where Dunstan and Æthelwold urged
strongly the monastic view. The king, however, was still undecided when
a voice was heard from the crucifix built against the walls bidding him
not to waver longer. Thus, so the _Liber de Hyda_ informs us, the monks
were confirmed in occupation.
Next year it was the turn of the canons of the New Minster to follow
suit, for, in the words of Wulfstan, “thereupon the eagle of Christ,
Bishop Æthelwold, spread out his golden wings, and, with King Edgar’s
approval, drove out the canons from the New Minster, and introduced
therein monks who followed the cœnobitic rules of life.” The Nunnery,
St. Mary’s Abbey, was at the same time placed under the strict
Benedictine rule.
And now events moved fast, and with monks established in the monastery
strange rumours and portents began to prevail. It was noised abroad that
the saintly Swithun, buried humbly in the common graveyard on the north
side of the church, had begun to manifest his virtues by acts of healing
at his tomb. The churchyard became the resort of crowds of pilgrims,
until
... the holy father, Æthelwold, warned by a divine revelation,
translated the holy Swythun, the special saint of this church at
Wynchester, from his unworthy sepulchre, and piously placed his
holy relics with due honour in a shrine of gold and silver given by
the king, and worked with the utmost richness and craftsman’s
skill.
The same account tells us that the bones of St. Birinus were similarly
deposited in another shrine, but St. Swithun was the popular saint, and
the miracles wrought at his shrine soon made the Old Minster renowned
throughout the whole land.
Indeed, as Rudborne, the monk, quaintly and naïvely tells us, “as long
as canons held the Church at Winchester there were no miracles
performed, but no sooner were they ejected and replaced by monks than
miracles were wrought abundantly.” Doubtless Rudborne was right. At all
events crowds of pilgrims thronged to Winchester, and the name of
Swithun, the Saxon saint, became a power in the land.
But all this time Æthelwold was at work rebuilding the Cathedral, and
the church he reared was the finest in the land--one of the wonders of
the age.
Wulfstan in his long-winded way describes the building, its aisles, its
towers, its crypt, both mystifying the reader and losing himself over
and over again in the description, as he relates how the newcomer passes
bewildered from one wonder to another, till he knows neither how to
advance nor to get back again.
Nesciat unde meat, quove pedem referat.
The gilded weather-cock on the top of one of the towers in particular
fired his imagination. Glorious and superb, it grasped the ball of
empire with its splendid talons, and from its lofty standard dominated
the whole populace of the city:--
Imperii sceptrum pedibus tenet ille superbis,
Stat super et cunctum Wintoniae populum.
The mighty organ placed in the church by Æthelwold’s successor he also
enlarges upon. This mighty instrument had twenty-six bellows--twelve
above, fourteen below--worked laboriously by seventy full-grown men, who
sweated at their task, while two organists hammered vigorously upon the
manuals, flooding the whole city with the volume of the sound.
Wulfstan not only gives us these details of the building, but he
describes the various splendid ceremonies which he himself witnessed
within it--the translation of St. Swithun’s bones in the presence of
King Edgar; the dedication in 980, when King Æthelred and nine bishops
were present, including the “white-haired and angelic Dunstan”:--
Canitie nivens Dunstan et angelicus.
Then of the feast which followed, telling us how a tenth bishop--one
Poca--who arrived too late for the labours of the ceremony, atoned for
it amply by the depth of his potations.
Nulla laboris agens, pocula multa bibens.
[Illustration: ST. PETER’S, CHEESEHILL, WINCHESTER
One of the oldest of Winchester Parish Churches, of Norman date.
Cheesehill--a corruption of Chesil--a word still surviving in Chesil
Beach, near Portland--denotes the dry or gravelly strand along the bank
of the Itchen, and has no connection with cheese. Cheesehill Street,
though somewhat ‘slummy,’ is very picturesque and contains many
interesting old houses.]
Later on there was a second dedication. Altogether it was a period of
splendid and impressive ceremonial.
Æthelwold’s monks displayed their zeal in another channel. In both
monasteries scriptoria were established, and Winchester became the
centre of an unrivalled school of MS. illumination. The MS. treasures of
Æthelwold’s monks may still be seen in the British Museum, in Winchester
Cathedral Library, at the Bodleian, and at Rouen. Loveliest of all is
the priceless ‘Benedictional of St. Æthelwold,’ the glory of the
Chatsworth collection, a MS. of rare beauty and interest, for it
preserves for us the figure and features of St. Æthelwold himself as
well as some of the architectural details of the new cathedral he had
erected. How the ‘Benedictional’ came into the possession of the
Cavendish family is unknown. Is it too much to hope that later on the
day may come when such a treasure may be restored to its natural
home--the Cathedral Library at Winchester?
Æthelwold’s last work for Winchester we have already mentioned--the
rebuilding of the monastery. He transformed the channels of Itchen, and
brought its purifying waters through the city and the monastery by fresh
courses.
Quoting again from Wulfstan:--
Hucque
Dulcia piscosae flumina traxit aquae
Successusque laci penetrant secreta domorum
Mundantes locum murmure coenobium,
Here great Æthelwold led sweet fishful courses of water.
And murmurs of mingling streams pervade the recesses monastic.
Such, then, was Æthelwold. In 984 he died, and was buried in the crypt
of the cathedral he had erected. The place of his sepulture is now
unknown. There are few among the makers of Winchester greater than he.
We have dealt with this era of constructive effort as if the full design
was brought to completion in Æthelwold’s lifetime. Such was not indeed
the case, and it was left to Ælfeah, his successor in the episcopate, to
actually finish the building schemes inaugurated by his predecessor. But
it was Æthelwold, not Ælfeah, whose creation it really was, and Ælfeah
(_St. Alphege_) will always be remembered more feelingly as the
Archbishop of Canterbury, martyred by the Danes, rather than as the
completer of Æthelwold’s great master-work in Winchester.
CHAPTER IX
THE CAPITAL OF THE DANISH EMPIRE
Saxon and Norman and Dane are we.
Æthelwold’s work was still in full progress when King Edgar died in 975.
Young as he was--he was only some thirty-two years old when he died--he
had reigned for some sixteen years, and his reign had had notable
results. It had been a reign of uninterrupted peace; indeed it was the
only peaceful reign, save Edward the Confessor’s, of any Saxon king in
England, and a reign, moreover, of good government and wise laws. And
though the memories of Edgar’s domestic life, his intrigues, and his
tragic murder of his false friend, Earl Æthelwold, belong rather to
Wherwell and Andover than to Winchester, we have many personal touches
reminding us of his close connection with Winchester history. We see him
holding his court continually at Wolvesey. Tradition even derives the
name of Wolvesey from the wolf’s head tribute which he caused to be paid
to him there, and which brought about the practical extermination of
wolves in the land; but be that as it may, at Wolvesey Edgar royally
kept his state, presiding over many a great meeting of the Witan, and
promulgating his laws with the imperious formula, “I and the
Archbishop”--an involuntary acknowledgment of what was, after all, the
great power behind the throne, the influence of Dunstan. We see him
attending the imposing ecclesiastic ceremonies of his reign, such as the
enshrinement of the bones of Swithun, and we read of the wise laws and
reforms he inaugurated. He standardized the coinage and the weights and
measures of the realm. “Let one weight and one measure be used in all
England, after the standard of London and of Winchester.” “Let there be
one standard of coinage throughout the king’s realm”--regulations which
serve to show the development of commerce and prosperity in the kingdom.
Another was a curious law passed to check the excessive drinking habits
to which in particular his Danish subjects were addicted. Pegs were
placed at certain intervals in the drinking cups, and no one was
suffered to “drink below his peg.” Yet notable as King Edgar was as a
king, his personal claim entitles him to little respect. Allowing fully
for the lowly standard of his age, his life was sensual, loose, and so
smirched with squalid self-indulgence that even his monkish admirers,
who had every reason to laud him highly, were forced to mingle censure
with the lavish encomiums they heaped upon him, and it was a bitter
legacy which his loose domestic life left behind him for the nation to
inherit. The national record, the _English Chronicle_, accords him an
appreciative but discriminating epitaph, praising his good rule and
reciting his virtues indeed, but concluding in words which we can all at
least re-echo:--
May God grant him
that his good deeds
be more prevailing
than his misdeeds
for his soul’s protection
on the longsome journey.
And now followed years of tragedy and strife. Edgar’s elder son, Edward,
was very soon murdered by his stepmother, Ælfrida, and the throne passed
into the hands of Edgar’s second son, Æthelred the Redeless, or Æthelred
of Evil Counsel, the feeblest, most inept, most hopeless of all our
monarchs, whether Saxon or English. His reign was to witness the
recrudescence of Viking inroad and savage assault, and when, after
bleeding the resources of the realm to death in a vain and hopeless
effort to buy off the invaders, his foolish brain conceived the
wickedness of murdering all the Danes in England--a fatuous and
desperate act of villainy, hatched at Winchester and consummated on St.
Brice’s Day 1002--the tragedy of misery was exchanged for the ruin of
despair, and the terrible vengeance the Danes exacted was only ended by
the conquest of the realm and the passing of it into Danish hands, and
so Winchester became the capital of a greater empire than ever before or
since--the capital of the great Scandinavian empire of Cnut.
Most striking of all the figures of this period, more interesting far
than the ignoble king, was Æthelred’s queen, Emma, daughter of Richard,
Duke of Normandy, the beautiful, fascinating, and designing woman whom
for her beauty the Saxons called Ælfgyfu Emma--Emma, the gift of the
elves--whom Æthelred married at Winchester in 1002. A rare personality
this Ælfgyfu Emma, but not a pleasing one. “I governed men by change,
and so I swayed all moods,” she might have said of herself. The wife of
two successive kings, and the mother of two more, she was to be for
fifty years, and during five successive reigns, the central influence in
Winchester history; for Æthelred on the day he married her presented
Winchester and Exeter to her as her ‘morning gift,’ or wedding present,
and when he died, Cnut the Dane, Æthelred’s successor, wedded her in
turn. Of the details of her career we have yet to speak more fully, and
after Cnut’s death she ‘sat’ or kept her court at Winchester for many
years as the ‘Old Lady,’ the beautiful Saxon phrase for Queen Dowager.
Her memory lingers now most closely around the charming old Tudor
building, Godbegot House, fronting Winchester High Street, which
occupies the site and still re-echoes the name of a little manor which
once belonged to her--the little manor of Godbiete. Queen Emma granted
it to the prior and convent of St. Swithun, “Toll free and Tax free for
ever,” and toll free and tax free it remained for years and years,
wherein none had right of access, and even the king’s warrant lost its
authority. And so for some hundreds of years the liberty of Godbiete
remained a source of division and evil influence, a sanctuary or
‘Alsatia’ right in the heart of the city, where those obnoxious to the
law might shelter and defy its terrors. For “no mynyster of ye Kinge
nether of none other lords of franchese shall do any execucon wythyn the
bounds of ye seid maner, but all only of ye mynystoris of ye seid Prior
and convent”--a rarely suggestive illustration of mediaeval life and
method. Destined ever to bring trouble with her in her lifetime, her
very legacy seemed to bear with it the same evil fruit of civil
disturbance to the city and much bickering of rival authorities for
centuries after her death.
Of Winchester in Cnut’s reign we have frequent mention in the chronicles
of the time. The story of Cnut rebuking his courtiers on the seashore at
Southampton we need not repeat, except as regards its sequel. “After
which,” to quote Rudborne’s account, “Cnut never wore his crown, but
placing it on the head of the image above the high altar of the
cathedral (_at Winchester_), afforded a striking example of humility to
the kings who should come after him.”
Nor was humility the only virtue Cnut displayed. His munificence to the
Church was striking and ample, and one chronicler after another the
gifts made by Cnut and Emma jointly to the religious houses both at
Winchester and in the district round. “This same Cnut,” we read,
“embellished the Old Minster with such magnificence that the gold and
silver and the splendour of the precious stones dazzled the eyes of the
beholders.” Two of Cnut’s gifts were indeed to become memorable in after
years. One was the great altar cross of solid gold which he and Queen
Emma presented jointly to the New Minster, a presentation quaintly
portrayed in the _Liber Vitae_ of Hyde, a register and martyrology
illuminated at Winchester during this reign. For years it remained the
glory of the houses till it was destroyed at the burning of Hyde Abbey,
and even then its history was not ended, for Bishop Henry of Blois,
having stolen the precious metal mingled with the ashes from the
conflagration, was forced by the monks of Hyde to make restitution. The
other historic gift was that made to the Old Minster, of “three hides of
land called Hille,” usually identified as St. Catherine’s Hill, whereon,
in centuries to come, generation after generation of Wykeham’s scholars
were to make regular pilgrimage for purposes of play on ‘remedies’ or
days of relaxation. The land is still Church property, and is held now
by the ecclesiastical commissioners.
Cnut is a great figure both in Winchester and in English history.
Foreigner though he was, he ruled not as an alien conqueror, but as an
English monarch, and Englishmen are proud to claim him as one of the
greatest among our national rulers. He died in 1035, and his body was
brought to Winchester for interment in the Old Minster, and in the
Cathedral his bones are still preserved in one of the mortuary chests
already referred to, along with those of Emma his
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. CROSS
St. Cross Hospital founded by Bishop Henry of Blois in 1136, and placed
by him subsequently under the protection of the Knights of St. John of
Jerusalem, from which circumstance the Brethren wear the characteristic
_croix pattée_ or eight-pointed cross of the Order.
[Illustration]
Cardinal Beaufort built ‘Beaufort’s Tower’ and most of the present
domestic buildings, and founded the Order of Noble Poverty.
The hospitality to travellers for which the Knights Hospitallers were
noted is still practised in the form of the ‘Wayfarer’s Dole’ of bread
and ale, dispensed at the hospital gates to those applying for it, very
much as in mediaeval days.]
queen, and--strange companionship--William Rufus also.
With Cnut’s death came faction and strife. Cnut’s two sons, Harold and
his half-brother Harthacnut, Æfgyfu Emma and Earl Godwine, had all
intrigued desperately for power. The various accounts differ, but
Harthacnut, who, as son of Emma and Cnut, had a strong following in the
country, was abroad at the time, and in his absence Harold secured the
throne. Emma had played her cards well, perhaps too well, for she had
managed to secure possession of Cnut’s treasure and to assert her
influence as ‘lady paramount’ over Wessex, for we read
... it was resolved that Æfgyfu, Harthacnut’s mother, should dwell
at Winchester with the king, her son’s hûscarls, and hold all
Wessex under his authority.
But this was not to last. Harold asserted himself and raided his
‘mother,’--she was his stepmother, of course,--while
... Ælfgyfu Emma, the lady, sat then there within, and Harold ...
sent thither, and caused to be taken from her all the best
treasures which she could not hold which King Cnut had possessed;
and yet she sat there therein the while she might.
Nor was this all. Harold’s violence became impossible to make head
against, and the poor queen was driven into exile
... without any mercy against the stormy winter, and she came to
Bruges beyond sea, and Count Baldwine there well received her ...
the while she had need.
And so, for some three years, both Emma and Harthacnut were fugitives at
Baldwin’s court, till on the death of the violent and worthless Harold,
some three years after, they returned. Harthacnut, equally inglorious,
reigned some two years only, and actually died during his own marriage
feast as he stood up to wassail his bride. His body was brought to
Winchester for interment in the Old Minster, as a modern inscription in
the Cathedral serves to remind us; while his mother enriched the New
Minster with a gruesome relic--the head of the blessed Saint Valentine
the Martyr--to pay for masses for his soul. Then in 1043 came Edward the
Confessor, son of Emma and Æthelred the Redeless, who was “hallowed king
at Winchester on the first Easter day”; and the realm had peace at
least, if not rest, for over twenty years.
Since her return to England, Emma, ‘the lady,’ had not been idle, for at
the accession of the new king she was not only re-established in all her
old supremacy, but had recovered much of the wealth which Harold had
wrested from her, and the remaining seven years of her life witnessed a
continual struggle for ascendancy between her and Edward her son. Edward
had no sooner been crowned than he set himself to seize her
treasure--doubtless it was national rather than personal property--but
Emma, skilled to fish in troubled water, had landed both loaves as well
as fishes in her net, and this time Godwine the earl, unfortunately for
her, cast his weight into the opposing scale; accordingly, six months
after Edward’s coronation, we read--
The King was so advised that he and Earl Leofric, and Earl Godwine,
and Earl Siward, with their attendants, rode from Gloucester to
Winchester unawares upon the Lady (_Emma_), and they bereaved her
of all the treasures which she owned, which were not to be told ...
and after that they let her reside therein--
a passage notable in its way, for it brings before us, in close
juxtaposition, practically all the great characters of the Confessor’s
reign--Ælfgyfu Emma, and the king her son, and the three great earls,
with their attendants--Godwine, the great Earl of Wessex, accompanied
possibly by his sons Harold and Tostig: Leofric, Earl of Mercia, the
‘grim earl’ of Tennyson’s poem, husband of the famous Godiva: and
Siward, Earl of Northumbria, the old Siward of Shakespeare’s
_Macbeth_--and suggests a striking subject for pictorial representation,
which as yet, unfortunately, no artist’s brush has attempted. It was
doubtless in the national interest that the three rival earls were led
to combine to support the king against his mother, but we cannot but
regret that the circumstance which united this notable and noble trio
together in the support of the king--probably the only occasion in his
reign when the king ever commanded their united support--should not have
been one more heroic than that of forcing a defenceless if grasping old
woman to render up the keys of her treasure-chest.
We have one more picture of the ‘Old Lady’--the legend of Queen Emma and
the ploughshares, a legend peculiarly characteristic of mediaeval
sentiment, which is quaintly narrated in full and charming detail by
more than one chronicler. Her enemies had slanderously connected her
name with that of Alwine, Bishop of Winchester, and she had appealed to
the ordeal by fire to clear her reputation.
Coming from Wherwell Abbey, where she had been forced to retire for
refuge, she had passed the night in prayer and fasting, and in the
morning, in the presence of the king and a great concourse of people,
she had been led forward by two bishops, to pass barefooted over nine
red-hot ploughshares laid in order in the nave of the Old Minster
church. Yet such was the potency of the protection she derived from her
blameless conduct and unsullied conscience, that she was not only
unharmed but had actually passed over the ploughshares before she became
conscious that she had even reached them, whereupon the king,
overwhelmed with contrition and remorse, implored her forgiveness, in
the words of the repentant prodigal: “Mother, I have sinned against
Heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to be called thy son”;
while in token of his sincerity he presented his own body before the
queen and the bishops for punishment. The bishops touched him each with
a rod, after which the pious king received three strokes from the hand
of his weeping mother.
The Winchester chronicler, conscious of a ‘divided duty,’ has managed
very dexterously to extricate the king from severe censure, while
honourably loyal to the lady paramount of his city. In 1052 Emma died,
and was buried by her second husband’s side in the Old Minster. Her
bones still rest, as already mentioned, mingled with his, in one of the
Cathedral mortuary chests.
After Emma’s death Edward the Confessor was frequently at Winchester; he
revived the practice of the earlier Saxon kings, and “wore his crown at
Winchester at Easter time”--in other words, held his Easter Court there.
Into the details of his reign we need not enter. Most striking, perhaps,
from the point of view of our Winchester annals, is the amazing
accumulation of extravagant legend, beneath which the history of this
reign is buried and obscured. One such legend we have just related;
another one is that of the mysterious death of Earl Godwine. The
_Chronicle_ records the circumstance briefly and naturally. “On the
second Easter day he was sitting with the king at refection (_doubtless
at Wolvesey_) when he suddenly sank down by the footstool, deprived of
speech and of all power.... He continued so, speechless and powerless,
until the Thursday, and then resigned his life, and he lies within the
Old Minster.” A plain story, plainly told--an old man, a sudden stroke
of paralysis, and death in its natural course. But not so in the hands
of the fifteenth-century annalist; the story had grown, by the snowball
principle, by then: Godwine was no friend of the monks, and Edward was a
Saint--the Confessor. Godwine in this account, while feasting at the
royal table, is under grievous suspicion of compassing the death of the
king’s brother, Alfred the
Ætheling. A cupbearer, in handing the cup to the king, slips with one
foot on the floor, but dexterously recovers his balance with the other
foot. “Thus,” remarked Godwine, “brother brings aid to brother.” The
king retorts fiercely, “But for the wiles of Earl Godwine, my brother
would have been able to bear aid to me.” The earl earnestly protesting,
and in token of his innocence, lifts a piece of bread, praying that it
may choke him if he is in any way complicated in the crime of murder.
The pious king solemnly blesses the bread, which proves a fatal
mouthful, for “Satan entered into him when he had received the sop,” and
the earl falls speechless before the incensed king, who spurns the body
with his foot, while his sons Harold and Tostig remove it, and later on
bury it surreptitiously in the Cathedral. So was history written ‘once
upon a time.’ Whereabouts in the Cathedral the great earl was buried is
unknown.
One more legend--for legend, unfortunately, we must so deem it--the
legend of Abbot Alwyn and the monks of Newan Mynstre, and we must
conclude. Edward’s reign is marked by the struggle between Saxon and
Norman interest for supremacy in England, and to the Confessor Norman
art, Norman culture, Norman thought were dear. Doubtless his instinct
was so far right, but, unaccompanied as it was by any national sentiment
or attachment, this predilection must be accounted in him a weakness,
and not a virtue, and opposition to the king’s policy took on a national
and therefore patriotic colour. This was reflected in the
Winchester religious houses, and the Newan Mynstre, staunch in its
attachment to the Saxon cause, became the rallying point for Saxon
patriotism, while the Old Minster had leanings towards the Norman cause.
Thus it came about that when, on the Confessor’s death, Harold marched
to Senlac to repel the Norman invader, Abbot Alwyn and twelve monks of
Newan Mynstre donned coats of mail, shouldered each a battleaxe, and
fought sternly and heroically in defence of the cause.
There, in the thickest of the fight, they plied their axes bravely, and
when all was over their bodies were found, lying dead round the dead
king’s banner, and it was seen from their habit that they were monks of
the New Minster at Winchester. The Norman Conqueror, on being informed
of the discovery, remarked with grim irony that “the Abbot was worth a
barony, and each of the monks a manor,” and mulcted the New Minster
accordingly. The story, which is to be found in Dugdale’s _Monasticon_,
is picturesque and appealing--unfortunately there is no confirmation of
it. It is not given in the _Chronicle_, nor in any local sources such as
the Hyde Abbey records (where assuredly it would have been preserved),
in Rudborne, or the _Annales de Wintonia_. Rudborne gives, indeed, a
long list of lands which the Conqueror deprived the New Minster of, but
that in itself would be no confirmation of the story, for in the same
passage he states that William also seized lands belonging to the Old
Minster. William, it is true, kept the Abbacy of the New Minster vacant
for some two years, but that again was but an act of minor tyranny, too
familiar to call for much remark. The story, indeed, appears to be quite
discredited by the entries in _Domesday Book_, which seem to afford no
evidence of spoliation, but rather to prove that the New Minster lands
were added to by William, while the Old Minster certainly suffered at
his hands; and we fear that the story of the abbot and the twelve monks
of New Minster must, like so many others, be offered up reluctantly as
one more sacrifice on the altar of historical accuracy. The subject may
be pursued in the _Victoria History of Hampshire_, where it is fully
discussed.
With Harold’s death on Senlac field Winchester opens on a new phase.
Saxon history in Winchester is glorious and fascinating, but of Saxon
buildings in Winchester few visible traces remain. Norman Winchester is
with us still, and under the Normans Winchester was to expand and attain
greater outward beauty and glory than perhaps a thousand years of
undiluted Saxon rule would ever have conferred upon her.
[Illustration: KING’S GATE, WINCHESTER
The smallest of the five original gates of Winchester, of which it and
Westgate alone are standing now. Abutting on the great gate of St.
Swithun’s Priory--now the Close Gate--it was burnt down during the
Barons’ War, and when rebuilt a small church was built above it for the
use of the lay servitors of the Priory. This church is now the Parish
Church of St. Swithun’s, Winchester. An absurd local tradition connects
the name with the number of sovereigns of the realm who have passed
beneath it.]
CHAPTER X
NORMAN WINCHESTER
Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.
It is safe to say that no other event so thoroughly affected the
fortunes of Winchester as the Norman Conquest. Not only was the city
completely transformed in outward form, but its relationship to the
country at large was to undergo profound modification, and a train of
political circumstance opened up the effect of which was ultimately to
deprive her of the leading national position she had hitherto occupied,
and to relegate her to second if not lower rank in the national polity.
The decline of Winchester was, however, as yet still far distant, and
the immediate result of Norman rule was to bring Winchester into even
greater prominence than in the closing years of Saxon rule.
We have spoken of Winchester as the capital of Saxon England, and so it
had been, but not in the exclusive sense in which the word is employed
nowadays. In fact, in the modern sense, viz. that of a permanent seat
and headquarters of government, no capital existed then at all. The
details of government were far less complex, government as an art far
less specialized and far less an exact science, and its whole character
took on a far more personal and direct complexion than at present, so
that while Winchester and London might both correctly enough be termed
capitals in the sense that the permanent symbols of rule, the official
records, and so forth, were kept in them, it was in reality the king’s
headquarters, wherever he might happen to be, that formed the effective
capital. But though Winchester was being, and had been for many years
past, hard pressed by London, she still retained the Royal Treasury, and
the state records were still kept there, and she could therefore still
claim something more than a nominal pre-eminence, even though the growth
and commercial development of London were rapidly diminishing her
relative influence.
The position of London William had recognized by being crowned there,
before the ceremony had been carried out at Winchester or elsewhere; but
other circumstances--political motives, reasons of personal convenience,
and indeed of personal preference--drew him largely to Winchester.
Indeed, when in England he ‘wore his crown,’ _i.e._ held his ceremonial
court, three times a year--at London at Pentecost, at Gloucester at
Christmas, and at Easter, the leading festival of the year, at
Winchester.
And both policy and convenience were largely involved in William’s
action. Communication was slow and difficult, the country sparsely
habited, and government then, even more than nowadays, rested on
prestige--the appeal to imagination.
William had posed as the lawful heir to the Saxon throne; he appealed,
whenever he could advantageously do so, for sanction for his acts to the
laws of Cnut or Edward the Confessor, and he was far too prescient a
ruler to underestimate the effect produced on his Saxon subjects, by his
sitting on the throne of his predecessors and ruling his Saxon subjects
in their historic centre of rule, quite apart from the subtle appeal his
so doing made to his own personal vanity. Moreover, apart from all
personal considerations, the position of Winchester marked it out as a
natural capital--for England was after all but a part of his realm, and
the English Channel was the bridge between it and the Norman provinces,
with the estuaries of Southampton and of the Seine as the ends of the
bridge. Indeed, as long as the link with Normandy remained firm,
Winchester could hold its head up high. When Normandy fell away,
Winchester declined also.
But beyond these reasons of state, Winchester appealed personally to the
Conqueror’s passion for the chase. The great forests all round it--for
it was still but a clearing, as it were, in the great primeval
forest--afforded him facilities for hunting at his convenience, such as
few other spots could offer. Here then he erected a royal residence,
some scanty traces of which may still be seen; here, very shortly
after, the inevitable sign of Norman domination, a great, impregnable,
and awe-inspiring fortress was to be seen rapidly rising on the high
ground in the south-western angle of the city area, and here too--and,
we are glad to say, almost equally inevitably--Norman culture and Norman
devotion expended themselves in raising a stately and glorious temple
for the worship of God, worthy alike in the dignity of its conception,
the beauty of its execution, and the scale of grandeur on which it was
carried out. Added to, modified, reconstructed or transformed, as
various of its parts have subsequently been, it is in essential features
the Norman Cathedral, which is standing still, and which is the glory of
Southern England to-day.
Foremost among the questions of the time was that of ecclesiastical
policy. William proceeded with caution. The position of Stigand,
Archbishop of Canterbury, had long been canonically irregular, for he
held Winchester as well as Canterbury, and he was guilty of other
irregularities also, and so at first William assumed a non-committal
attitude towards him. He refused to permit him to officiate at his
coronation, but treated him with respect and courtesy, until a
convenient opportunity arose to depose him, when he had him brought to
trial and deprived. The remaining years of his life Stigand spent as a
kind of state prisoner in Winchester.
Many tales are told of his hoarded wealth and his penurious habits; a
part of it, a great crucifix of massive gold and silver, he bestowed
upon the Cathedral. He was buried within its walls, and a figure of him
has been of recent times placed in one of the niches on the great Altar
Screen.
Stigand’s deposition made room for two notable appointments. Lanfranc,
perhaps the keenest intellect of the day, certainly the foremost among
ecclesiastical statesmen, was made archbishop. William Walkelyn, a
relative, there is some reason to believe, of the Conqueror, became the
first Norman bishop of Winchester.
Walkelyn enjoyed a high reputation alike for learning and for personal
piety. The monkish author of the _Annales de Wintonia_ describes him as
a man “of perfect piety and sanctity of life, endowed with wondrous
sagacity and withal of such abstinence that he eschewed both meat and
fish and rarely tasted wine or mead, and then only with extreme
moderation.”
To such a man, imbued with the culture as well as the genius of Norman
civilization, the Saxon Cathedral of Æthelwold--albeit barely one
hundred years before it had seemed so sublime to the restricted and
untutored imagination of precentor Wulfstan--appeared meagre and quite
insufficient. He set to work to rebuild the Cathedral, and this fact
alone must serve to make his name ever memorable among the ’ makers of
Winchester.’
Walkelyn’s building far exceeded in proportions the Saxon one it
replaced. It is a moot point how far the sites of the two buildings were
identical, and a passage in the _Annales de Wintonia_ seems to show
they certainly were not entirely so, though in any case they could not
have differed much; but in historic continuity, in the dust of the early
kings it preserved, in the shrines of the saints which it displayed to
the devout, it was still the historic cathedral of the Saxon capital,
transformed and glorified indeed on a scale of noble vastness and
dignity hitherto unattempted in England.
Foremost among cathedral traditions is the story of the building of the
roof, recorded in the same _Annales de Wintonia_ to which reference has
been several times already made, and in them alone. Walkelyn had
strained his resources to the full, and still needed timber for the
roof. He applied accordingly to the Conqueror for a grant of timber, and
received permission to take from one of his woods--Hempage Wood, near
Avington, five miles from Winchester--as much timber as he could fell
and cart away within three days. “Make hay while the king smiles,” was
the bishop’s maxim. He collected a whole army of wood-cutters, carters,
teams of horses, and in three days removed every timber tree in the
wood, leaving one oak only, the so-called Gospel Oak under which
tradition reported Augustine to have preached. Unwarranted as the
tradition appears to have been, it served to protect the tree, which
still stands, though to all appearance dead, an interesting reminder of
Walkelyn and his cathedral. When William discovered what a sweep the
bishop had made of his “most delectable wood,” he was furious, and was
only with difficulty appeased. “Certainly as I was too liberal in my
grant, so you were too exacting in the advantage you took of it,” he
said, when at length he readmitted the bishop to his presence and his
favour.
The story acquires additional interest from the subsequent history of
these huge and venerable timbers. For some 800 years they have continued
to support the mighty roof, though quite recently some of them have had
to be replaced, owing to the destructiveness of a grub--the grub of the
_Sirex gigas_--which had in places eaten them through and through. A
portion of one of these beams with a specimen of the destructive _sirex_
can be seen in the city museum, and curios made of this so-called
‘cathedral oak’--though much of it by the way is chestnut--are being
sold now for the benefit of the Cathedral Preservation Fund: thus is
exemplified Earl Godwine’s remark, “Brother brings aid to brother.”
Two other items relative to Walkelyn are of interest. Curiously
enough--and it speaks eloquently for his detachment of mind and freedom
from professional narrowness--he wanted at first to revoke Æthelwold’s
policy and put back secular canons for monks. The monks were aghast,
and, more important still, Lanfranc was hostile, and accordingly after a
struggle the bishop gave way and abandoned the project. The other item
is the connection between Walkelyn and the great Fair of St. Giles, to
which reference has been already made. Walkelyn persuaded William’s son,
William Rufus, to grant him the right to a three days’
Fair, on the hill eastward of the city, and to apply the tolls so
obtained to the erection of the Cathedral. To the development and
further history of the Fair we shall return in a later chapter.
The residence or ‘Palace’ of the Conqueror stood in the very centre of
the city, near where the Butter Cross stands now, and abutting upon the
Newan Mynstre. Indeed, to obtain room for it the monks were despoiled of
part of their site. Interesting remains of it exist in the thick walls
and the cavernous cellars of the ancient houses which now occupy the
spot--the latter vividly suggestive of dungeons and of the Isaac of York
episode in Scott’s _Ivanhoe_. Close at hand were the Royal Treasury and
the Mint, and almost within hail were the quarters of the king’s
executioners, whom he kept always ready ‘laid on,’ as it were--a
gruesome reminder of the darker tones in which life in Norman times was
painted.
The rule of the Norman Conqueror was one which profoundly impressed the
imagination both of his contemporary subjects and of succeeding
generations. No historical events have been more picturesquely told or
more repeatedly dwelt upon than the stories of Curfew Bell, of Domesday
Book, of the Feudal System, and of the New Forest--all these centre in
some form or other either round Winchester or the immediate locality.
The history of William’s reign, as presented in our history books to
children at least, might indeed be almost entirely constructed out of
Winchester and its memorials. The curfew ordinance,
[Illustration: MARTYR WORTHY
One of the old-world villages, some few miles above Winchester, lying in
a reach of the river Itchen of unusual beauty and charm.]
the order to extinguish fires and put out lights--probably as much a
wise precaution to diminish risk of fire in crowded towns built mainly
of wood as directly political in purpose,--was first promulgated here.
Here first of all curfew was rung, as it has rung nightly ever since.
Formerly it rang from the little church of St. Peter in the Shambles,
behind Godbiete; now it rings from the old Guild Hall--the Hall, in
earlier days, of the Guild Merchant of Winchester.
Another event which affected the popular imagination even more
profoundly was the great survey of the kingdom, the results of which
were embodied in the Domesday Book, so called because, as Rudborne says,
“it spareth no one, just like the great Day of Doom.” The compilation of
it was regarded as a great act of oppression. “Inquisition was even made
as to how many animals sufficed for the tillage of one hide of land.” In
reality it was an act of statesmanlike administration, the object of
which was to collect accurate information for the purpose of assessing
‘geld,’ or dues for military service. Exact assessment for taxes is
evidently not a modern terror merely, nor is the modern income tax-payer
the only one who has objected to inquisitorial modes of assessment.
Winchester and London were omitted from Domesday Book altogether--an
omission which was repaired, as far as Winchester is concerned, in Henry
I.’s reign, when the Winchester Domesday Book, as it was called, was
compiled. Needless to say, Domesday Book was merely the popular name
for it; its real name was the _Rotulus Wintoniensis_, or Book of
Winchester, sometimes termed _Rotulus Regis_ or King’s Book. Domesday
Book was kept at Winchester, and a copy of it at Westminster. The
original is now in the Rolls Office.
It is certainly noteworthy that Winchester should have given birth to
the two most valuable records of national history which this country has
ever possessed, two records which no other nation can find any parallel
to, viz. the English Chronicle and the Domesday Book. The value of the
latter is that it gives us in absolutely unquestionable form the raw
material of history, unwarped by personal bias, uncoloured by tradition.
By means of it we can put to exact test many of the time-honoured
statements, accepted for generation after generation without question or
demur, and in that fierce crucible many and many a legendary tradition
treasured hitherto as current historical coin, has been melted down and
revealed as a spurious token merely. Such a one we probably have in the
story already related of Abbot Alwyn and the monks of Newan Mynstre; the
story of the afforestation of the New Forest is another. But the New
Forest, though local, is rather beyond our scope: the reader is referred
to the fuller volume on Hampshire for a discussion of this topic: and,
indeed, the story of Norman Winchester is full enough as it is--replete
with many a thrilling scene, many a notable historical figure. William
himself, strong, stern, far-seeing and determined, a leader among men,
towering head and shoulders above his contemporaries, capable of
cruelty, hard and grasping, indeed, as were all who strove to rule in
those stern days, but never small or moved by petty spite. “He nothing
common did or mean,” might almost be said of him. And side by side with
him, Lanfranc the Italian, smooth, supple, astute--like William, a
master mind, a great man, but with the greatness of the ecclesiastical
statesman rather than of the saint or even the scholar; and in sharp
contrast Walkelyn the Norman, the high-minded, the conscientious, the
ascetic--a scholar and a devotee rather than a statesman; and after
these a host of minor personalities, striking and interesting enough,
too, in their way. Foremost among these stands Waltheof, Earl of
Huntingdon, son of the great Siward, Earl of Northumbria. A picturesque
and pathetic figure he is, with certain virtues and high qualities all
unfitted for his time.
Poor Waltheof--like Saul of old, his outward man striking and tall and
goodly to look upon,--was the idol of William’s Saxon subjects. But the
fair exterior covered after all but a weak and irresolute soul, no match
for the master mind of William, who read him through and through as a
reader reads his book. Yet though in his weakness William despised him,
in his popularity William feared him, and when denounced by his
treacherous Norman wife for the merely colourable part he had played in
the Bridal of Norwich--
That bride-ale
That was many men’s bale--
William, deaf to all entreaty, kept him a close prisoner, and finally,
at the Pentecostal Gemôt held at Winchester, had sentence of death
pronounced upon him. Swiftly and secretly the order was carried out, and
on May 31, St. Petronilla’s day, at early dawn, while the men of
Winchester were in their beds, Waltheof was led out to execution on St.
Giles’s Hill. He came arrayed in full dress as an earl, wearing his
badges of rank, and on reaching the place of execution knelt down to
pray. He continued sometime in prayer while the executioner, fearing
interruption, grew restive and impatient. “Wait yet a little moment,”
pleaded the victim; “let me, at least, say the Lord’s Prayer for me and
for thee,” and the Earl’s voice was heard uttering the petitions one by
one, till at the words, “Lead us not into temptation,” the axe
descended. But, as the severed head fell from the body, the lips were
seen still to be moving, and the words, “But deliver us from evil,” were
distinctly heard. Such is the moving account we have of Waltheof’s
death. The last chapter of the story belongs rather to Crowland than to
Winchester. Buried in the first instance obscurely at Winchester, his
body was later on permitted to be reinterred at Crowland, and, on
raising it, the head was found to be miraculously reunited to the trunk,
a thin red line alone revealing the death he had died. Kingsley has told
it in masterly style in _Hereward the Wake_ and the episode of his false
wife Judith’s visit to her husband’s tomb forms a thrilling incident
most picturesquely told.
Of Hereward himself Winchester history is silent, but Kingsley, in
another striking passage, brings him too upon our local stage, when he
rides to Winchester to make submission to the king. With his companions
he rides along the Roman road which leads still from Silchester, till,
from the top of the downs, they catch sight of the city lying beneath
them.
Within the city rose the ancient Minster Church, built by
Ethelwold--ancient even then--where slept the ancient kings,
Kennulf, Egbert, and Ethelwulf, the Saxons; and by them the Danes,
Canute the Great and Hardicanute his son, and Norman Emma, his
wife, and Ethelred’s before him; and the great Earl Godwin, who
seemed to Hereward to have died not twenty but two hundred years
ago; and it may be an old Saxon hall upon the little isle, whither
Edgar had bidden bring the heads of all the wolves in Wessex, where
afterwards the bishops built Wolvesey Palace. But nearer to them,
on the downs which sloped up to the west, stood an uglier thing,
which they saw with curses deep and loud--the keep of the new
Norman castle by the west gate.
We will not stop to discuss this striking passage; and though Hereward
be but a figure imported into our local history, the castle which he saw
was, both then and for many years to come, the most noticeable and
striking feature in Winchester, as also the leading outward symbol of
the Norman presence and power. For centuries it was to hold its place
supreme, to see one sovereign after other add and re-add to its palace,
to stand siege and battery, to be the residence of kings and queens, to
witness the birth of more than one heir to the throne, to gather within
its walls councils and parliaments. For 600 years it was to endure till
Cromwell laid siege to it, and then razed it to the ground, all save the
great Hall, built in Plantagenet days, by Henry III. which still remains
glorious in its associations as in the beauty of its proportions. Yes,
Hereward and his companions might utter curses loud and deep, for the
rebirth of the nation, which the Norman period heralded, was not
accomplished without much labour and travail, both of body and of
spirit; but could he have looked forward, as we can look back, upon all
that Norman rule has been the stepping-stone to, both in Winchester and
elsewhere, he would have found, like the unwilling prophet of old, a
blessing on his lips and not a curse, and we too shall be ready to offer
up our Te Deum in a spirit of thankfulness, earnest and sincere, though
the appropriate accompaniment to it be rather a subdued strain, and in a
minor key, than an unbroken outburst of triumphal joy.
CHAPTER XI
LATER NORMAN DAYS
They shot him dead on the Nine-stone Brig
Beside the Headless Cross,
And they left him lying in his blood
Upon the moor and moss.
BARTHRAM’S _Dirge_.
When William the Conqueror died, the link with Normandy was temporarily
severed, and during the reign of Rufus of evil memory Winchester
declined in political importance; nor, apart from one or two episodes,
are the Winchester memories of the reign of a striking character. It
witnessed, indeed, the practical completion of Walkelyn’s life-work--the
great cathedral--as well as the institution of St. Giles’s Fair, as
already mentioned, but these belong in essence, though not in time,
rather to the epoch of the Conqueror than to that of his violent-minded
successor.
Most characteristic of all events of the reign was the long-drawn-out
struggle between Rufus and Archbishop Anselm--“the fierce young bull and
the old sheep,” as Anselm himself had in dismal prognostication dubbed
them. On Lanfranc’s death in 1089 William kept the see vacant for
several years, as was his practice in matters of church preferment, in
the meantime shamelessly appropriating the temporalities of the see; and
when as a result of a dangerous illness he at last agreed to appoint a
successor, it was only with extreme reluctance and forebodings of ill
that Anselm was at last prevailed on to accept the king’s nomination.
Anselm’s fears were fully justified, and a state of hopeless strife soon
existed between the two. To all Anselm’s demands, particularly his
demand to go to Rome for investiture, the king returned an inflexible
refusal, until a crisis was reached at a great council held in
Winchester, memorable as the last personal meeting between the king and
the archbishop. Every form of pressure was brought to bear on Anselm; he
refused, as a matter of conscience, to give way, and finally announced
his intention of going to Rome without the king’s sanction, as he could
not go with it.
The king raged and stormed in vain, till Anselm, as he turned to leave
the royal presence, begged permission to give him his blessing. “I
refuse not thy blessing,” said the king, somewhat subdued; he inclined
his head, and Anselm signed the sign of the cross over him. They never
met again.
The last scene of all in the reign is, however, Winchester’s most
dramatic, as well as tragic, recollection. On the afternoon of Lammas
Day (August 1), 1100, news came to Winchester that the Red King, who had
been hunting that day in the New Forest, had
[Illustration: WATERSPLASH AT ITCHEN STOKE
Perhaps the prettiest reach of the river Itchen--and that is saying a
good deal--lying between Itchen Stoke and Ovington. The road between
them crosses the main stream in a delightful ‘watersplash.’]
there met a violent death. Prince Henry, his younger brother, with his
followers had spurred into the city bringing the tidings, had seized the
Royal Treasure, and had summoned the Witan to pronounce him king.
Meanwhile the Red King’s body, alone and untended, lay weltering in
blood on the spot where he had fallen, till a charcoal-burner, Purkess
by name, travelling along had found it and placed it in his cart, that
the poor remains might at least have decent sepulture in the cathedral
of the diocese. As the news spread in the city an eager throng gathered
and watched the road to await the sorry funeral cortège, as it made its
mournful way, probably along the road from Compton through the south
gate, and so into the old monastery. The interment took place the very
next day, right under the tower--“on the Thursday he was slain, and on
the morning after buried”; and when a few years later the Norman tower
fell upon the tomb, men said it was the Red King’s crimes and not
structural weakness that had occasioned the fall. His bones were
transferred later on to one of the mortuary chests on the side screens
of the choir, but popular tradition still points to a tomb beneath the
tower as the tomb where he was originally buried, and speaks of it as
Rufus’s Tomb.
And now, with Henry on the throne, Winchester resumed its former
political importance. Henry reunited the Norman provinces to England,
and the old activity of intercourse across the seas was resumed. But
more than that, Henry identified himself with the city more closely
than any king has ever done before or since. His romantic marriage with
the Saxon princess Eadgyth, of Romsey Abbey, grand-daughter of Edmund
Ironside, made him popular, and after his marriage he and his queen--the
good queen Molde the people called her--made Winchester Castle their
residence, and here their son William, the ill-fated hero of the _White
Ship_ tragedy, was born.
With its old political position restored, and the king reigning and
residing here in person, Winchester rose to the zenith of its importance
in Norman days.
A number of events of interest are identified with this reign. First and
foremost, the birth of Hyde Abbey. Newan Mynstre, the pious offspring of
Alfred and Edward the Elder, had since the translation of Swithun’s
bones, during Æthelwold’s régime, steadily declined in importance, and
its activity had been much hampered. The proximity to the older and more
extensive foundation, which eclipsed and overshadowed it in importance,
was one cause; another was the cramped nature of the site upon which the
New Minster had been erected.
Always small and confined, so close were their respective churches that
chanting in one disturbed the devotions in the other. The erection of
William the Conqueror’s palace had made matters still worse, and the
monks had had to forego a portion of their already over-congested area.
Under these circumstances William Giffard, who had succeeded Walkelyn as
Bishop of Winchester, obtained from Henry permission to move the
monastery to the village of Hyde in the northern suburbs of the city,
and here near Danemark Mead, where Guy of Warwick was said to have
vanquished Colbrand the Dane, the new structure was commenced. The
immediate result was highly satisfactory.
The monks of St. Swithun’s, who also had suffered from the over-close
proximity and congestion, as well as from the rivalry of its over-close
neighbour, heartily co-operated and granted the site for the new abbey.
Old rivalries were allayed, and for a time a spirit of cordiality
prevailed, while as a means of raising funds to assist both houses the
king’s grant of a three days’ fair was added to, and an extension given
for five additional days, making eight altogether.
In 1110 all was ready, and the monks of Newan Mynstre proceeded in
solemn procession to take possession of their new home, bearing with
them their sacred relics--the great cross of gold given by Cnut and
Emma, and the remains of their illustrious dead, Alfred and Alswitha and
their son Edward, for reinterment in the glorious new Abbey Church.
Newan Mynstre had so far lasted for some 200 years; now it entered on a
new and amplified existence--an existence destined to endure for over
400 years, during which, as Hyde Abbey, it was to maintain a proud and
exalted position among the monasteries of the land, till Henry VIII.’s
commissioners dissolved and swept it away, leaving what is now a scanty
ruin merely--a gateway and little else--to speak of the former glories
of the once famous foundation of Alfred the Great.
Of interest and importance only second to that of the erection of Hyde
Abbey was the appointment of the bishop, Henry of Blois, who succeeded
to the see on the death of William Giffard in 1129--a man of high birth
and extreme eminence, who was to play a leading part both in the
national fortunes and in the fortunes of the city for over forty years.
His career we shall deal with more fully in the next chapter.
As to the condition of Winchester in Henry’s reign we have fortunately
sources of exact and unusually ample information. From the Domesday
Survey of William the Conqueror, Winchester and London had been entirely
omitted. Henry gave orders for a Winchester Domesday, as it is sometimes
termed, to be compiled--a survey limited, it is true, to the king’s
lands, that is, the lands in Winchester paying land-tax and brug-tax
(the latter a tax of uncertain nature, perhaps dues on brewing). This
was supplemented by a second survey made some years after by order of
Bishop Henry of Blois; and the results of the two surveys are of
peculiar importance and interest, for though the church properties are
left entirely unnoticed, we glean from it knowledge, not only of the
streets and properties, but also of the occupations and handicrafts, _et
hoc genus omne_, of Norman Winchester.
The mode of taking the census was peculiar. Eighty-six of the leading
burghers were empanelled and sworn to hold a grand inquest, and to
return a faithful verdict. From their labours we gather not only that
the Norman city, in its general ground plan, its walls, gates, and the
dispositions of its streets, reproduced very closely many of the
features of the original city erected by the Romans, but that that
general character has remained practically undisturbed to the present
day. The main artery and commercial thoroughfare was then, as now, the
High Street, referred to only indirectly in the census as _Vicus
Magnus_. Nearly all the other streets crossed it at right angles and
were named after the different trades followed in them; and we gather
that in Winchester, as in all other mediaeval towns, each trade had its
own special street or quarter, and their general disposition was
somewhat according to the scheme annexed.
Some few of these names linger still, though practically all the special
industries have long since disappeared. Minster Street has survived and
for obvious reasons, Sildwortenestret and Bucchestrete have survived to
modern times in Silver Hill and Busket Lane respectively, while Gere
Street or Gar Street, curiously enough, survives, though all but
unrecognisably, in Trafalgar Street. The list of the trades alone is
lengthy and varied, and in itself a telling testimony to the prosperity
of the city at the time. The occupations of cloth-weaving,
tailoring, tanning, remind us of the great industry of the
district--sheep-rearing--the wool and other products of which formed the
staple attraction for continental merchants to throng to the city
[Illustration:
Westgate.
The Castle. --||-- Snidelingestret (_or Tailors’
|| Street_), _now Westgate Lane_.
||
Gerestret (_or Gar Street, --||-- Bredenestret (_now Staple Gardens_).
now Trafalgar Street_). || _Here later on the
|| Wool Staple was placed._
||
Goldestret (_or Gold Street, --||-- Scowertenestret (_Shoe-waremen’s
now Southgate Street_). || Street or Cobblers’
|| Street_), _now Jewry Street.
|| The Jewish Ghetto was here--hence
|| its present name._
||
Calpestret (_or St. Thomas’s --||-- Alwarenestret (_All-wares-men’s
Street_). || Street or Drapers’ Street_),
|| (_now disappeared_).
||
Menstrestret (_now Little --||-- Flesmangerestret (_Flesh-mongers’
Minster Street_). || Street or Butchers’
|| Shambles_), _now St. Peter’s
|| Street_.
||
The Monastic Quarter. --||-- Sildwortenestret (_or Shieldware-men’s
|| Street_), _now Upper
|| Brook Street. The name survives
|| in Silver Hill._
||
||-- Wenegerestret (_or Wongar
|| Street_), _now Middle Brooks_.
||
||-- Tannerestrete (_or Tanners’
_On this side also was_ || Street_), _now Lower Brook
Colobrochestret (_or Colebrook || Street_.
Street_). _Close by was the ||
[1]Hantachenesle, the quarters ||-- Bucchestrete (_near Eastgate_).
of one of the ‘Gilds.’_ ||
Eastgate.
]
during the fairs of St. Giles. The shieldmakers reflect its military
importance, and the goldsmiths the rank and material wealth of those for
whom it catered.
Naturally enough, many other interesting details are to be gathered
incidentally, _e.g._ the names of the inhabitants, among which many
names still familiar as distinctively Winchester names are to be found,
and their various ranks and occupations. We read, for instance, of a
market near the three minsters, of which the present Market Street is a
survival; of ‘estals,’ or stalls, in the High Street, a reference with a
curious modern echo, inasmuch as the stalls in the High Street and
Broadway have been quite recently the source of much local heart-burning
and contention; of ‘escheopes,’ or shops, which had belonged to the
Confessor’s queen, Edith; of reeves (_prepositi_), and of a ‘stret
bidel’ (or _street beadle_). One curious entry relative to Eastgate
speaks of certain steps which gave access to the church above the gate
(_qdā gradˢ ad ascendendā ad ecclam sup portā_), showing that King’s
Gate was not alone among the city gates in having a little church above
it.
Another important feature we gain information on is the position of the
Gilds. These trade organisations had now become important and fully
organised; they served for the protection of their members, they made
regulations for the conduct of the several trades, and their
headquarters were used as clubs or places for general meeting and
discussion--the latter including almost as a _sine qua non_
ale-drinking, and that not always in moderation. The Survey contains
references to three halls or ‘gild’ headquarters--_Lachenictahalla_ (or
_chenictes’ hall_) near Westgate, the _Chenichetehalla_ near Eastgate
(on the site of the present St. John’s Rooms), and the _Hantachenesle in
Colebrook Street_. What the very obscure term _Hantachenesle_, applied
to the last named, means is a problem on which so far no satisfactory
light has been thrown. Nor is it clear who the ‘cnechts’ or ‘chenictes’
were--whether, as is generally assumed, they were ‘knights,’ _i.e._
young men of rank, or ‘cnechts,’ _i.e._ sons of burghers not yet
admitted to the ‘Freedom.’ We read that at the Chenichetehalla, the
‘chenictes’ drank their gild (_chenictehalla ubi chenictes potabant
Gildam suam_), and at the Hantachenesle the ‘approved’ or freemen drank
theirs (_Hantachenesle ... ubi pbi homiēs Went potabant Gildā suā_).
That this beer-drinking was often inordinate we gather from various
contemporary references, such as Anselm’s rebuke of a certain monk who
was given to frequenting the gilds and drinking deeply: _in multis
inordinate se agit et maxime in bibendo ut in gildis cum ebriosis
bibat_. There is also a reference to a ‘_Gihald_’ or
‘_Gihalla_’--possibly a ‘Gild’ Hall,--and the Pipe Rolls of this reign
mention a Tailors’ Gild, and a _Chepemanesela_, or _Chapman’s Hall_. The
whole subject of these gilds, as well as of their halls, is one of great
obscurity, and the references in the Winton Surveys, full of interest as
they are, serve rather to whet our curiosity than to actually solve any
problems they suggest.
[Illustration: EASTON
A typical Itchen valley village, one of the most picturesque in the
county, with an old Norman church, quaint thatched cottages, and clipped
yews.]
But whatever their exact function and organisation at the time, from
them the important Merchant Gild grew, and its hall in High Street (on
the site occupied now by the old Guildhall) was the centre for many
years of corporate and civic rule, till the erection some forty years
ago of the present and more pretentious Guildhall in the Broadway.
The whole circumstances of this so-called Winton Domesday are of unusual
interest. The original MSS. exist, bound in an ancient leather binding,
considered to be the work of contemporary Winchester craftsmen. These
are now the property of the Society of Antiquaries.
Significant among other features of the mediaeval city was the Jewish
quarter, or Ghetto, a survival of which we have in the present Jewry
Street, at that time Scowertene Street. Abutting on this, in the rear of
what are now the extensive premises of the George Hotel, dwelt the
Jewish community, with a synagogue of its own, for the Jews were not
merely tolerated here, but actually welcomed. The extensive commercial
relations now rapidly developing between Winchester and the Continent
were doubtless responsible for this, and the Jew in his ancient
prescriptive capacity of banker was found to be an effective ally in
building up the commercial importance of the rapidly developing city.
References to the Jews at Winchester are fairly frequent all through the
next two centuries, the period of Winchester’s commercial prosperity. In
Richard I.’s reign Richard of Devizes tells us of a Lombard Jew lending
money to the Priory of St. Swithun, and lamenting the leniency shown to
them by Winchester; while later on in the thirteenth century we read of
a Jew--“Benedict, a son of Abraham”--being actually granted the full
freedom of the city. These facts reveal to us the scope and the
importance held by the Winchester of mediaeval times as an emporium and
centre of commerce of more than local repute. But we are anticipating,
and we must now return.
The remaining distinctive feature of the city to be noted was the
monastic quarter, which occupied practically the whole area between High
Street, Calpe Street, and the outer city wall. Foremost in importance
was the great Convent of St. Swithun’s--its great cathedral church
forming its effective boundary to the north, its great gate opening into
Swithun Street close to the little postern gate or King’s Gate, and with
the south-eastern edge of the city wall as its southern limit. Behind
it, eastward, was the bishop’s residence--Wolvesey, the ancient court of
the Saxon kings--and flanking High Street at the eastern end was Nunna
Mynstre, or St. Mary’s Abbey, part of the revenues of which were derived
from the tolls or octroi duties levied on commodities entering the East
Gate.
Such then, in bare outline, was the Winchester of Henry’s reign--not
without its miseries, its injustices, it is true, but, as the times
went, busy, prosperous, and developing. But this state of things was not
to endure for long. Henry’s heir, William, had perished in the _White
Ship_; and though he had done all he could to avert it, the land was to
be shortly handed over to a disputed succession and the horrors of civil
war when he died. Winchester has good reason to cherish the memory of
Henry I. and to recall his reign with satisfaction. He died in 1135, and
was buried in Reading Abbey, which he had himself founded.
CHAPTER XII
A GREAT BISHOP, HENRY OF BLOIS
Let us now praise famous men....
It was he that took thought for his people that they should not fall
And fortified the city against besieging.
_Ecclesiasticus._
Great as has been the part played by kings in the history of our city,
that played by bishops has been even greater still, and few among the
makers of Winchester hold a more prominent or more honourable place than
the great bishop who had succeeded to the see a few years before Henry
I.’s death, Henry of Blois, brother of Stephen of Blois, now king of
England, whose fortunes were to be closely linked during the two
following reigns with those of our city.
A scheming statesman and an ardent churchman, he was to play a leading
part in national affairs in the troublous times that were to follow--to
direct his see for over forty years, and to leave indelible marks of his
occupancy in the see and the city alike, of which St. Cross Hospital,
Wolvesey ruins, the Cathedral font and portions of its fabric are but
some of the most notable and most enduring.
And the times were troublous indeed. The _White Ship_ tragedy had bereft
not only the king of his heir, but the nation of a male claimant to the
throne in the direct line, and all Henry’s influence was insufficient to
secure the crown for his daughter Matilda, the widowed Empress of
Germany. The feeling of the time was adverse to having a female as
sovereign; and Stephen of Blois, Henry’s nephew, actively championed by
Bishop Henry, and strongly supported by the barons, bore down all active
opposition.
But king though he was, Stephen’s personal position was very different
from that of his Norman predecessors. Brave and frank, but personally
easy-going, dependent, moreover, on the goodwill of the powerful
interests which had placed him on the throne, his authority was weak and
his hold on his subjects ineffective. Barons and bishops strengthened
themselves against him, and an era of castle-building commenced, which
was to usher in a period of more terrible oppression than the country
has ever witnessed before or since, for, secure in their strongholds,
the Norman barons fastened themselves on the defenceless countryfolk
like vultures on their prey, and there was none to make them relax their
hold. As the _Chronicle_ says:
They filled the land with castles and they cruelly oppressed the
wretched folk with castle works. When the castles were made they
filled them with devils and evil men. When took they the men who
they thought any goods to have both by night and by day, churls and
women, they cast them in prison for their gold and silver, and they
tortured them with pains untellable--for never were any martyrs so
tortured as they were. They hanged them up by the feet and smoked
them with foul smoke--they hanged them by the thumbs or by the head
and hanged fires upon their feet.... Many thousands they killed
with hunger.... Then was corn dear and flesh, cheese and butter,
for none there was in the land.... And they said openly that Christ
slept and his saints.
Such was the anarchy, such the ruin, which weak rule had brought upon
the realm.
Prominent among the castle-builders--though not among the
oppressors--were certain of the bishops, and none more so than Bishop
Henry. The bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, the ancient seat of Alfred
and the Saxon kings, he converted into a strong Norman fortress, the
ruins of which still stand, while at Merdon (near Hursley, some five
miles from the city), at Bishop’s Waltham, and at Farnham, he reared
fortresses also. Thus Winchester became remarkable in one respect--it
had two fortress castles instead of one, a privilege it was later on to
pay dearly for.
But Bishop Henry had other schemes too. Of royal birth, reared in the
atmosphere of church ascendancy in the great and ambitious house of
Cluny, and naturally masterful in temperament, he was aiming at higher
rank and wider influence. Bishop of Winchester though he was, and Abbot
of Glastonbury--for by special papal sanction he had been allowed to
hold this valuable and influential office alike with his
bishopric--there was still the archbishopric before him, and when in
1136 this fell vacant he seemed by every natural claim to be marked out
for it; but Stephen had begun to feel his brother’s yoke growing heavy
on him, and after some long delay Bishop Henry was passed by and
Theobald, Abbot of Bec, appointed. Henry was deeply mortified; and
though the Pope soon after appointed him as Papal Legate over Archbishop
Theobald’s head, his wounded pride never forgot the affront it had
received.
Disappointed of his hopes of Canterbury he worked hard to persuade the
Pope to divide England into three provinces instead of two, with
Winchester diocese as the third archbishopric; and though not actually
successful in this, the Pope is said to have encouraged him in his
project.
While matters were thus strained between the bishop and the king,
Stephen, who had witnessed with alarm the growth of the castle-building
and the power of the barons, determined to enforce his authority upon
them. He called on several of the bishops to surrender their castles,
and, being met by refusal, treated the Bishops of Lincoln and Salisbury
with such cruelty and personal indignity that the latter died from the
hardships inflicted on him. This act of unparalleled folly--for the
person of a bishop was regarded as sacred--not only estranged public
sympathy, but fanned to active flame the smouldering resentment of
Bishop Henry. As Papal Legate he summoned Stephen to answer for his
conduct before him at a council held at Winchester, and here the king
was not only condemned, but even obliged to do penance. Stephen’s
position was gravely compromised, and Matilda’s supporters, who had
long bided their time, broke into active opposition. Robert, Earl of
Gloucester, her half-brother, took up arms in her behalf; Matilda landed
at Arundel; and Stephen in fighting at Lincoln was taken prisoner.
Such an event seemed a token from heaven. Bishop Henry openly espoused
Matilda’s cause; he proclaimed her at Winchester as “Lady of the
English.” The city opened its gates to her, and she marched in in
triumphal procession with all her forces and took possession of the
Castle, while the occasion was celebrated by a solemn service of
rejoicing in the Cathedral.
But this state of things was not to last. Arrogant and impracticable,
she quickly alienated her own supporters, and finding the bishop by no
means subservient, as she had expected, she summoned him to yield up his
Castle of Wolvesey to her, to which summons he is said to have
enigmatically replied, “I will prepare myself,” and this he did. He
repaired and strengthened his Castle and threw his influence again into
the scale of Stephen. Thus civil war broke out once more, and for six
years the country was torn again by every kind of evil and oppression.
In these troubles Winchester, placed, as it were, between anvil and
hammer, with the empress-queen in the Castle and the bishop at Wolvesey,
suffered terribly. Raid and counter-raid, siege and counter-siege
succeeded one another, till almost the whole city--houses, churches,
monasteries alike--were consumed in the flames. Alswitha’s foundation,
Nunna Mynstre, or St. Mary’s Abbey, parish
[Illustration: THE DEANERY, WINCHESTER
One of the few remaining links with the conventual buildings of St.
Swithun’s Priory, which among the Benedictines were always placed on the
south side of the minster. Formerly it was the quarters of the Prior of
St. Swithun’s. Philip of Spain was lodged here when he came to
Winchester to marry Queen Mary of England.]
churches, domestic buildings, all alike perished. Far and wide the
flames spread--even the new building of Hyde Abbey, only erected some
thirty-one years, was involved in the general conflagration. The
Cathedral and St. Swithun’s Priory alone escaped, and that, it is said,
because Robert of Gloucester generously forbore reprisals.
But the empress’s cause was a declining one, and though David, king of
Scotland, and Robert of Gloucester stoutly attacked Wolvesey, it held
out till relieved by Queen Matilda in person, and it was now the
empress’s turn to suffer siege in the Castle. Various accounts are given
of what occurred; in one it is stated[2] that, being straitened for
provisions, she escaped by feigning herself dead, and was carried out in
a coffin. Be this as it may, her forces were routed--she fled, and both
Robert of Gloucester and King David were taken prisoners. Finally, the
war exhausted itself. The land was ruined, impoverished--nothing seemed
left to strive for. Peace was made on terms of compromise, and King
Stephen, restored to the throne, entered Winchester with the empress’s
son, Prince Henry, who was acknowledged as his heir. Stephen died soon
after, and Henry II. became king.
And now matters went badly for Bishop Henry. Henry the king was
determined to bring the castle-builders to book, and Henry the bishop
was a foremost offender, and in addition he had to defend himself from
charges brought against him by the monks of Hyde.
In marked contrast with his behaviour elsewhere, Bishop Henry had acted
oppressively against them, and when their abbey was destroyed he had
even forced from them the ashes to which it had been reduced. No slight
treasure the latter, for did they not contain the molten remains of
cross and shrine and chalice, the cross of Cnut and Emma, their great
prize and possession, and many another treasure, which though now but
molten metal, still reckoned a value in thousands of pounds? Fortune was
against the bishop, and he found it convenient to retire abroad, to
Cluny and elsewhere, for a time, while the new king established his
authority, made order in the distracted kingdom, and razed the offending
fortresses to the ground. Thus while the bishop’s palace at Wolvesey
still remained, the Norman keep was dismantled and rendered harmless,
and some of these ruins we can see there to-day.
The succeeding years were to present Bishop Henry in a less ambitious
and altogether more attractive light. He had played for his great
stake--played and lost: his legatine commission had expired, his
archiepiscopal dream had rudely disappeared. His political power
shattered, and his personal influence largely compromised, he was glad
to make peace with the king and full restitution to the monks of Hyde,
and he returned to his see to spend the last portion of his life--some
fifteen or sixteen years--in acts of quiet episcopal rule and active
beneficence. During his stay on the Continent he had amassed many
treasures of art, and these he brought back with him--very probably the
wonderful and curious black stone font, one of a rare series of seven
English fonts, four of which are in our own county and diocese, was
placed by him in the Cathedral at this time. But a far nobler and more
noticeable monument he was already rearing for himself in the outskirts
of the city. Some mile down the valley, in the little village then known
as Sperkforde, he had, in the early days of Stephen’s reign, commenced
to build a hospital or almshouse--the Hospital of St. Cross--and to this
he now devoted himself.
Filled as the land then was with misery and ruin, relief of the hungry
and distressed was a peculiarly pressing need, and the bishop’s aim was
to relieve distress. Following the hospitable example of the great
Clugniac house in which he had been reared, the gates of St. Cross were
to be ever open, ready to give kindly welcome to all who should enter
there in want. Thirteen aged brethren were to be maintained in ease and
comfort. One hundred of the poor of Winchester were to be regularly fed
there in the “Hundred Mennes Hall,” and seven poor Grammar School boys
of Winchester--for Winchester had its Grammar School then, earlier even
than the College of Wykeham--were likewise to be fed and provided for
daily. In 1157 Bishop Henry committed the guardianship of his hospital
to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitallers as
they were called, whose special care was to aid wandering men,
particularly the poor pilgrims visiting the Holy Sepulchre. And so the
brethren of St. Cross wear the black gown and the eight-pointed silver
cross of the Knights of St. John to this day.
St. Cross is Bishop Henry’s great memorial. He lived to see it firmly
established, but otherwise in his later years he took but little part in
public affairs. One of his last acts was to receive his cousin, the
repentant King Henry, after the murder of à Becket, when he bade him
welcome him with affectionate admonition and gave him his blessing. He
died in 1171 and was buried in the Cathedral; the tomb popularly
designated William Rufus’s Tomb has been thought to be his. Great and
high-minded as a churchman, he had lived through the period of personal
striving--“the fever, and the watching, and the pain” of
self-advancement and of worldly ambition. His selfish schemes had died
and nobler ones had succeeded, which revealed the man at his greatest
and his best. Truly it might be said of him--
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
And St. Cross, at whose gates the needy wayfarer still receives
hospitable welcome as he did in Bishop Henry’s day, flourishes still,
exercising a far wider measure of beneficence and power for good than
its founder, in all probability, anticipated or even dreamed.
CHAPTER XIII
ANGEVIN AND PLANTAGENET
Ay, that approves thee, tyrant, what thou art,
No father, king, or shepherd of thy realm;
But one that tears her entrails with thy hands,
And like a thirsty tiger suck’st her blood.
_Edward III._
We need not stay to discuss in much detail the course of events during
the reigns which followed. It was but a blackened and ruined Winchester
which emerged from the disasters of the civil war. With two monasteries,
some twenty churches, and most of the domestic dwellings consumed, it
took her all her energies to reconstruct the desolate fabric; nor did
she ever completely recover the blow. Hyde Abbey was at once
recommenced, and gradually, but only very gradually, resumed its former
importance. St. Mary’s Abbey, too, was rebuilt, and Winchester, as the
natural centre of the wool trade, was able steadily to recover her
commercial activity, and managed to retain her importance as a centre of
traffic and intercourse some two hundred years or more longer, but
politically her supremacy had departed for ever, and London henceforth
was more and more to hold unchallenged sway.
Henry II.’s visits in Winchester were not frequent, and in addition were
but casual. It was here, while recovering from illness, that he matured
his great scheme for the administration of justice, the division of the
country into circuits with itinerating judges of assize, to hold assizes
or sittings for the due dispensation of the king’s justice, from which
circumstance Hampshire has always occupied a foremost position in the
assize list, but Winchester was in no sense his capital.
Richard I. paid the city the compliment of coming here after his release
from captivity to be crowned in the Cathedral, and though at the royal
banquet following thereon the citizens of Winchester strove with those
of London for the honour of serving the king with wine--a privilege
involving the reversion of the golden goblet in which the wine was to be
served--their claims were overruled and London bore off the prize.
More important were the building projects of the Bishop of Winchester,
Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, who had succeeded to the see the year before
Richard came to the throne. The pilgrim stream which flowed through
Winchester had swollen to such proportions as to embarrass the monks of
St. Swithun’s. Bishop Godfrey formed a confraternity to raise funds and
carry out an extension eastward of the fabric, to make it possible for
the pilgrims to visit the shrine of the saint without invading the body
of the church, an extension which, owing to the limited area of firm
ground on which the Cathedral stood, had to be made on an artificial
foundation, in peaty and waterlogged soil, and to this fact must be in
part attributed the insecurity of the fabric, which has necessitated the
enormous and heroic labour of repair now actively in progress. Of this,
however, more anon.
But Bishop Godfrey de Lucy had wider aims also. As bishop and receiver
of the dues from St. Giles’s Fair, the commercial prosperity of the city
was of great moment to him, and he improved and developed the Itchen
navigation by means of a canal--or “barge river,” as it is termed--and
constructed a huge reservoir at Alresford, much of which remains still
as Alresford Pond, to retain the water necessary to keep the channel
full. The trade of Winchester was evidently still a highly valuable
asset.
Of King John’s reign we have memories in keeping with the general course
of his doings. He was frequently here, hunting regularly in the forests
all round the city, and here his son and successor, Henry of Winchester,
afterwards Henry III., was born. It was at Winchester that John received
Simon Langton and the other bishops exiled during the interdict, and in
the chapter-house of the Cathedral that he received the papal absolution
for his offences against Holy Church. But the peace thus dishonourably
ushered in was of short duration, and a year or so later Winchester was
in foreign hands, being held by Louis, Dauphin of France, whom the
barons had invited over to expel John from the throne.
But when John died, as he did shortly afterwards, the barons withdrew
their support from the Dauphin, and John’s son Henry, then a lad of nine
years old only, ascended the throne--Henry III., Henry of Winchester.
We cannot give in full the story of Henry, interesting and important as
it is, and intimately associated as much of it was with our city; for
Henry was here continually, he made it his chief residence, and in the
years that followed Winchester had often reason to pay dear for his
attachment to his parent city. Wild disorder, riot and revel, profuse
expenditure and pinch of consequent poverty, anarchy and siege and civil
warfare in her streets, all followed in turn, till order was at last
evolved, and dignified and noble parliaments assembled in her Castle
Hall, the symbol of the reign of law that was to follow, and the earnest
of that rule by representative assembly which has made our nation--and
almost Winchester herself--the mother of parliaments, honoured through
the length and breadth of the world.
Chequered as the reign was to be, the early years were quiet and
prosperous, till Henry’s evil genius, Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of
Winchester, gained ascendancy over the king. The king’s marriage to a
French princess, Eleanor of Provence, followed, and the king, under the
influence of a foreign wife, and a prelate and justiciar of alien
sympathies, entered on a
[Illustration: CHEYNEY COURT AND CLOSE GATE, WINCHESTER
The outermost ‘court,’ if such a term may be used, of the Cathedral
Close, from which the great Close Gate gives access to Swithun’s
Street and King’s Gate. The Close Gate is guarded by a porter, as
in mediaeval days, who locks and unlocks it regularly by night and
day. Near Cheyney Court stands part of the old ‘Guesten Hall,’
where poor pilgrims to the Shrine of St. Swithun used to be lodged.
Weird tales of ghostly visitors haunting the Close are told by
persons still living. The name Cheyney appears to be derived from
the French _chêne_, an oak.
]
reckless course of extravagance and anti-national policy which estranged
all his subjects’ sympathies. To all posts of honour and preferment,
whether civil or ecclesiastical, foreign claimants were preferred, and
the land groaned under the tyranny of alien domination, while its
resources were being drained away from it to provide revenues for
foreign beneficiaries abroad. Protest after protest, discontent, active
opposition, ridicule, and remonstrance were all in vain. The king was
once significantly asked by the witty Roger Bacon what dangers by sea a
skilful pilot would most avoid, and on evading the question was told
‘Petrae et rupes’ (_stones and rocks_), a faintly-veiled allusion to the
chief influence for evil in the state. But all was in vain, and at last
armed opposition could no longer be prevented, and the barons under
Simon de Montfort broke out into open revolt.
In the Barons’ War which followed, Hampshire and Winchester were
intimately involved. It has been the fate of Winchester, almost from
early Saxon days, to have within more than one rallying point for
popular sympathy, and so to suffer peculiarly at all crises of national
division; and so it was now.
Few in the land had suffered more acutely from the king’s policy of
preferring aliens than the monks of St. Swithun, and when the Barons’
War broke out the monks of the convent sided strongly with De Montfort.
The citizens, however, held loyally to the king, and thus it came about
that when in May 1264, a few days before the battle of Lewes, De
Montfort marched against the city, the citizens rose against the
convent, fearing lest the monks, who controlled part of the walls and
the King’s Gate, should welcome the invaders and admit them to the city.
A violent attack was made on them, the Close Gate was burnt down, and
the invading citizens burst their way in and slew several of the monks.
The fire spread to the King’s Gate and burnt it down; and when later on
the gate was rebuilt, the monks of St. Swithun built above it a little
church for the use of the lay servitors of the convent, and so the
little church--now the parish church of St. Swithun’s, Winchester--came
into existence, perched in mid air above the little postern gate. Nor
was this all, for the year after, when Simon de Montfort the younger
appeared again in arms before the city walls, the monks actually
admitted him, and a wild night followed in Winchester; his troops
revenged themselves on the defenceless citizens for their opposition by
burning and plundering a portion of the city, and putting many of them
to the sword. But the ascendancy of the barons was but brief, for in the
same year, 1265, Prince Edward defeated and slew De Montfort at the
battle of Evesham, rescued his father, and restored him to the throne.
A memorable year was this both for England and for Winchester, for Henry
summoned to Winchester his first representative Parliament, notable
because for the first time representatives of the cities and boroughs
appeared there with knights of the shires, along with the barons and
prelates, and the abbots and priors of the leading monasteries. The
Prior of St. Swithun’s and the Abbot of Hyde were both present at that
remarkable assembly. In 1268 a second Parliament assembled at
Winchester, and four years later the king died, and Edward I. became
king.
Henry III.’s reign was indeed a notable one for the city, and one
notable addition he made to it remains still as one of its foremost
architectural and historical treasures. This is the great and noble hall
which he added to the castle, and which retains still, with some
alteration, much of its original character. Many a notable scene has
this noble hall witnessed, both during Henry’s reign and since, the
early Parliaments of 1265 and 1268 pre-eminent among them. One such
dramatic scene was the one related in full by Matthew of Paris, as
occurring in 1249, when the king unmasked and brought to justice a
confederacy of robbers who had conspired to waylay the highways and rob
the passers-by. None were safe from them: even the king’s own
consignments of wine, coming to Winchester, were stopped and plundered.
Matters were in this state of insecurity when the king, coming to
Winchester, was approached by some Brabantine merchants, who complained
that they had been stopped on the highroad near Winchester and robbed of
200 marks. The king’s anger boiled over, and in hot indignation he
ordered the castle gates to be shut, and a jury empanelled then and
there to find and disclose the offenders. The twelve citizens thus
appointed pleaded inability to throw light on the matter, but the king,
not to be thwarted, shouted, “Carry away those artful traitors; bind
them, and cast them into the dungeons below, and let me have twelve
other men, good and true, who will tell us the truth.”
The second jury, with the fear of death thus before them, promptly
displayed quicker powers of perception, and laid before the king the
detects of a widespread conspiracy, in which many leading men of the
city and neighbourhood, as well as of the king’s household, whose pay
was probably long in arrear, were implicated. And so justice was done,
and for a while travelling abroad was safer.
Thus, now through good report, now through evil, the fortunes of our
city waxed and waned, but, in a sense, her day was over. Mediaeval
Winchester more and more grew to assume the character of a purely
provincial city; one with importance, indeed, with prestige and dignity,
but from which, like the so-called ‘buried cities’ of the Zuyder Zee,
the wide shores whereon the tides of major national circumstance ebbed
and flowed, continually receded more and more, while her citizens found
themselves less and less ‘going down in ships’ to the broad sea of
national life, and ‘occupying their business’ in those ‘great waters.’
CHAPTER XIV
FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY WINCHESTER
What do you lack, what do you buy, mistress? a fine hobby horse to
make your son a tilter? a drum to make him a soldier? a fiddle to
make him a reveller? what is’t you lack?
BEN JONSON.
It is pleasant to turn away from the direct stream of the national
flood, and to explore some of the by-streams, the more local whirls and
eddies in the life of our city, and this theme is naturally suggested by
the thought of Winchester in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
when imperial politics had largely ceased to affect her, and the wider
growth of interests and domestic features had given her life within a
greater diversity, and rendered possible a minuter degree of
specialization.
Interest in the main centres round her civic rule, the pilgrim stream,
the great annual Fair of St. Giles, and the domestic architecture, while
supreme over all these was the dominating interest and control exercised
by the ecclesiastical powers within her--the sway of the crozier and the
tonsure, the cloister and the cowl. We shall deal in this chapter with
the city at large, leaving to the chapter following the more purely
monastic aspects.
The city as a city had been growing--as always was the case with
mediaeval towns closely walled in--continually more and more congested.
The southeastern quarter occupied by the Convent of St. Swithun’s, with
its Cathedral and great churchyard, the adjoining Abbey of St. Mary, and
the bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, was a lung open indeed and well
ventilated, but elsewhere the hemmed in area was a maze of narrow and
crowded thoroughfares, with houses, whose curiously timbered, but
inconveniently picturesque fronts, almost jostled one another across the
narrow passage-ways between,--houses, of the type still to be seen in
the so-called ‘Old Rectory’ in Cheesehill Street, in the pseudo-antique
houses in ‘the Brooks,’ in Mr. Mayne’s Tudor House near the Butter
Cross, and the present Godbegot House almost opposite, of later date
though most of these be--as if the chief office of neighbourly regard of
a mediaeval dwelling to those round her was not merely to
Not beteem the winds of Heaven,
Visit _their_ face too roughly,
but also to religiously exclude that indiscreet and unwelcome intruder,
the all-prying and inquisitive sun, while through many of the low-lying
streets ran broad and open ditches, not always, alas! the _dulcia et
piscosae flumina aquae_, the sweet refreshing streams which Precentor
Wulfstan had once commemorated,--streams whose channels flow now in
well-regulated courses, some open, some underground, but which then
made their way, often through filth and accumulated garbage, in far less
well-ordered circulation through the city.
Though the city, judged by contemporary standards, might be a ‘joly
cité,’ of which
The aere was god both inne and oute,
it must have fallen far short of almost every modern standard of health
and convenience, and its narrow, confined, and ill-cleansed courts were
the lurking-places of contagion and of never wholly absent plague.
The civic management was a strange, incongruous muddle of overlapping
and conflicting authorities, each jealous of its own influence and
envious of its neighbour’s. The authority of the gilds had now become
crystallized into a corporation of more or less definite form, the Mayor
and Bailiffs, who exercised the controlling influence over the major
part of the city. When exactly a ‘Mayor’ first came into existence is
unknown. The civic records go back, indeed, to a certain Florence de
Lunn in 1184, though he can hardly be accepted as a ‘mayor’ in the
technical sense, but the Mayor only exercised authority over the
population within the walls, and ‘the Liberties,’ as they were called,
were excluded from his jurisdiction. Of these there were two, the
Liberty of the Soke, the region, that is, beyond the walls to the east
and north, over which the Bishop had supreme jurisdiction, and which he
entrusted to the care of a special officer, the Bailiff of the Soke,
and the Liberty of Godbiete, the little manor within the city granted
by Queen Emma to the Convent of St. Swithun, from the church tower of
which curfew rang, and within whose ‘liberties,’ as already stated, no
officer bearing warrant, whether of king, mayor, or bishop, might enter.
This tripartite division of authority, in which the civic, episcopal,
and monastic powers were mutually confronted, formed a cunningly devised
preserve, in which the dexterous fisher in the troubled waters of the
day might ply his angle with rarely successful result.
The dominating commercial interest was the Wool Trade. England was
famous for wool, and to this trade Winchester, as a natural centre with
Southampton as her port, owed her prosperity.
North of the High Street, not far from the Westgate, stood the great
Hall where the wool was brought and sampled, and here the great Tron or
weighing machine was kept on which the wool was weighed. In Edward
III.’s time the Winchester wool trade was at its height. His wars with
France, really undertaken to enable him to control the Channel, and so
to keep the trade with Flanders in his own hands, had prospered, and
when he introduced his famous wool-stapling measure, by which ‘staples’
or exclusive wool markets were set up in ten towns in England, of which
Winchester was one, the commercial prosperity of the city increased by
leaps and bounds. But, alas! Edward’s policy was only too successful.
The Flanders trade was considered more important than local English
[Illustration: BREWHOUSE, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
College Brewhouse, adjoining College Street, is one of the oldest
portions of the College buildings. Over the archway one of the turrets
of Outer Gateway is to be seen.]
interests, and when, some years after, he appointed Calais as the staple
town, and removed the staple from Winchester, the days of the commercial
prosperity of our city were numbered.
But while the wool trade lasted,--and it only died out as such trades do
by degrees,--Winchester with all its limitations must have been a rarely
interesting and attractive place in which to “catch the manners fleeting
as they rise.” It is much to be regretted that the Winchester of this
period had no shrewd and genial humorist, no Chaucer or Jonson, to
mingle with the crowd, and to preserve for us, whether by pen or pencil,
the humours of the day,--the varied types, lay and cleric, monk, friar,
pilgrim, merchant, or franklin, who might have been found periodically
gathered either at the Wool Market or the Hall of the Gild merchant, or
at ‘the George,’--for there was a ‘George’ at Winchester then, even as
now,--in as full and diverting variety as ever foregathered at the
Tabard itself; but interesting as those intrinsically were, their
interest was as nothing beside the two great dominating attractions
which periodically gathered all sorts and conditions of men for
temporary hospitality within her walls, the pilgrimages, and the great
Fair of St. Giles. And if it was the Wool Trade which made the Fair,
equally it was the Fair which gave the city its notoriety and its
commercial importance. And the Fair while it lasted dominated
everything--not only was all ordinary business suspended, but even the
jurisdiction of the ordinary civic authorities was equally subject to
its influence, and the already complex problem of civic rule was
rendered topsy-turvy by a temporary transfer of authority within the
city area from the Mayor to the Bailiff of the Soke,--a glorious
opportunity for paying off old scores, which many a modern local
administrator might well envy him.
The early history of the Fair we have already touched on. A fair had
been held on St. Giles’s Hill since very early days, and with the
strange incongruity of association characteristic of early times, fairs
were for a long time regularly held in churchyards. But the Fair of St.
Giles had long since outgrown the limits of the little churchyard of St.
Giles, on the hill which bears his name, and successive charters of
William II. and later sovereigns had made the rights and profits of the
Fair the perquisite and privilege of the Bishop of Winchester, who had
the power of exclusive trading within the area of the Fair during its
duration. Originally granted for three days, Henry I. had extended the
period to eight, Stephen to fourteen, and Henry II. to sixteen, and this
period was confirmed in the last charter granted for the Fair, viz.,
that given by Edward III. in 1349, in which all the privileges of the
Fair were rehearsed and solemnly confirmed. The procedure connected with
the Fair was minute and formal. On the 31st of August, the Eve of St.
Giles, the Bishop took possession, as it were, by setting up his court
in the _Pavilionis Aula_, or Hall of the Pavilion, on the top of the
hill. The court being formally constituted, Justiciaries or Bailiffs of
the Fair were appointed, who at once proceeded either to Southgate or
Kingsgate, where the Mayor, Bailiffs, and citizens of Winchester were
required to meet them, and dutifully to deliver up the keys of the gate,
and from thence to accompany them in turns to the Westgate, the Wool
Staple, and the other gates in succession, and to deliver up the keys of
each, while the Fair was solemnly proclaimed and the transfer of
authority effected. The proclamation made forbade the buying and
selling, while the Fair lasted, of articles of general merchandise,
other than food, anywhere in Winchester or within seven leagues’ radius
(10½ _miles_), except within the limits of the Fair itself.
This done, the humiliation of the Mayor and Bailiffs was completed by
their being required to humbly attend the usurping authorities to the
Bishop’s Pavilion, thenceforward to submit to their jurisdiction, with
what grace they might, till the Fair was over. Nor was it only at
Winchester that the Fair was proclaimed--Southampton, though actually
beyond the seven leagues’ radius, was included in the prohibited area,
and here and at all important points on the boundary of the Fair zone,
the same proclamation was made and formal possession taken. Nor was it
only smuggling that the Fair officials had to guard against. Outlaws of
the Robin Hood type--of whom the notorious Adam of Gurdon, Bailiff of
Alton, and Lord of the Manor of Selborne, was perhaps the most
famous--were accustomed to lay in wait and levy blackmail on merchants
and travellers who had business at the Fair, and at all particularly
dangerous spots, such as the Pass of Alton, as it was called, the spot
on the road from London to Alton where the thick woodland made highway
robbery a comparatively easy matter, sergeants, armed and mounted, were
stationed to keep the Pass.
The Fair itself was a veritable town of booths or stalls within a wooden
palisade, each quarter or ‘street’ within it taking its name from the
merchandise displayed or the nationality of the traders who occupied it.
Then there were the Spicery--the general grocery, or trade in sugar,
spices, and preserved fruits, in which the monks of St. Swithun traded
largely--the Pottery--the Stannary (or Falconry)--the ‘stret’ of the
Flemings, of the Genoese, of the Cornishmen; and the prices paid were
high, for a high ‘tariff wall’ surrounded the Fair. On a burden borne by
one man was levied a penny, on a cask of wine or cyder fourpence, for a
falcon twopence, for an ape or bear--animals much affected as butts and
playthings by the great, and even by the monks--fourpence. Multiplying
these by twelve, as is customarily done, to reduce them to modern
values, we realise how heavy these tolls were. Nor were luxuries and
alcoholic drinks the only article taxed. The raw material paid toll too:
every bale of wool fourpence, of which twopence went to the Bishop, and
twopence, to conciliate popular support evidently, to the check
weighman. Plantagenet times were not a Cobdenite millennium; and,
probably, could a ballot have been taken at the time, while the monks
and the Bishop’s ‘menie’ would undoubtedly have voted for Tariff
Reform, very few Winchester citizens--though the Fair was profitable
enough to them in reality--would have polled with them.
Within the Fair itself, the _mise en scène_ and the humours of the crowd
would have presented a subject fully worthy of Ben Jonson himself, and
it is safe to say that no human concourse, not even Bartholomew Fair in
its most palmy days, could have taxed his genius more than St. Giles’s
Fair during the Edwardian régime would have done. Motley, indeed, was
the crowd gathered here--Jews and Normans, Poles and Italians, strolling
minstrels, quacks and jugglers, ballad-mongers and fortune-tellers,
thieves and swaggerers, Corporal Nyms and Ancient Pistols, rogues and
sharpers of every kind, cheating, swearing, dancing, quarrelling,
drinking,--hawk-eyed chapmen and hard-visaged countrymen, each alike
bent on cheapening the other’s demands, huckstering, gesticulating, and
chaffering in strange dialects and all but unknown tongues--while here
and there vigilant assizemen, wearing the Bishop’s livery, passed
eager-eyed amidst them, keenly scenting out deficient weight or cozening
ell-wand, for in spite of severe penalties imposed on all detected in
such practices, the Fair was pre-eminently a place where
nobody’s virtue was over nice,
and all the ‘tricks of the trade’ flourished in a congenial soil. Thus
Harvey, prentice to Symme atte Stile, who tells us in Langland’s “Piers
Ploughman,” how
at Wye and Wynchestre I went to the faire,
lifts up some part of the veil for us, telling us that
wikkedlych to weye (_wickedly to weigh_)
was his first lesson.
We have already spoken of the Bishop’s Court or _Pavilionis Aula_. Here
the Bailiffs and Justiciaries of the Fair met, not merely to make
regulations, but to dispense justice, for the _Pavilionis Aula_ was also
a court of summary jurisdiction, a ‘piepowder court,’ _cour des pieds
poudreux_ or dusty-foot justice, that is, where the wily Autolycus, or
Artful Dodger of the day, or other picker up of unconsidered trifles,
was awarded short shrift and well-earned punishment either in stocks or
pillory, or in the Bishop’s dungeon under Wolvesey Palace.
Such then for some three hundred years was the great Fair of the
Festival of St. Egidius. For many years it survived, even though trade
in Winchester was falling off and doomed, but it could not survive
indefinitely. In Henry VI.’s time a distinct falling off was apparent;
since then it has dwindled gradually bit by bit, till now the only
tangible memorial remaining is the name of the Bishop’s court, the
_Pavilionis Aula_, the ghostly footfall of which seems still to be
re-echoed in the name “Palm Hall,” a well-known residence standing on
the brow of the hill where ‘all the fun of the Fair’ sparkled and
bubbled so many hundreds of years before.
Side by side with the Fair was the Pilgrim stream, which too reached its
height about this period. We have seen how early in Edward the Elder’s
reign the shrine of St. Josse in Newan Mynstre attracted pilgrims to
Winchester and gave it a reputation--a reputation which the enshrinement
in Edgar’s reign of Swithun’s bones enormously added to. Tales of
miracle were circulated, widespread and equally widely credited,
cripples were healed, the lame walked, and St. Swithun’s became the most
popular pilgrimage centre in all Southern England. From Henry II.’s
reign, though the shrine of Becket rose into importance, St. Swithun’s
did not abate in popularity, and the stream of pious, dust-laden feet
still flowed just the same to and from it, save that many going on
pilgrimage would visit the shrines of both St. Thomas and St. Swithun on
their way. Rich and poor, a-foot or in the saddle, they streamed into
Winchester as soon as the pilgrim season--the early spring, that
is,--arrived. As Chaucer tells us:
Whan that Aprille with his showrès swoote
The drought of Marche hath percèd to the roote,
* * * * *
Thanne longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.
The wealthier lodged in hostelries and inns, the poorer found shelter
and hospitality within the walls of convent or nunnery. From south and
west they came--over the Roman road from Sarum and along the Itchen
valley from Southampton, turning aside to visit St. Cross and receive
the wayfarer’s dole of bread and beer, till they reached the gates of
St. Swithun’s or of Hyde. St. Swithun’s was the chief place of resort.
Here within the Pilgrim’s or Guesten Hall, the greater part of which
still stands, a rough but welcome bed awaited them, while at the buttery
a plentiful meal of broken victuals and beer was to be had for the
asking. Then next morning after mass they would be admitted to the
shrine, to say their prayers, make their humble offering, and depart.
An unwholesome and unsavoury enough crowd, doubtless, in the
main--travel-stained, footsore, and unwashed, disease accompanied them,
frequently enough, from centre to centre, just as plague follows
nowadays the eastern lines of pilgrimage in India and Arabia--and not
even all their piety and devotion could sufficiently endear them to the
monks of St. Swithun as to make them personally acceptable, and secure
unrestricted welcome for them within their church and monastery.
Accordingly, though allowed to enter the Cathedral freely, their liberty
within it was circumscribed. Admitted to the north transept by a special
door--the Pilgrim’s door, now walled up--they could make their way into
Godfrey de Lucy’s retro-choir, the great extension east of the high
altar, where the shrine of the saint was placed. So much and no more of
the Cathedral was open to them, for at the head of the presbytery steps,
leading down to the south transept and nave, massive iron-work gates
barred the way; the gates are to be seen still, though long since
removed to near the western entrance of the Cathedral. And so their
devotions ended, they would journey on--on
[Illustration: MIDDLE GATE, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
Middle Gate gives access to Middle or Chamber Court--so called from
‘Election Chamber,’ the large room over the gateway where
‘elections’ to college were formerly held. The three statues over
the gateway represent the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel, and the
Founder. The quaint old custom of college boys crossing the Quad
bareheaded, in honour of the Virgin, is followed at Winchester
College still.
]
to the great Abbey of Hyde, then on to Headbourne Worthy church, to
visit the Saxon rood at its western end, then on by Alton and Farnham,
probably to rest for the night in the great Cistercian Abbey of Waverley
hard by, and so on by Guildford and St. Martha’s to Canterbury--a
well-defined route clearly marked even now for much of its length, and
still known as the Pilgrim’s way. So great a vogue did the pilgrimage
craving become that at length it had to be controlled and forbidden by
law. Yet the pilgrimage had its uses--the open-air journey, severe
though its hardships were to the ill-found and poorly shod, served,
doubtless, as a magnificent tonic, both mental as well as bodily, and
must have done much to correct the terrible insularity of ideas which a
population otherwise chained to the soil must otherwise have engendered.
Nor, in all probability, was the belief in the efficacy of pilgrimages
in the cure of diseases, particularly mental ones, without at least some
substantial basis of truth.
As in the case of Henry of Hoheneck, so also, _mutatis mutandis_, might
many a pilgrim to Winchester have had it said of him:
And he was healed in his despair
By the touch of _St. Swithun’s_ bones,
Though I think the long ride in the open air,
That pilgrimage over stocks and stones,
In the miracle must come in for its share.
A miracle none the less pronounced because the air of Hampshire Downs
had been a potent but unrealized contributory factor in the result.
CHAPTER XV
THE MONASTIC LIFE
Grosse Städte, reiche Klöster
Schaffen, dass mein Land den euren
Wohl nicht steht an Schätzen nach.
KERNER, _Der reichste Fürst_.
But active as were the currents that circulated in and round the gilds,
the wool markets, the annual fair, and the pilgrimage resorts, the
dominating stream was that which flowed through the monastic channel,
and over mediaeval Winchester the influence of the monastery in one form
or other, whether of priory, abbey, or nunnery, or whether of the
mendicant orders, or nursing sisterhoods, now for a considerable time
firmly established in the city, was supreme.
The Priory was a secluded area, the privacy of which was jealously
guarded. The Cathedral itself, from the eastern angle of the north
transept to the southern corner of the west front, formed the effective
boundary on the city side, with the great churchyard lying between it
and the city proper. The remainder was supplied by the high close-wall
running all round it, much as the greater part of it does now, flanked
to the east by the boundary of the Bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, and
forming, with the latter, part of the external defences of the city, so
that between them the monks and the Bishop relieved the citizens of
something like a quarter of the burden--a heavy one at that time--of
keeping the walls in repair and defending them if attacked.
The main entrance was then, as now, the great close-gate, opening into
Swithun’s Street near Kingsgate,--the point of attack in the troubles of
1264--and besides this a small postern or opening gave access from
‘Paradise’--as the area east of the northern transept was and still is
called--to Colebrook Street and Paternoster Row. From the churchyard to
the domestic quarter no direct means of access existed; the ‘Slype’ or
passage through the great south-western buttress was not yet made, and
to pass from the west part into the cloister it was necessary to pass
through the Cathedral itself.
The domestic buildings--as was always the case with the Benedictines,
and St. Swithun’s was a Benedictine house--were grouped on the south.
The cloister garth was a square enclosure, south of the nave, roofed
overhead and flagged below, but otherwise open to the air, with the open
lavatory or general washing-place in the centre. This was the monks’
usual place of resort, except when the services in church or special
duties called them elsewhere. Here, half in the open air, they read,
they studied, laboured at the occupations of the scriptorium, the
illuminated missal or book of the ‘Hours.’ Here was their library, and
here the _magister ordinis_ held his school for novices, a school where
the instruction, however, was not, as is commonly supposed, the
humanities or even divinity, but the rule of the order of St. Benedict,
to be, to the monk, from the moment he had taken the vows, more than
his conscience. Here in the cloister, too, the monks enjoyed such
minor relaxations as fell to their lot. Here they took their
‘meridian’ or mid-day siesta; and here, for all the world like great
schoolboys--whenever, that is, the prying eyes of Sacrist or Precentor
were not upon them--they even indulged at times in harmless but
unauthorized gossip and “snatched a fearful joy.”
Grouped round the cloister garth--their site now occupied by canons’
houses--were the domestic buildings proper: the kitchen to the west, the
refectory on the south. On the east--its Norman arches still in part
standing--was the Chapter House, where the Prior held a chapter daily
for the regulation of the internal routine, and for the admonition or
correction of offenders against the discipline. South of this, where now
the Deanery stands, were the Prior’s quarters. Farther to the east were
the sleeping quarters, the ‘dortour’ or common dormitory, the sick house
or infirmary, and so forth; while standing by itself at some little
distance in the outer court--Mirabel Close as it was called--was the
Pilgrims’ hall, where the poorer pilgrims were lodged, and now almost
the only part of the domestic buildings of the monastery still
standing.
At the period we are speaking of monastic life had assumed a character
entirely different from what it had borne in Saxon and Norman days.
Poverty, obedience, chastity, and toil had been not only the motto, but
actually the practice, of the earlier monk. He had not only prayed and
wept, and denied himself ease and creature comforts--his life had been
one unceasing round of severe bodily labour. His own efforts had
sufficed for his daily wants, and in ministering to them, he had taught
the savage people round him the arts of agriculture, he had reclaimed
the waste lands, and had literally made the wilderness to blossom like
the rose. But this active, simple phase had passed away. Monasteries
like St. Swithun’s or Hyde now performed important ceremonial and social
duties of an official character. The Prior of St. Swithun’s kept lordly
state; the Abbot of Hyde wore a mitre. These monasteries controlled
extensive interests, swayed large estates, held much church patronage,
and extended generous hospitality to high and low alike. The simple
organisation of earlier times now no longer sufficed, and a considerable
retinue of lay brothers was considered necessary for the domestic
service of the monastery, while the more purely spiritual duties alone
were performed by the monks themselves. The monk was thus left free to
pray and study, to perform his regular offices, and keep his ‘hours’
strictly, and only the more responsible of the domestic duties or those
of supervising the several departments of activity were assigned to
those who had taken the vow. The lay brethren or retainers performed
the menial duties, and were so completely separate from the brethren in
orders that they were even excluded from their churches. Thus the little
parish church of St. Swithun perched above Kingsgate was set apart for
the lay servants of the Priory, and the parish church of St.
Bartholomew, Hyde, in like manner for those of Hyde Abbey. Probably few
at that day could have foreseen that the churches built for the lay
retainers would prove more enduring than the great monasteries
themselves. Thus, spiritually speaking, the monasteries were, if not
actually dead, at least moribund. Shut in from the world outside they
affected less and less the stream of general spiritual life, and gradual
atrophy of spiritual powers followed inevitably on the failure to
exercise them.
Yet it would be a profound mistake to infer--as one easily might,
particularly if one were guided by popular pictorial representations of
it--that the life of the fourteenth century monk was one of ease and
enjoyment. In reality it was one of severe discipline and
self-repression. The eight daily services of the hours beginning at
midnight with nocturnes, and ending at evening with compline, with the
enforced vigils and broken periods of sleep they entailed, were but a
part of the regular daily obligation. In addition there were masses to
be said, study and reading in the cloister, the labours of teaching and
of the scriptorium. It is a somewhat cheap sneer to set down the monk as
merely indolent or self-indulgent, but his life certainly tended as a
rule more to deaden than to exalt, and the monk entered the cloister
only too often to discover nothing but a limited outlook and a dreary
round of humdrum trivialities, instead of the religious peace and the
beatific vision he had expected.
The brethren who controlled the various departments of monastic economy
were termed _Obedientiarii_, or brethren yielding obedience to the
Prior, and responsible to him for performance of their respective
duties. The Prior was over all, and next to him was the Sub-prior. The
church was looked after by the Sacrist and the Precentor. These
regulated the services, while the latter in addition was responsible for
the discipline. He was the general policeman, a kind of peripatetic
conscience, imposing silence in the cloister, and checking illicit
conversation, and particularly on the alert during nocturnal service,
lest the burden of drowsiness should prove too heavy for any of the
worshippers. Armed with a lantern he stole from brother to brother, and
if any was found nodding he placed the lantern at the offender’s feet,
who, thus detected and openly shamed, was required to take up, as it
were, the ‘fiery cross,’ and bear it on until he should find another
guilty like himself, in which case he might pass the unwelcome task on
to his companion in disgrace--a kind of monastic game of touch, not
without its humorous side. The manager of the estates was the Receiver
or Treasurer, the chief domestic official the Hordarian or Steward,
others were the _Custos operum_ or Keeper of the Fabric, the Cellarer,
the
Almoner, the Master of the Novices, or _Magister ordinis_, the Gardener,
and so on.
A somewhat full collection of Obedientiary Rolls, or official accounts
of St. Swithun’s Priory, still exists, and much valuable and interesting
information has been rendered accessible to the general public by Dean
Kitchen, who has edited them, and from these we can learn full details
of the daily life, dietary, and operations of the monks of St. Swithun.
They had two main meals a day, with certain other opportunities for
minor refreshment. Bread, cheese, meat, fish, and eggs appear to have
been freely provided, though it must be remembered that there were
always guests as well as the monks to be catered for. On fast days
‘drylinge,’ or salt fish, and mustard figured largely, the mustard
serving as a corrective to the unpalatable fare, and doubtless, too, a
useful tonic to bodies which had to endure so many hours in a stone
church or in an open cloister entirely unprovided with artificial means
of warming. Beer was the general, and wine a rarer beverage. Relishes
and extra dishes were granted from time to time, as, for instance, on
festival occasions, or as a reward for special duties. To guard against
chills furs were largely worn, and were indeed a heavy item of
expenditure. Spices were largely used as comforts in the same way as the
mustard already referred to, and to keep the monks in health the
gardener was required to supply each monk with a regulation number of
apples daily from Advent to Lent, doubtless, again, a wise provision at
a period when vegetables were
[Illustration: CLOISTERS AND FROMOND’S CHANTRY, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
“But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloister’s pale.”
Cloisters, with Fromond’s Chantry in the centre (for College has two
chapels), forms one of the most poetic spots of Winchester College.
In earlier days school was held in Cloisters during the summer months.
In Cloisters the College dead lie buried. Many former scholars have cut
or carved their names on the stone-work of Cloisters, among them the
famous Ken, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells, who wrote his _Manual
of Prayers_ for the use of Winchester College Boys.
His morning hymn
“Awake, my soul, and with the sun,”
and evening hymn
“Glory to Thee, my God, this night,”
first appeared in this _Manual_. The inscription in Cloisters is “Thos.
Ken, 1665.”]
nowhere readily obtainable as at present. As an additional corrective,
blood-letting, five times a year, was an habitual practice, and as this
involved three days in hospital, _i.e._ practically three days’ holiday,
it was rather looked forward to than otherwise. ‘Shaving day’ was an
important event. On Maunday Thursday the monks washed each other’s feet,
and once a year they had a bath. The straw for the pallets, on which
they slept in the ‘dortour,’ was changed once a year.
The meals were taken in silence in the refectory, while, to transpose
the poet’s words,
The Reader droned from the Pulpit,
Like the murmur of many bees,
The legends of good _St. Swithun_
And _St. Benet’s_ homilies.
Straw litter covered the floor, which was changed seven times a year--a
higher standard of cleanliness and luxury than prevailed generally,
seeing that Erasmus, 200 years later, could still complain of the filthy
rush-covered floors of English houses, where bones, scraps, and ale from
the table accumulated, with even less desirable kinds of dirt, and
which, when it was replaced, was removed so perfunctorily that the lower
layers remained undisturbed, it might be for years.
The Obedientiary Rolls, moreover, supply us with an interesting insight
into the commodities in general use, and also into their prices.
Reducing to modern values we find an egg and a herring practically cost
then, as now, a penny apiece. Sugar existed in various forms--Sugar
Scaffatyn, Sugar of Cyprus, Sugar Roset, and sweetmeats or comfits of
various kinds, varying from one to several shillings a pound. Rice was
largely consumed, and cost threepence a pound. ‘Coryns,’ _i.e._ _grapes
of Corinth_, in other words currants, about two shillings a pound.
Enormous quantities of groceries, ‘spiceries’ as they were termed,
figured in the accounts, but, doubtless, largely because St. Swithun had
his stall at St. Giles’s Fair, and dealt extensively in ‘spices.’
It was at Fair time that the monks had their chief holiday, and made
their chief purchases. It was at the Fair that they purchased also the
furs they wore so largely. On the top of the hill the Prior had his
special pavilion, and kept practically open house--and doubtless the
monks keenly appreciated the rare opportunity the Fair afforded for a
little excursion beyond the walls. For though the Prior mingled freely
with the outer world, as a great political person-age was summoned
regularly to Parliament, and so forth, the monk in general but rarely
left the convent gate, and saw little beyond ‘the studious cloister’s
pale.’
We have fewer details of the Abbey of Hyde, just as we have fewer
remains of its fabric. Such part as remains, apart from some unimportant
ruins, is generally supposed to have formed part of the Tithe barn.
Opposite the gateway of this--which is really an interesting piece of
architectural work, unfortunately very meagre in extent,--is the Church
of St. Bartholomew, Hyde, where, as already stated, the lay servants of
the abbey worshipped. The squared and worked stones which are to be
seen freely in the houses all round the neighbourhood are, otherwise,
practically all that still remains of the great abbey.
Of its internal life we know also but little; the _Liber de Hyda_
preserves most of its history, but we have no obedientiary rolls to
chronicle its small beer. During much of its later history it had a hard
struggle for existence. The Black Death all but brought ruin to it,
though later on William of Wykeham did much to restore its prosperity.
Its best-known abbot was Walter Fyfhyde, abbot from 1318 to 1361.
Of St. Mary’s Abbey we have fewer details still. It enjoyed a
considerable revenue from the tolls, or ‘octroi,’ on merchandise which
entered the city at the East Gate.
Far different from the life of monk or nun was that of the friar. In the
fourteenth century he was firmly established as a Winchester
institution. He was the active missioner, the revivalist, the preacher.
He moved in the world, not in the cloister. He taught, he preached, he
visited the slums; he was the Church-army worker or the Salvationist of
his time, and if he wrought too much on the superstitious fears of his
hearers, even if the relics which he permitted them to kiss were usually
nothing but ‘pigges bones,’ like those of Chaucer’s ‘gentle pardonere,’
as often as not he would have been prepared to defend the fraud as a
pious deception which did no harm to his listeners, while as a class the
friars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were undoubtedly the
salt of the earth.
All the four orders of friars were represented in Winchester--Black
Friars or Dominicans, Grey Friars or Franciscans, White Friars or
Carmelites, and Austin Friars. Their quarters were generally in the
slums. The name ‘Grey Friars’ still lingers in ‘The Brooks,’ and ‘The
Friary’ in Southgate Road preserves the memory of the Austin Friars,
though the latter, strictly speaking, were rather canons than friars
proper. Between the several types of ecclesiastics deadly jealousy
existed, and if monk and friar agreed at all, it was probably in a
common hostility to the ordinary parochial incumbent or parish priest.
Besides these, many smaller religious or semi-religious houses of
various types existed. Adjoining Wykeham’s College was the ‘Sustern
Spital,’ a community of nursing sisters, fronting on to College Street;
the little college of St. Elizabeth of Hungary stood near the boundary
wall of ‘Mead’; and besides these were a number of others, of which
Magdalene College was perhaps the chief. Mediaeval Winchester could
certainly display ‘Pious Founders’ with any city of its day.
The monasteries continued to flourish in greater or less prosperity till
the middle of Henry VIII.’s reign. But though the cloister monk himself
might come but little in contact with the outer world, the aspects in
which the monastery as a whole did so were numerous and important. Not
only in its immediate vicinity did it serve as educator, general
almoner, and physician, relieving want and sheltering distress, but far
away also from its walls its word was law, its control all-sufficient.
As landed proprietors on a widely extended scale the monasteries wielded
enormous territorial influence. At their grange farms, such as the farm
of the Augustinians at Silkstede, they maintained large bodies of farm
hands, they reared sheep, they drove to market, they bought and sold.
Nor was this all; all was fish that came into their net, and Church
patronage not the least important or acceptable, so that more and more
the duty of providing for the spiritual needs of neighbouring or
outlying parishes fell to their share, along with the tithes or dues
paid to support it, and in such cases tithe was no longer paid to the
incumbent direct but to the monastery, who appointed a ‘vicar’ or deputy
to carry out the spiritual duties,--a system satisfactory enough,
perhaps, if faithfully followed out, but leading to every form of evil
and neglect when laxity supervened, and selfishness replaced zeal; and
so the system of ‘vicars’ as incumbents was inaugurated, while the
frequent iteration and survival up and down the country side of such
monastic addenda to the names of Hampshire towns and villages, as Itchen
Abbas, Abbot’s Ann, Monk’s Sherborne, Prior’s Barton, to quote but one
or two, is an eloquent testimony to the firm grasp which the monk had
secured of the spiritual patrimony of the Church, and to this more than
anything else is to be attributed the present poverty of the Church, and
the lay patronage existing in so many rural English parishes to-day.
The closing scene in the monastic story was not, however, to be reached
for some century or so longer. In Henry VIII.’s time, however,
monasteries had drifted so hopelessly from the general stream of
national life, that it was evident their existence could not be
indefinitely prolonged on existing lines, and Wolsey, with an insight
and high zeal for reform which is rarely done sufficient justice to,
conceived the plan of closing them and diverting the funds thus set free
to other religious and kindred purposes, the endowment of schools,
colleges, etc. Henry VIII. availed himself of Wolsey’s suggestion, and
Thomas Cromwell, the supple and unscrupulous instrument of an equally
unscrupulous master, carried it out,--not, however, with any view of a
right-minded diversion of funds set aside for religious purposes, but
with the intention, barely veiled, of selfish misappropriation, and the
satisfaction of personal greed, and in the general scramble for plunder,
not only did the monastic property, as such, get swallowed up, but the
parochial endowments--where vicars were in being, at least--were
swallowed up also.
The actual closing was carried out by two commissions. In 1536 some of
the smaller Winchester houses were suppressed, including the Sustern
Spital and the various friaries. Then in 1537 a second commission was
appointed, and the larger houses began to fall. At Hyde, Abbot Salcot
proved ‘conformable’ and surrendered the abbey, and in 1538 Cromwell’s
commissioners, with the notorious Thomas Wriothesley, afterwards Earl
of Southampton, acting the part of ‘leading villain’ of the piece,
visited it to carry out the work of demolishment. In a letter to
Cromwell they thus describe their work at Hyde:--
About three o’clock (_A.M._) we made an end of the shrine here at
Wynchester.... We think the silver thereof will amount to near two
thousand marks. Going to our beds-ward, we viewed the altar, which
we purpose to bring with us. Such a piece of work it is that we
think we shall not rid it, doing our best, before Monday next or
Tuesday morning, which done we intend, both at Hyde and at St.
Mary’s, to sweep away all the rotten bones that be called relics,
which we may not omit lest it be thought that we came more for the
treasure than for avoiding the abominations of idolatry.
The words are significant, and the hour 3 A.M. tells its own tale. The
abbot and other inmates received pensions, very modest ones, and the
manors fell into various lay hands. Wriothesley secured the lion’s
share. The abbey buildings were sold for the material they were built
of, and so rapidly did most of it disappear, that Leland in 1539 says in
his well-known _Itinerary_: “In this suburb stood the great abbey of
Hyde, and hath yet a parish church.” Camden, writing shortly after,
speaks of the “bare site, deformed with heaps of ruins, daily dug up to
burn into lime.” In 1788 what still remained of the ruins was nearly all
rooted up to make a County Bridewell. No thought of Alfred, or the other
mighty and illustrious dead buried within the precincts, seems to have
stayed the Vandal hands; numerous relics, patens, chalices, rings were
found. A slab of stone bearing Alfred’s name was taken away, and is
still preserved at Corby, in Cumberland. It was not part of Alfred’s
tomb, as it bears the date 891. So far all attempts to locate the
position of Alfred’s tomb have been unsuccessful. Like Moses of old, “no
man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.”
The suppression of St. Swithun’s had results less drastic. Hyde Abbey
was simply swallowed up in the catastrophe. St. Swithun’s was
transformed into the capitular body of the Cathedral, the Prior,
Sub-prior, and monks disappeared, and in their places succeeded the
Dean, the Chapter, and Canons of Winchester.
The new establishment thus formed was at first composed of the Dean,
twelve prebendaries, and six minor canons. The Prior, William Kingsmill,
proved ‘very conformable,’ and became the first Dean of the new
collegiate body. The commissioners, here as at Hyde, stripped the
Cathedral of its ornaments. The silver shrine of St. Swithun
disappeared, and various other shrines, and the glorious treasures of
gold and silver, and precious stones, the gifts of Cnut, Bishop Stigand,
and many another pious donor, which had graced the high altar, were all
swept away by the greedy hands of the spoilers.
The domestic buildings have almost all now disappeared. The
chapter-house was pulled down in 1570 by Bishop Horne, largely for the
sake of the leaden roof; and the cloisters later on suffered a similar
fate. Part of one of the convent kitchens remains in one of
[Illustration: MEMORIAL GATEWAY, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
The Memorial Gateway, opening on to Kingsgate Street, was erected
recently in memory of Wykehamists who fell in the South African
War.
]
the houses at the west side of the cloister garth, and some portions of
the domestic buildings still remain in the Deanery, but practically all
connected with the domestic life of the monastery has now disappeared.
In 1632 Bishop Curle opened a passage, now called ‘The Slype,’ by
cutting through the great buttress on the south side, and so converted
the cloister garth into a thoroughfare. Two curious Latin anagrams cut
on the west front of the Cathedral and on the wall adjoining commemorate
this. But the Priory, thus transformed, gained rather than lost in
usefulness. Much of the property was indeed seized by the king, but the
Dean and Chapter have remained otherwise in full possession of the
powers and privileges granted to them, while the fuller and less
restricted range of activity has rendered the Cathedral the centre of
ecclesiastical life and of extended usefulness, far exceeding what the
Priory in its later days ever succeeded or perhaps ever aimed at
securing.
The suppression of St. Swithun’s was the first in point of time; later
on, in 1538, Hyde was dissolved; in 1539, St. Mary’s Abbey--Nunna
Mynstre--founded by Alswitha, Queen of Alfred the Great, suffered a like
doom. St. Elizabeth’s College lasted a few years longer, and was finally
sold to Winchester College in 1547, and the buildings pulled down. The
college luckily survived the visitation, so, also, equally fortunately,
did St. Cross and St. John’s Hospital, and these remain in continued and
more extended usefulness till the present day.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CATHEDRAL
Sermons in Stones.
To deal adequately with Winchester Cathedral would be almost to write
the history of England, a task manifestly impossible within the limits
of such a work as this. For the Cathedral is not merely a building, but
a veritable history in stone, and that not a history--as historic
buildings very often are--of a community which has raised but a small
eddy in the waters of national life, but of one which has profoundly
affected the fortunes of the nation during almost every period of its
existence. It is safe to say that scarcely a single storm of national
strife has burst upon the land without leaving in some way an impress
upon these grey stone walls, and during a period of many centuries there
was scarcely one single actor of eminence in the national drama who did
not leave, in some form or other, a record imperishably graven here
behind him. Not only have these stones witnessed the coronations of
kings--the baptisms, marriages, and burials of princes--the consecration
of bishops, and many another ceremony of high national significance,
but they enshrine within their circuit the sacred dust of generations of
the great departed, subject and king, soldier and priest, statesman and
prelate; they are a great national Valhalla with which no other in the
land save Westminster Abbey can claim to compare. As the preceding pages
have shown, a Christian cathedral has existed continuously on the
present site since the days of Kynegils and Kenwalh, in the 7th century.
Bishop Swithun and Bishop Æthelwold successively added to or rebuilt
large portions of the fabric, but the only Saxon work now remaining is
in the crypt and foundations. The pillars and arches are splendidly
massive and curiously fashioned, and show that Æthelwold’s work was
solidly constructed. The Cathedral, as we see it to-day, is the Norman
and Angevin Cathedral--the cathedral of Walkelyn and of Godfrey de Lucy,
transformed in later Plantagenet days by Edyngton, Wykeham, and
Beaufort, and adorned by Silkstede, Fox, and many others. Walkelyn’s
Cathedral was a typical Norman building, and the disposition of its
parts reflected a symbolism as well as a harmony. The central truths of
Christian doctrine, those of the Trinity and of the redemption, were
beautifully symbolised in the three-fold repetition of nave, triforium,
and clerestory in the elevation, and of nave, choir, and transepts
disposed in the form of a cross in the ground plan. The arches and
pillars are characteristic examples of the Norman style--semicircular
arches springing from heavy, cushion-shaped capitals surmounting the
strong circular pillars. The general effect of the interior, though
heavy, was one of impressiveness and dignity, as can be well seen from
the transepts, which remain for all practical purposes unaltered from
their original form, or better still from the interior of Chichester
Cathedral of to-day. It reflected alike calmness, dignity, and
strength--the dignity of a strength conscious of a burden indeed, but
self-reliant and adequate to the task. It is no light burden that those
giant pillars are bearing, nor do they support it joyously or even with
ease: each one is rather an Atlas, bearing his load strongly and
uncomplainingly, but needing to put forth all his powers in the effort.
Godfrey de Lucy, Bishop in Richard I.’s time, extended the church
eastwards by adding the retro-choir with its beautiful Early English
arcading, graceful columns, and lancet windows,--an extension which,
owing to the insufficient foundation on which he built, is in large
measure responsible for the insecure condition of the fabric to-day.
This we will revert to later on in the chapter. Godfrey de Lucy’s object
was to afford space for the ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims who
crowded to Winchester to see the shrine of St. Swithun, but who in other
respects were unwelcome guests. His extension eastward afforded every
facility to admit the pilgrims in to view the shrine, without giving
them access to the choir, nave, or domestic parts of the Priory. In
Edward III.’s reign came the transformation of the nave and aisles--a
daring work commenced by Bishop Edyngton, and completed by William of
Wykeham, almost equal in magnitude to the reconstruction of the fabric
itself. Edyngton’s work may be seen in the aisle windows at the extreme
west of the building; Wykeham’s, which is lighter and more graceful,
fills the rest of the nave. The general result has been to impart to the
interior gracefulness and lightness. The columns on either side of the
choir steps, which were left partly unaltered, show us in some measure
how the change was effected, partly by pulling down and rebuilding,
partly by cutting away from the face of the columns. The triforium was
removed bodily, and the triple row of Norman arches thrown together into
a single range of light, lofty, and graceful Perpendicular-Gothic
arches, surmounted by smaller Perpendicular windows serving as
clerestory. Triforium proper no longer exists, but its place is taken by
a continuous narrow balcony running along both sides of the nave. The
impressiveness and beauty of the effect thus produced it is impossible
to describe. As you enter at the west end the majesty of the whole at
once silences and uplifts you--a forest almost of lofty shafts and
pillars rising unbroken and towering overhead, where they branch out and
interlace in the beautiful intricacy of the fan-tracery of the roof.
It is not without appropriateness that Wykeham and Edyngton both lie
buried here in the beautiful chantry chapels which they respectively
erected between the pillars on the south side of the nave.
The work of transformation from Norman to Perpendicular was continued
through the choir and presbytery aisles by Beaufort and others, and
later bishops extended the building eastward beyond the limits of
Godfrey de Lucy’s work. The three chapels at the east end, Orleton’s
Chapel, commonly spoken of as the Chapel of the Guardian Angels,
Langton’s Chapel, and the Lady Chapel, contain much interesting and
varied work.
In one sense the retro-choir is, architecturally speaking, the most
interesting part of the Cathedral. It presents wonderful variety, and
contains specimens of practically every stage of architectural
development since de Lucy’s day. But it must be confessed that the
general effect is rather a confused medley of seemingly haphazard or
tentative reconstructions, and the piecemeal character of the separate
parts deprives it to a large extent of the dignity and completeness of a
harmonious whole. Nowhere is this exemplified better than in the three
east windows of the south transept--all altered from the original Norman
windows, and each entirely different in character from its neighbours.
Yet this very want of harmony is strangely eloquent. Winchester
Cathedral, and its east end more particularly, is not an architect’s
cathedral, so to speak--one complete harmonious design like Salisbury;
rather is it a document in stone--a deed to which many participants have
affixed their sign-manual, each in his characteristic writing, and
bearing the direct impress of his personality.
Yet fascinating as its architectural features are, they are dwarfed and
unimportant beside the wealth of historical association that lies locked
up within these walls as in a treasure-chest.
Of the many great and solemn ceremonials which these walls have
witnessed--such indeed, to mention one or two only, as the second
coronation of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, the baptism of Henry VII.’s son,
Arthur of Winchester, Prince of Wales, the marriage of Henry IV. with
his second wife Joan of Navarre, and that of Mary Tudor, Queen of
England, to Philip of Spain--we will not now speak in detail. Rather
will we concentrate our attention on the historic and architectural
monuments which meet our eye almost wherever we turn, and among this
wealth of historical and architectural treasures three may be singled
out for special notice--the chantry chapels, the reredos, and the
mortuary chests. The chantry chapels are gems of beauty and of interest,
enshrining the mortal remains as well as the memories of six notable
men,--Edyngton, Wykeham, Beaufort, Waynflete, Fox, and Gardiner.
Wykeham’s chantry is almost daringly constructed out of and between two
of the great pillars of the nave. The memories of the three chantry
monks who served it in Wykeham’s lifetime are preserved by three
charming miniature figures placed in effigy at Wykeham’s feet. The
chantries of Beaufort, Waynflete, Fox, and Gardiner are east of the
choir. Beaufort’s chantry, less beautiful perhaps architecturally, is
wonderfully suggestive. How eloquently the recumbent effigy seems to
recall the strong features of the man who desired power so earnestly,
and could dare greatly in the effort to possess it--those rigid hands
now clasped meekly in prayer betoken a humility and repose which their
owner when in life probably never enjoyed, nor it may be even desired.
Waynflete, again, had a notable career. Headmaster of Winchester, he was
chosen by Henry VI. as first headmaster of his new foundation of Eton,
and shortly after from headmaster became Provost, from which position he
rose to become Bishop of Winchester. Waynflete founded Magdalen College,
Oxford; and Magdalen College has but recently been discharging a pious
duty by undertaking the work needed for the preservation of her
founder’s chantry. With Waynflete, Wykeham, and Foxe (founder of
Corpus), all buried in these chantries, Winchester might almost claim to
have founded Oxford herself. Architecturally each chantry marks a step
forward in the development of style, and registers the successive stages
in the rise, culmination, decline, and death of Perpendicular Gothic.
Of the great altar-screen we have already spoken. Here we have
Perpendicular Gothic at its very best, rich in effort, yet in perfect
taste, without the least suggestion of the florid or the bizarre--the
detail so varied, the execution so delicate. The statuary is modern, but
is beautifully executed and in perfect keeping--a somewhat unusual
excellence--with the original work. It would be hard to meet with so
illustrative and remarkable a series of Christian saints and examples as
are here shown in effigy grouped
[Illustration: SECOND MASTER’S HOUSE, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
Wykeham’s ‘children,’ the seventy scholars that is, are still
lodged in College, as they have been from the first, under the
charge of the second master, whose house lies between Outer Gateway
and Chamber Court, over which latter some of the windows look out.
]
round the Saviour’s figure--the four archangels, the Virgin and St.
John, St. Paul and St. Peter, doctors like Jerome, teachers like
Ambrose, Christian missionaries like Birinus, bishops like Swithun,
Æthelwold, Wykeham, and Wolsey. Among sovereigns we have Egbert, Alfred,
Cnut, and Queen Victoria. Among the others of note are Earl Godwine,
Izaak Walton, Ken and Keble. Many of these lie actually buried within
the Cathedral walls, and nearly all left their mark inseparably and
honourably stamped, alike on the national, as on the city history.
Of all the historical memorials, however, none is capable of so
profoundly stirring the imagination or arresting the attention as the
six beautiful mortuary chests placed above the side screens of the
choir. Think what associations the inscriptions on these recall. Early
Wessex chieftains, as Kynegils and Kenwalh: kings of Wessex, when Wessex
was supreme over all England, as Egbert and Æthelwulf: the union of
Saxon and Dane, as personified by Cnut and Queen Emma; the Norman tyrant
as represented by Rufus. Not even in Westminster Abbey itself can names
such as these be read. And close at hand are other significant names
too: Harthacnut: Richard, son of the Conqueror, fated, like his brother
Rufus, to meet a violent death in the New Forest, but otherwise unknown
to history: Duke Beorn, murdered at sea by Sweyn, son of Earl Godwine.
These and other striking names can be found graven on the stone-work
which carries the mortuary chests above.
Of former bishops of Winchester the majority are buried here. Some of
these--and among them some of the most famous--have no visible sign to
mark their tomb; these include such names as Birinus, Swithun,
Æthelwold, Walkelyn, Henry of Blois. There are many others too over whom
we should like to linger: Peter de Rupibus, for instance, the evil
genius of Henry III.’s reign, and Ethelmar or Aymer, the absentee
bishop, who died in Paris, but desired his heart to be placed in a
casket for interment in the Cathedral, though when alive his affections
seem to have been centred anywhere but here. His monument is more
picturesque than his life was edifying. He is represented in effigy in
the attitude of prayer, and holding his heart between his folded hands.
In striking contrast to these are monuments to Bishops Morley, Hoadley,
Samuel Wilberforce, and Harold Brown.
Over the remaining monuments, and there are many of very great interest,
we cannot linger. Flaxman is represented by a bas-relief of Dr. Warton,
famous in his day as headmaster of the College, seated in his
magisterial chair, with a group of college boys ‘up to books.’ The
details of schoolboy attire are curious and interesting. Appealing to a
wider circle are two flat slabs of stone, one in Prior Silkstede’s
Chapel, one in the north aisle. The former bears the name Izaak Walton,
the latter Jane Austen. Truly Winchester Cathedral is a city of the
mighty dead.
In addition to the monuments there are many other features of great
attractiveness. Prior Silkstede’s carved wooden pulpit, the quaint old
font curiously carved in black stone, said to have been brought to
Winchester by Henry of Blois, and the _miserere_ seats in the choir
stalls are among these. The Cathedral library, too, is of rare interest.
The wonderful Illuminated Vulgate, with its almost romantic history, and
numerous early Saxon charters are preserved here, along with Cathedral
and city records of great historical value.
The exterior of the Cathedral presents less interest. It is grand and
striking, but hardly beautiful. The West front is flat and featureless,
the long straight roof of the nave is monotonous. The east end, with its
varied work and the huge Norman transepts, is by far the finest portion.
Taken as a whole the general effect is extremely dignified and
impressive, and the surroundings are entirely in keeping.
As you pass down the beautiful lime avenue, or cross the grass to the
west and north, the quiet dignity and repose impress you with an
influence deeper than mere beauty, and the Cathedral Close, with its
Jacobean and Georgian houses, is equally serene, dignified, and
attractive. The Deanery is interesting, particularly the Early English
work in the portico, and the beautiful green sward in Mirabel Close,
with the Pilgrims’ Hall to the east, and Cheyne Court with its
open-timbered and gabled houses, all both alike quiet, stately, and
harmonious. A rare place this Close, with associations too of its own.
Even nowadays it possesses its ghost--a female figure robed and veiled
like a nun--which persons still living will describe to you, for they
have seen it themselves, they declare, and heard its ghostly footfall
echoing as it has paced before them on the flags. Nor is the word
‘Close’ a word only. Still every night the gate is religiously locked at
the stroke of ten, after which none may enter or depart save by favour
of the Close porter, the lineal successor of the ‘proud portér’ so
prominent in Early English ballad poetry.
Before leaving the Cathedral we must say a few words about the
operations for the repair of the fabric to which reference has already
been made.
The insecurity of a large part of the fabric is due mainly to the
foundation on which Godfrey de Lucy built when he extended the Cathedral
towards the east. To do this he had to build out over an area of peaty
and water-logged land, wherein to reach a solid foundation it was
necessary to go down through successive layers of marl and gravel and
peat, to a considerable depth, varying from 16 to 24 feet. As this
involved working under water, and as the task of dealing with water
under foundations was beyond the skill of builders of the time, de Lucy
made an artificial foundation of beech logs, or beech trunks rather,
laid horizontally one over the other and kept in place with piles, with
the result that a progressive subsidence has occurred, mainly, but not
entirely, at the east end, causing walls to bulge and crack, and
fissures to appear, until the present degree of insecurity has been
reached. Thus it has been not a question of restoration, but of
preservation, and the work has been taken in hand not a moment too
soon.
The present operations have consisted, in the main, of systematic
underpinning of the walls and buttresses, and as much of the work has
had to be carried out under 10 feet or so of water, a diver has been
employed to lay down concrete in section after section at the base of
the new foundations, the water being afterwards temporarily drawn off by
the help of powerful pumps, to enable the work of underpinning to go on.
The employment of divers to lay foundations for a building 800 years old
would appear a fantastic absurdity, transcending the wildest stretch of
imaginative invention. Winchester Cathedral has actually realised it.
Unfortunately, the securing of the southern aisle of the nave may demand
an addition,--not merely underpinning, but the construction of
buttresses. But these, although novel, will be no more foreign to the
general design than were the corresponding buttresses which Wykeham
added to the north aisle; and these, with the further addition of the
great tie-rods inserted at various spots in the transepts and
retro-choir, will, it is hoped, give the Cathedral a stability which
will ensure its preservation for centuries more. The operations, so
novel in character, so daring in conception, so extensive in scale, are
yet unfinished, and while some £90,000 has been already expended on the
work, something like another £12,000 is still needed for its
completion.
CHAPTER XVII
THE COLLEGE
Schoolmasters in any schoole
Writing with pen and ink.
CHILDE MAURICE.
“Manners makyth man”--‘manners’ in the old and wide sense of the word,
the equivalent of the Latin ‘mores,’ or of the word ‘conversation’ in
St. Paul’s epistles, _i.e._ moral worth and character as contrasted with
wealth, or the symbols of rank and power. This is the motto inseparably
connected with Wykeham’s foundations at Winchester and Oxford alike, and
who shall say how potent this motto has been in inspiring and moulding
the character of English manhood and English public schools during the
five centuries and more since their great founder was laid to rest?
Winchester College is no common place. If Winchester Cathedral, which
enshrines the bones of Egbert, should be the Mecca of all pious lovers
of the Empire, Winchester College should be the Mecca for all English
public school men. Not that Wykeham was the first to found an English
public school, whatever exactly the term ‘public school’ may mean.
Schools had existed in the land for six or seven hundred years before
Wykeham’s day. There were schools in Winchester itself, as, for
instance, the ancient Winchester Grammar School, seven of the poor
scholars of which received a meal daily in the Hundred Mennes Hall at
St. Cross. Wykeham did not invent schools as public schools, but what he
did was to give to public schools the special impetus and character
which they have borne ever since, and in this sense he is rightly named
and revered as the ‘Father of English public schools.’
Earlier schools had almost invariably been linked to collegiate
churches--the communities of secular canons--and had occupied always a
subordinate position. Wykeham gave an independent position to his
school, strengthening it indeed by making it part of a collegiate body,
and linking it with the University, through the sister foundation of New
College--St. Marie College of Wynchester in Oxford, to give it its full
name--which Wykeham had completed in 1386.
Before the college could be commenced many preliminaries were
necessary,--bulls from the Pope, and other official sanctions, lawsuits
and agreements with all kinds of bodies which had an interest in the
site; but Wykeham began to organise his school before the permanent
buildings were ready, and for some years his scholars were lodged in
temporary quarters somewhere by St. Giles’s Hill. The site chosen for
the buildings was just outside the city walls to the south, and when at
last all was ready, on March 20, 1394, the opening ceremony was
solemnized. The aged bishop received the Warden and seventy scholars in
the presence chamber of his Episcopal palace of Wolvesey, and the whole
body left Wolvesey in solemn procession, and entered and took possession
of their new abode.
Wykeham’s immediate purpose in founding a school appears to have been to
help to provide a body of educated clergy. Successive visitations of the
‘Black Death’ had depleted the land of clergy, just as it had of
labourers, and there was pressing need for a supply of educated men to
recruit their ranks. It was to be part of the object of the college to
provide such recruits.
The scheme of the college and the statutes of the founders were
carefully thought out and elaborated. The college was part of a wide
educational scheme: a school and something more--a society, with roots
in Oxford as well as in Winchester. The society was to comprise a
school, a chantry, and a body of Fellows. The school was to consist of
seventy scholars, a number chosen very possibly in symbolical allusion
to the seventy ordained to teach and preach throughout the land of
Galilee, just as Dean Colet afterwards chose ‘a hundred and fifty and
three’ as the number of his scholars in the school he founded--St.
Paul’s School, London. Over these were a master or _Magister
informator_, and an usher or _hostiarius_: the chantry was equipped with
three chaplains, three chapel clerks, and
[Illustration: TOWER OF AMBULATORY, HOSPITAL OF ST. CROSS, WINCHESTER
A picturesque red-brick corner of the domestic buildings of St.
Cross Hospital, close to the magnificent grey-stone tower and
archway known as Beaufort’s Tower.
]
sixteen choristers: the number of Fellows or Socii was ten. The supreme
head over this varied community was the Warden.
This society, complete in itself and so far independent, was linked with
another--the sister foundation of New College, Oxford--in such a way as
to gain stability and dignity without subordination. Winchester was to
be independent of New, but the influence of New was to be a potent
factor in determining the policy of Winchester. The Warden of Winchester
was to be appointed by New College, and New College was also to have
extensive powers of visitation.
In Wykeham’s day any separation of the religious element from other
aspects of education would have been deemed impossible, and everything
was cast in a religious and even semi-monastic mould. Nevertheless the
organisations for the school and chantry were kept quite distinct, and
while divine service was celebrated practically continuously by the
chantry staff, the scholars were required to attend chapel services only
on Sundays, saints’ days, or other festivals. The Warden and Fellows
alike were to be in priests’ orders. The Fellows had duties to perform
connected with the chantry, but none connected with the school, except
that the Warden and Fellows were to elect the headmaster. The headmaster
was not necessarily to be in holy orders; he was to teach the scholars,
and to maintain discipline, and was to be assisted by the usher or
_hostiarius_. The ‘seventy’ were to be _pauperes et indigentes_, _i.e._
poor and in need of assistance, apt to study, and well versed in the
rudiments of Latin grammar, reading, and plain-song. They were to be
elected by a body of six, known afterwards as ‘the Chamber,’ from the
room overlooking Middle or Chamber Court, ‘Election Chamber,’ where
elections took place. The ‘Chamber’ was to consist of the Warden and two
Fellows from New (known as the senior and junior ‘posers’ respectively),
with the Warden, Subwarden, and Headmaster of Winchester. In election
preference was to be given to founder’s kin, and then to others in due
degrees of priority of claim. They were to remain until the age of
eighteen years, unless on the roll for New College; but founder’s kin
could remain till the age of twenty-five years.
The scholars were to be lodged, boarded, clothed, and taught entirely
free of expense: they were not to keep dogs, ferrets, or hawks: to carry
arms or frequent taverns: to empty water, etc., on the heads of their
companions from windows in the court--regulations which throw a curious
light on the manners of the time. The scholars were to be lodged and fed
under the charge of the _hostiarius_ or usher--an arrangement which
obtains even now, as the ‘seventy’ still reside in chambers in college,
under the charge of the second master.
We must not suppose that Wykeham’s scholars were to be boys either
destitute or in actual want. The term _pauperes et indigentes_ was
probably a formal expression, designed to exclude the actually wealthy
rather than anything else, like the term _in need of financial
assistance_ inserted in modern scholarship regulations.
In addition to the above, the statutes contemplated the admission of a
limited number of outsiders, known as _commensales_ or commoners, and
later on town boys or _oppidani_ were admitted as day boys. The
conditions under which the commoners resided varied greatly from time to
time. In 1727 Dr. Burton, then headmaster, made extensive additions to
the College buildings, practically converting his own house into a
boarding-house for them, and this building became known as ‘Old
Commoners.’ In 1838 Commoners was rebuilt, under the name of New
Commoners, but the result was not very satisfactory, and in 1860 the
present plan of boarding in tutors’ houses was commenced, when the Rev.
H. J. Wickham opened the first ‘House.’ In 1869, during Dr. Moberly’s
tenure as headmaster, the system was extended. ‘Commoners’ was done away
with, the commoners themselves lodged in tutors’ houses, and the
building in part transformed into ‘Moberly Library’--so termed in memory
of Dr. Moberly.
The College buildings and grounds are a charm and a delight. From the
outer front in College Street, little indeed can be seen. The
headmaster’s house, built on the site of the old Sustern Spital, is a
flat-fronted modern building faced with squared flints, and the old
Brewery presents little but a blank wall of ancient masonry. The one
external feature of interest is the delightful ‘Old Gateway’ surmounted
by a statue of the Virgin.
Passing under Old Gateway with College Brew House on the right, and then
under Middle Gate into Chamber Court, one is transported back
immediately into mediaevalism. There over Middle Gate is the figure of
‘Sainte Marie,’ and scholars, juniors, at least, if not always seniors,
as they cross the quad, doff their hats still in reverence to the Virgin
as they have done from the beginning. Immediately opposite you are
Chapel and Hall. Chapel, with Fromond’s chantry used by Lower-school
‘Men,’--for Winchester is remarkable among schools as having two
chapels--and the beautiful cloisters behind it, those cloisters which
the Founder himself seems almost to pervade and to spiritualize with his
presence, is a place to wander in and dream dreams of the past. Hall,
approached, as befits its dignity, up a grand old stairway, is
splendidly impressive, with its magnificent open timber roof and carved
wainscot, and the Founder’s portrait--a picture of real grace and
beauty--dominating the high table or dais at the other end. In the lobby
adjoining the kitchen they will show you the ‘Trusty Servant,’ the
quaint old painting emblematic of loyal and devoted service. The riddle
is explained in a copy of verses attached, and the absence of any
reference to expectation of reward on behalf of the ‘Trusty Sweater’ is
at least as suggestive as his loyalty and humble demeanour.
Most appealing, perhaps, after Hall, possibly more even than Cloisters,
is ‘Seventh Chamber,’ Wykeham’s original schoolroom, or part of it at
least, now used as a common study for senior College men, and a
veritable museum of interesting reminders of old Wykehamical life
mingled confusedly with aggressively incongruous and more modern
‘intrusive deposits,’--here perhaps a framed ‘Vanity Fair’ cartoon of
the headmaster; there possibly a couple of Teddy Bears serving as
mascots--for in college life the points of contrast between ancient and
modern are curious and startling, while not the least alluring of its
characteristic features is the rich flavour and vigour of college
nomenclature. ‘Moab,’ the boys’ washing-place in earlier and less
luxurious days--“Moab is my wash-pot”--is a delicious example of this.
College phraseology is a subject almost worthy of separate treatment by
itself.
‘Seventh Chamber Passage,’ itself originally part of Seventh Chamber,
leads you to ‘School,’ the seventeenth-century schoolroom built by
Warden Nicholas. Here you may see the ‘thrones’ or official seats in
earlier days of headmaster and usher, and the world-famous Winchester
emblem on the walls--
Aut disce
Aut discede
Manet tertia sors--caedi.
which may be freely rendered--
Learn, or depart, or stay and be beaten;
though it is more than doubtful whether, in the experience of earlier
Wykehamists at least, the first and the last-mentioned fates were at all
often found to be mutually exclusive.
Beyond is ‘Meads,’ where ‘Domum’ is yearly held, and beyond, again, ‘New
Meads,’ with its magnificent sward, its lofty trees, and its memories of
‘Eton Match’; and right away again, across the river, ‘Hills’ lies in
full view--St. Catherine’s Hill, where Winchester boys in earlier days
repaired for recreation on ‘remedies’ or holidays, the joys of which may
be followed out in full in Bompas’s delightful life of Frank Buckland.
“Manners makyth man”--one is tempted to wonder if more may not here be
meant than meets the ear, and whether ‘manners,’ in its Latin equivalent
_mores_ at least, does not wrap up a punning allusion, after the method
so dear to that age, to Warden Morys, to whose hands, on the erection of
the building, Wykeham first committed the future of his great college.
But be that as it may, the emblem seems to sum up the spirit of the
college with literal fidelity. Passing through its chambers, its chapel,
its courts, its cloisters, one is sadly tempted to linger to recall the
memory of this great headmaster, or recount the quaint stories told of
this famous warden or that, and the names of Ken, Arnold, Goddard,
Gabell, Huntingford, Barter, rise almost instinctively to one’s lips. We
shall find their memories all piously preserved and commemorated whether
in portrait, tablet, or building, as for instance the Memorial Gateway
erected as a memorial of the old Wykehamists who fell in the South
African War; but here we may not stop, and those who wish to do so can
follow out their story in Leach’s _Winchester College_ or Adams’s
delightful _Wykehamica_. But more striking than the past, the noble
traditions nobly preserved is the vitality in the present. ‘Sainte Marie
College’ has always known how to adapt herself successfully, as age
succeeded age, to the requirements of the day, and has paid the truest
respect to the Founder’s wishes in never allowing herself to grow old.
There is no frost, mingled with the kindliness of age, in Winchester
College.
CHAPTER XVIII
WOLVESEY--ST. CROSS--THE CASTLE HALL--THE ROUND TABLE
And for great Arthur’s seat ould Winchester preferres,
Whose ould Round Table yet she vaunteth to be hers.
DRAYTON’S _Polyolbion_.
From College one turns naturally to Wolvesey--Wolvesey with its
wonderful grey stone walls, its memories of Saxon and Norman,
Plantagenet and Stuart times. Here Alfred kept his Court, with all the
learned men of his time around him; here the _English Chronicle_ was
first compiled; and here, above that very Wolvesey wall, it may be, the
Danish pirates captured in the Solent were hanged--as has been already
related--in retributive justice. But the big blocks of ruin in Wolvesey
Mead are of later date; they recall to us the career of that notable
figure among the Bishops of Winchester, Henry of Blois, King Stephen’s
brother, bishop from 1129 to 1171--the masterful man, devoted churchman,
and scheming politician, whose story has been somewhat fully related in
Chapter VIII. To strengthen himself he fortified
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. LAWRENCE, WINCHESTER
A small but extremely interesting parish church in ‘The Square,’ of
which practically all the exterior, save the Western Doorway and
the Tower, is hidden from sight by the houses and shops hemming it
in on all sides. Every Bishop of Winchester on being installed
proceeds in solemn procession from the Cathedral to St. Lawrence
Church to ring the bell--a picturesque survival of feudal days.
‘The Square’ marks the site of a palace built for his own
occupation by William the Conqueror.
]
his dwelling at Wolvesey with an ‘adulterine’ castle--for he built here
without royal warrant, as he built his castles elsewhere at Bishop’s
Waltham and at Hursley,--and he sided alternately with Stephen and
Empress Matilda in the civil war, as circumstances dictated. And so it
befell that Winchester itself became divided into rival camps; Matilda’s
forces held the Royal Castle and the Bishop held Wolvesey, and, here
within his defences, now in ruins, the Bishop stood the siege valiantly.
Ultimately peace was made, and Winchester saw Prince Henry make joyful
entry into her ruined streets and ratify the compact. His later years
were passed in works of peace and beneficence, and for these he will
always be most gratefully remembered.
He built the Hospital of St. Cross, a permanent refuge for thirteen poor
brethren, and a house of daily entertainment for the poor and needy
outside its walls. He placed his foundation of St. Cross under the
protection of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, an Order specially
devoted to guarding the welfare of pilgrims and wayfarers. And so the
Brethren of St. Cross still wear to-day the eight-pointed cross of the
Order and the black gown which distinguished the Knights Hospitallers,
and the wayfarer’s dole of bread and beer may still be asked for and
obtained at its hospitable gates. Advancement, personal power, and
political ascendancy, all these Bishop Henry desired for himself, strove
for, won and lost in turn. St. Cross retains its vitality still,--such
is the perennial virtue of unselfish kindliness and beneficence.
Though its fortifications were dismantled, Wolvesey remained the
residence of the Bishops of Winchester for many centuries after Henry de
Blois. Here, on March 28, 1394, in the presence chamber of Wolvesey,
William of Wykeham received the warden, John Morys, and the seventy
scholars of his _Newe College of St. Marie_, and gave them his blessing
as they set out in solemn procession to enter into occupation of their
newly erected premises. In the Civil War, after Cromwell’s capture of
the city, the old Bishop’s Castle was finally dismantled.
Present-day Wolvesey Palace stands on your left as you enter from
College Street with the Norman ruins and the old Tilt yard in front of
it and on your right. Bishop Morley, the friend of Ken and Izaak Walton,
erected it. But Wolvesey and Farnham together proved too heavy an
episcopal burden, and later bishops have preferred to reside at Farnham.
So Wolvesey ceased to be the Bishop of Winchester’s official residence,
and the greater part of Morley’s building was pulled down by Bishop
North at the end of the eighteenth century. The growing need for the
division of the diocese makes it quite possible, however, that the
Bishops of Winchester may again be residing in Wolvesey Palace, as their
predecessors did for so many hundreds of years.
Wykeham’s College, ‘the Newe Saint Marie College of Wynchester,’ is but
a stone’s-throw from Wolvesey. The story of the College has been fully
dealt with in a former chapter, and so, now, as we pass along College
Street from Wolvesey, our thoughts may well turn to a house on the left
adjoining College, with memories of a different kind, those of Jane
Austen. A tablet over the door recalls the fact of Jane Austen’s death
within its walls in 1817. She had removed here from her home at Chawton,
near Alton, in hope of recovery under the medical treatment which
Winchester could afford her. But the hope was vain. She lies buried in
the north aisle of the Cathedral nave. We know her now as among the
rarest and most charming of women novelists. Of her we shall speak again
in the chapter on ‘Winchester in Literature.’
Some half mile or so south of College, beyond New Meads and the meadows
by the river--those meadows from which the tower and pinnacles of
College Chapel form so poetic a picture as they mingle with the trees
around, and the Cathedral behind--lies St. Cross, a foundation which has
undergone many vicissitudes and been at various times “much abused”
(_see pp._ 188, 189), but which has happily now for many years past been
rescued from the spoiler and restored to the full exercise of generous
beneficence. Of its foundation by Henry of Blois we have already spoken,
but in its associations another historic name figures, of equal
prominence with Bishop Henry’s--that of Beaufort, Bishop and Cardinal in
Henry VI.’s reign. Beaufort was a second founder, and the domestic
buildings and the fine gateway are his work. Along with the Brethren
with black gown and silver cross will be seen some wearing a mulberry
gown, with the Beaufort Rose as emblem; these are Brethren of the order
Beaufort founded--the Order of Noble Poverty. St. Cross is not a place
to describe at all in words; its traditions, its characteristic customs,
its general atmosphere belong to it and to it alone; to appreciate it it
must be felt. Peaceful and dignified, with the clear transparent waters
of Itchen flowing quietly by at its feet, there is no place in
Winchester, or indeed anywhere else, where the sense of hallowed charm,
of serenity, of contentment, and of rest seems quite so natural and so
pervading as here.
Wherever else we turn in Winchester we find some treasure or other over
which to linger. On the high ground forming the south-west angle of the
city there is the County Hall, last surviving relic of the great royal
castle, which William of Normandy first erected and which his successors
added to. For some six hundred years that great keep, with its heavy
battlements and frowning bastions, scowled down upon the city and
overawed its burghers. Yet, grim and all but impregnable as those ‘rude
ribs’ might seem to be, more than one assailant found means to penetrate
within. Here, in 1140, Matilda the Empress, besieged by Stephen’s Queen,
was forced by hunger to abandon resistance, and to seek safety by
stealth and stratagem in a hasty and disastrous flight--her power of
effective resistance broken finally and for ever. Here, in 1645, flushed
with victory from Naseby field, came Cromwell, and, after nine days of
hot cannonade, compelled the surrender of the citadel--a surrender which
he followed up by ordering the castle to be ‘slighted,’ _i.e._ razed to
the ground.
The present Castle Hall was erected by a Winchester monarch--Henry III.,
Henry of Winchester. Here again the sense of the historic past swells
and surges round you. It is almost a revelation in history to walk round
it and follow out in detail the memories of those whose history is
personally connected with it, their names and arms all emblazoned in the
stained glass which fills the lights on either side. Local feeling has
been just recently somewhat deeply stirred by the removal within the
Hall of Gilbert’s well-known bronze statue of Queen Victoria, formerly
placed in the Abbey grounds--a removal which has evoked a very
unfortunate controversy, and as to the wisdom of which considerable
cleavage of opinion exists. But whatever view be taken of this, as to
the impressiveness of the great Hall, within and without, or the story
it has to tell, no two opinions can be held. The grand interior with its
splendid columns speaks of great assemblies within its walls; of
Parliaments such as the one held here as early as 1265, within a year of
the death of the great De Montfort, the ‘inventor,’ so to speak, of the
representative assembly; of State ceremonial displays such as when Henry
V. received the French ambassadors here, a few days only before the
Agincourt expedition sailed--as when Henry VII. celebrated the birth of
his first-born, Arthur of Winchester, Prince of Wales, and as when Henry
VIII. received and fêted the great Emperor Charles V., the
Charlemagne of his day; of State Trials such as that which unjustly
condemned Sir Walter Raleigh; of the Bloody Assize and the horror of the
judicial murder of Dame Alicia Lisle; while the most characteristic
touch perhaps of all is given by the quaint relic hanging on the western
wall, the so-called King Arthur’s Round Table. A curious relic indeed
this latter, and an ancient one, possibly 700 years old. We shall hardly
accept it, as Henry VIII. and his royal Spanish guest did, as the actual
table at which King Arthur and his knights used to seat themselves, even
though we may read their names--Sir Launcelot, Sir Galahallt, Sir
Bedivere, Sir Kay--inscribed upon its margin. Rather does it recall to
us those quaintly attractive, uncritical mediaeval days, when historical
perspective was unknown, that glorious age when “Once upon a time”
almost satisfied the yearnings of the historical instinct. Yet one may
question whether we are really better off, because for us King Arthur’s
Round Table has no existence and Arthur himself is lost in the strange
background of
Moving faces and of waving hands,
that weird labyrinth where history and legend, myth and romance, are so
strangely and inextricably interwoven; and one turns away baffled and
reluctant from many and many an old-world story, and many and many an
old-world relic such as this, with the sense of something like a lost
inheritance.
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
There is, however, little real excuse for these unavailing regrets in
Winchester, for she above all places has store of real history--and such
history, too--enough and to spare.
Here, for instance, in the West Gate adjoining the Castle Hall, and in
the Obelisk just beyond the circuit of the old walls, this vividness of
history meets us again. Formerly the West Gate was a blockhouse as much
as a gate. You can still see where the portcullis worked up and down,
and look down from the battlements of the roof through the machicolated
openings which enabled defenders to meet assailants with molten lead and
kindred compliments. Later on it was a prison. On the walls of the
splendid old chamber above the gateway we can see elaborate designs
carved out by one poor prisoner after another, to while away the tedium
and to help him to forget the miseries of his imprisonment. Now the West
Gate is a museum with a collection of rare local interest: early weights
and measures of the days when Winchester could still impose its
standards upon others, weapons and armour, the gibbet of the
executioner, and the axe of the headsman. But strong for defence as the
West Gate and city wall were, the Obelisk beyond recalls to us one foe
whom no bar could exclude, no bolt restrain; for though in 1666
Winchester was straitly shut up like Jericho of old, and none went out
and none came in, that grim and relentless assailant, the Plague, passed
all barriers unchallenged, and Winchester became as a city of the dead.
Then--for none dared approach--the country people held their market
without and chaffered for their wares at safe distance with the men upon
the wall, and the Obelisk, erected in 1759, serves to commemorate the
spot where marketing was done for Winchester citizens under such tragic
conditions. Happily, plague has disappeared from our midst for some 250
years. In mediaeval days, right on indeed from 1348, the year of the
Black Death, plague was all too common a visitant. The sister societies
of Natives and Aliens still survive in Winchester, to carry on the work
of relieving widows and orphans, first begun when plague laid its hand
so heavily on the city in the ‘Annus Mirabilis’ and left so many widows
and orphans to relieve.
Full of interest as the West Gate is, it leaves a sense of regret behind
when we remember that it is the only one remaining of the four principal
gateways which the city once possessed. The artificial and curiously
warped ideas of taste and sentiment which characterised the mid-Georgian
period were responsible for a wholesale destruction of Old Winchester
architectural treasures. Three historic gateways, the ruins of Hyde
Abbey, the tomb of Alfred the Great, Bishop Morley’s Palace of Wolvesey,
all these and others suffered destruction, partial or complete. The City
Cross itself was condemned to removal, but popular indignation, ever
ready to express itself in Winchester as vigorously, even in modern
days, as it was in earlier days of Saxon and Dane, when popular clamour
round the hustings was the due and only expression of law,
[Illustration: HURSLEY VICARAGE
Hursley, five miles from Winchester, is the centre of ‘Kebleland.’
Here John Keble was parish priest for thirty-one years. Hursley
Church was practically rebuilt from the profits of the _Christian
Year_, and Keble and his wife lie buried in Hursley churchyard
close to the porch on the southern side.
The village has memories of Richard Cromwell, and there is a fine
historical monument to the Cromwell family in the tower of Hursley
Church.
]
could not be restrained, and the City Cross was left undisturbed. Nor
did the West Gate escape except by accident. The great room over the
gateway was at that time held as an annexe to a public-house adjoining,
and so the West Gate was spared merely in order that Winchester citizens
might the better enjoy their ‘cakes and ale.’ History teaches us to be
grateful at times to strange benefactors. To many, with the present
trend of social and political thought, the sentiment _Das Gasthaus als
Freund_ will come almost as a shock, yet here in Winchester we are
confronted by the curious paradox, that while water has sapped the
stability of the Cathedral, that of the West Gate has been secured by
beer.
Municipal life in Winchester forms another chapter full of interest. Of
her early ‘gilds,’ dating back perhaps to days before Alfred, of the
Chepemanesela, the Chenicteshalla, the Hantachenesla, and other vaguely
indicated centres of civic organisation, where, in Henry I.’s time, the
citizens in their various grades assembled to ‘drink their gild,’ we
have already spoken. Her roll of mayors claims to begin with Florence de
Lunn in 1184. Whatever antiquity the Mayoralty can justly claim--for
Florence de Lunn can hardly be treated quite seriously--her corporate
history is full and varied.
The new Guildhall in the Broadway, some thirty years old only, which has
replaced the old Guildhall in the High Street, possesses an interesting
collection of civic portraits, along with corporation plate, municipal
archives, and much wealth of historic raw material.
The finest of these pictures, King Charles II.’s portrait, painted by
Lely, and presented by the Merry Monarch himself to the city,
represents, perhaps, the only return with which the loyalty of the
citizens towards the house of Stuart was rewarded. They lent King
Charles I. £1000, they melted their private plate, valued at £300, and
their city plate, valued at £58 more, to help to fill his empty coffers
when the Civil War was raging. Old Bishop Morley, whose memories centre
closest round present-day Wolvesey and Farnham, and Bishop Hoadly of the
Queen Anne period, are among the more interesting of the personalities
whose effigies are here displayed.
Many, indeed, are the interesting memories which Winchester preserves of
the Merry Monarch and his Court; of Nell Gwynn and of the valiant stand
made against her by Prebendary Ken; of Sir Christopher Wren and the
palace he commenced to build for his royal master on the site of the
castle razed by Cromwell--a great and ambitious project never completed,
but which, under the name of the King’s House, served for many years as
the military headquarters of the city till a great fire swept it away in
1894, to make room for the present barracks, erected, soon afterwards,
on very nearly the same site.
Another interesting Guildhall portrait is that of Edward Cole, Mayor in
1597, a patriotic citizen who himself subscribed £50--a large sum for
one man in those days--towards the Queen’s war fund in days of the
Armada, and a ‘gubernator’ some years later of Christes Hospitall,
Winchester, founded, by Peter
Symonds, in 1607 alike for the maintenance of the aged and the education
of the young--a foundation possessing a delightful old Jacobean
building, just beyond the Close wall, out of which has grown, almost
within the last decade, on a wide and open site on the outskirts of the
city, a rapidly developing school of modern type, where the ‘children’
of Peter Symonds, in largely increased numbers, receive a far wider
education than was possible when he first called them into existence.
His will is a curious and characteristic document. It occupied an
enormous number of folios. Blue Coat schoolboys, practically until the
removal of the school to Horsham, showed respect to his memory by some
sixty of their number attending a special Good Friday Service at the
church of All Hallows, Lombard Street, at which sixpences and raisins
were distributed, in accordance with his will; and his Winchester
scholars and Brethren keep his memory by an annual procession to service
at the Cathedral on St. Peter’s Day, with a special sermon and quaint
ceremonial observance.
Such are some of the matters of interest, small and great, which meet
you wherever you turn in Winchester--everywhere there is some _genius
loci_, some cricket installed, and chirping on the hearth. Here it is a
quaint tavern-sign such as you can read on the outskirts. As you leave
the city you read the legend “Last Out,” as you approach from without
you read “First In.” Or it is a name of some street--Jewry Street, for
instance, recalling the times when, as already narrated, the Jews
formed a powerful element in the commercial prosperity of the city, and
had a Ghetto here--or Staple Garden, reminiscent of the great Wool Hall,
where the ‘Tron’ or weighing-machine of the Wool Staple was kept, when
Winchester was the mart where the wool trade of the south of England
centred. And here and there are darker and more sombre recollections,
such as the tablet outside the City Museum serves to remind us of the
moving tragedy of the execution of Dame Alicia Lisle in September 1685,
on a spot in the open roadway, in front of what then was the Market
House. Then, too, there are glorious old houses, Tudor and mediaeval,
like God Begot House and the so-called Cheesehill Old Rectory, and the
delightful houses erected by Sir Christopher Wren himself--those
inhabited now by Dr. England and Captain Crawford in Southgate Street
for instance, and the house in St. Peter’s Street erected for the
Duchess of Portsmouth, of unpleasant memory. These are merely random
examples of the kind of interest which Winchester presents to those who
wander through her streets with eyes to see and ears to hear. For the
casual visitor Winchester has much to offer; for the student of history
she has more; but her wealth of treasure can only be apprehended
adequately by those who are privileged to dwell within her charmed
circle, for her harvest of attraction is too wide to be garnered save by
those who bring extended opportunity as well as love and reverence to
the task.
CHAPTER XIX
WINCHESTER IN LITERATURE
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s eye
Clothes them with shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
It is always a pleasing occupation to follow out the associations of
human fancy which often invest persons and places with an interest, and
indeed a romantic charm, to which the cold-eyed historian or dryasdust
critic is entirely unresponsive, and if Winchester as it first appeared
to us, as we looked down from the brow of St. Giles’s Hill, seemed to
throb with the life and interest of a departed age, and of historical
personages long since passed away, so too we shall find that it
possesses associations of the purely literary type, not indeed fit to
challenge comparison with the glorious pageantry of its historic past
which we have attempted, all too inadequately, to present upon our
stage, but not unworthy to be chronicled and to be included in her
volume of romance and recollection. Her points of contact with
literature have been many, and yet it would be wrong to describe her as
a literary city. No poet of note, no great writer, has, in recent days
at all events, claimed her as parent; her acquaintance has been rather
with literary persons than with literature itself, for though she has
attracted many to make her in some form or other their theme, but little
of real weight in any but ancient literature has first seen the light
beneath her auspices. For all this she has, in literature as in life,
her story to tell, and that an ancient one.
The first literary associations of Winchester are, as is but natural,
historical ones, and the first mention of her in literature is found in
Bede, who records for us, among other scanty details, her name, ‘Venta,
quae a gente Saxonum Ventanceastir appellatur’; she next appears in a
full flood of glory, the seat of the learned and literary court of
Alfred, from which he gave the world the treasures of his literary
efforts--the _Consolations_ of Boëthius, Gregory’s _Pastoral Care_,
Orosius, and Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_, all rendered into the
vernacular, and more important far than all of these, the great
thesaurus of early national history, the _English Chronicle_, the
history of which we have already related, and from which we have quoted
so constantly in our earlier chapters, to be followed by the equally
momentous Domesday Book--curious as it may seem to include this among
literary productions. Following from this we have a wide and almost
bewildering series of chroniclers, historians, and annalists, some of
whom, like William of Malmesbury, Henry Knighton, and Matthew Paris,
record details of her career incidentally as general items in the
history of the land, while others, like Precentor Wulfstan and the
annalists of Ealden Mynstre and Newan Mynstre, laboured at Winchester in
their respective scriptoria, producing not merely wonderful works like
the _Benedictional_ of St. Æthelwold and the _Golden Book_ of Edgar, but
local histories in goodly store, the Hyde _Liber Vitae_ and _Liber de
Hyda_, and the later monkish annals of Plantagenet days--Rudborne’s
_Major Historia Wintoniae_, the anonymously written _Annales de
Wintonia_, and others. Prominent among these various chroniclers was
Geoffrey of Monmouth, who, romancist and fabricator as he was, has yet
rendered valuable service by preserving the British legends as they
survived among the Brythonic folk, and has given us--and let us be duly
grateful--the Arthurian legend in all its suggestive elusiveness and
mystery, centring round Winchester and Silchester, with Arthur the
Christian King, Merlin the Mage, Dubric the High Saint, and many
another--a legend which passed through many languages and many lands,
gathering store of added marvels on the way, the customary guerdon of
such literary wanderings, to reappear in strange unwonted guises, as in
Layamond’s _Brut_ and the _Morte d’Arthur_ of Malorie. And the legendary
lore of Winchester is far from being her least attractive literary
asset: we have dealt with this subject fairly fully already--some may
perhaps deem too fully,--yet is not legend but the _alter ego_ of
history, and are not myth and legend, sober fact and imaginative
creation, after all merely the multicoloured strata in the complete
rainbow of presentment of vital truth, passing and repassing each into
other by nice gradation and imperceptible advance? But all these are but
prehistoric as it were, when English as a language was not, and monastic
Latin and Anglo-Saxon the muddy media of literary communication.
The Winchester stream in English literature begins to flow at first with
feeble current--a distich or so of uncouth verse, or a casual reference,
as in _Piers Plowman_, Leland, Camden, or elsewhere. Drayton, in his
_Polyolbion_, has some twenty lines or so on the Itchen, referring to
the Round Table of Arthur at Winchester, and the towns on her course,
speaking of
... that wondrous Pond whence she derives her head,
And places by the way, by which shee’s honoured,
(Old Winchester, that stands neere in her middle way,
And Hampton, at her fall, into the Solent Sea),
and Ken and Walton, in later Stuart days, come upon the scene. Ken is a
real Winchester possession--educated at Winchester College, and later
on, Prebendary of the Cathedral, he wrote his well-known and still
widely-used _Manual of Prayer_ for the use of the scholars of Winchester
College, and his _Morning and Evening Hymns_ breathe the same spirit of
the inner religious life afterwards so beautifully reflected in Keble’s
_Christian Year_. His preferment to the see of Bath and
[Illustration: WINCHESTER FROM ST. GILES’S HILL
From St. Giles’s Hill, where in mediaeval days the world-famous Fair of
St. Egidius or St. Giles was held, an unequalled view of Winchester city
can be obtained. The Cathedral, Wolvesey, the College, the Guildhall,
the High Street, the Alfred Statue, the Old Guildhall, the Westgate, can
all be seen. The dark clump of trees on the sky-line is the so-called
Oliver’s Battery.]
Wells arose too out of his sturdy refusal to countenance the Merry
Monarch’s irregular life, for he refused to let Mistress Eleanor Gwynne
have the use of his house to lodge in, a refusal which angered the king
at the time, but conciliated his respect, for on the bishopric falling
vacant he declared that none should have it but the “good little man who
refused his lodging to poor Nelly.” Izaak Walton, Ken’s relative, made
Winchester his residence during the closing years of his long life--a
man of culture and some literary pretension, apart altogether from his
immortal _Compleat Angler_, for his lives of Donne and Herbert attained
to some celebrity; tradition connects a certain summer-house by the
stream in the Deanery garden with him and his fishing, and in several
places in his _Compleat Angler_ he makes allusion to our Winchester
streams, showing that he had ofttimes baited his angle by one or other
of its waters. Peace to his soul--he rests in the Cathedral, in
Silkstede’s Chapel, and the verses over his tomb, though devoid of all
literary merit, are said to have been written by Ken his kinsman.
Our next possession is a greater name--and that, moreover, a Hampshire,
though not in any real sense a Winchester one--the Hampshire novelist,
the most charming and natural of women writers, Jane Austen. Here in the
early days of 1817, when a deadly and insidious malady had attacked her,
she came with her sister Cassandra to lodge in a house in College
Street, occupied then by a Mrs. David, in the vain hope that Winchester
medical skill might restore her strength.
The following letter from her pen,[3] written at this period, reveals
the characteristic _espièglerie_ of the writer, which not even advancing
weakness could disarm or subdue.
MRS. DAVID’S, COLLEGE STREET, WINTON,
_Tuesday, May 27th_.
There is no better way, my dearest E., of thanking you for your
affectionate concern for me during my illness than by telling you
myself, as soon as possible, that I continue to get better. I will
not boast of my handwriting--neither that nor my face have yet
recovered their proper beauty; but in other respects I gain
strength very fast; am now out of bed from 9 in the morning to 10
at night; upon the sofa, it is true, but I eat my meals with Aunt
Cassandra in a rational way, and can employ myself, and walk from
one room to another. Mr. Lyford says he will cure me, and if he
fails I shall draw up a memorial and lay it before the Dean and
Chapter, and have no doubt of redress from that pious, learned, and
disinterested body. Our lodgings are very comfortable. We have a
neat little drawing-room with a bow window, overlooking Dr.
Gabell’s garden.... On Thursday, which is a confirmation and a
holiday, we are to get Charles [_a relative--then a boy at the
College_] out to breakfast. We have had but one visit from him,
poor fellow, as he is in sick-room, but he hopes to be out
to-night.... God bless you, my dear E. If ever you are ill, may you
be as tenderly nursed as I have been. May the same blessed
alleviations of anxious, sympathising friends be yours; and may you
possess, as I dare say you will, the greatest blessing of all, in
the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. _I_ could
not feel this.--Your very affectionate aunt,
J. A.
Poor Jane Austen, the rally was but a momentary one, and an untimely
death cut short her career just as she was developing to her best work.
She is buried in the Cathedral, where, curiously, the flat stone slab
over her body speaks eloquently of her benevolence of heart, sweetness
of temper, and Christian patience and hope, but not one word of her
literary skill or claims as an authoress--the only reference to these is
in the indirect phrase “the extraordinary endowments of her mind.” So
little was her right place in literature then realized, that some among
her friends saw her appearance as a novelist rather with concern than
with approval, and her literary ventures were even referred to
apologetically. Posterity has amply atoned for this neglect: the
Cathedral possesses two memorials of her--a brass and a stained-glass
window; and she has long since been admitted to the high measure of
appreciation to which her naturalness and sincerity justly entitle her.
The Dr. Gabell referred to in the letter was, of course, the well-known
Dr. Gabell, headmaster of the College, mentioned in the previous
chapter, a characteristic figure famous in his day, a picture of whom,
had she been spared, she might perhaps have left us, limned in her own
nervous and inimitable manner; but, alas! it was not to be. Fortunately
the house she occupied is known, and a commemorative tablet, placed over
the door, records appropriately her sojourn there and her untimely
death.
Following close upon Jane Austen came another, with a name ever to be
honoured in song--a summer migrant merely, it is true, or rather an
autumn one,--whose light was destined to be shortly afterwards suddenly
extinguished also. John Keats, the poet, who came here in August 1819
from Shanklin, where “Keats’s Green” preserves his memory, for a visit
of some two months’ duration--“the last good days of his life.” Several
considerations dictated his visit to Winchester, among others, the
desire to have access to a good library, a desire destined, quite
unaccountably, to disappointment. His letters written from Winchester
are full and charming literary productions: he describes the
‘maiden-ladylike gentility’ of her streets; the door-steps always ‘fresh
from the flannel’--the knockers with a staid, serious, and almost awful
quietness about them; the High Street as quiet as a lamb, the
door-knockers ‘dieted to three raps per diem’;--in such happy, delicate
phrases he hits off the Winchester of the day. Of the place itself he
gives us interesting touches: the air on one of its downs is ‘worth
sixpence a pint’; the beautiful streams full of trout delight him; the
Cathedral, fourteen centuries old, enchants his imagination; while the
foundation of St. Cross he finds to be greatly abused.
Where he lodged we know not, dearly as we should like to--we can only
form such conclusions as the following clues[4] point to:
I take a walk every day for an hour before dinner, and this is
generally my walk. I go out the back gate across one street into
the Cathedral yard, which is always interesting; there I pass under
the trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the
Cathedral, turn to the left under a stone doorway--then I am on the
other side of the building, which leaving behind me, I pass on
through two College-like squares, seemingly built for the
dwelling-place of Deacons and Prebendaries, furnished with grass
and shaded with trees; then I pass through one of the old city
gates and then you are in one College Street, through which I pass,
and at the end thereof crossing some meadows, and at last a country
alley of gardens, I arrive at the foundation of St. Cross, which is
a very interesting old place, both for its Gothic tower and Alms
square and also for the appropriation of its rich rents to a
relation of the Bishop of Winchester. Then I pass over St. Cross
meadows till you come to the most beautifully clear river. Now this
is only one mile of my walk.[5]
Another clue, which locates the house very close to the High Street, if
not in it, is given by the following:
We heard distinctly a noise patting down the High Street as of a
walking cane of the good old Dowager breed, and a little minute
after we heard a less voice observe, “What a noise the ferril
made--it must be loose.”[6]
Winchester streets are less staid and genteel now, and the High Street
would hardly echo responsive to such repressed sounds to-day.
Two months only the visit lasted, months of tense compression and rich
utterance of song. _Hyperion_ (which he never finished), _Lamia_, _The
Eve of St. Agnes_, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_--all these in one form or
other came under his pen for completion or revision, while his _Ode to
Autumn_, the most perfect of all his odes, was wholly a Winchester
production inspired by his circumstances and surroundings. The German
poet might almost have had Keats prophetically before him when he sang:
Singst du nicht dein ganzes Leben,
Sing doch in der Jugend Drang!
Nur im Blüthenmond erheben
Nachtigallen ihren Sang.
E’en though after years be silent,
Sing while youthful passions throng,
Only in the fervid spring-time
Nightingales pour forth their song.
But no after years, alas! were to succeed, and Keats’s fervid
‘Blüthenmond’ was all his allotted span. Winchester is happy in the
memory of his eventful connection with her, brief in time though it was.
Our next name is Thackeray, who seems to have loved to locate his scenes
in our city and neighbourhood, though in general his references have too
little local colour to permit of identification--assuming, that is, that
any such local image was really intended.
_Vanity Fair_ and _Esmond_ are full of local allusions; Sir Pitt
Crawley, for instance, would appear to derive his names from Pitt and
Crawley, two villages close to Winchester; and in _Esmond_, Hampshire
allusions, tantalisingly veiled, it is true, seem to meet and to baffle
you everywhere. It seems impossible to avoid identifying Castlewood,
with its ruined house battered down by Cromwell, and the Bell Inn with
Basing House and Basingstoke; and while Alton, Alresford, and Crawley
are all mentioned, it is round Winchester that interest centres and
perplexes most. Where else in literature is a scene so inimitably
conjured up and told so charmingly and with such restraint, where else
is the real Thackeray so fully revealed, as when Esmond rides on from
Walcote to the ‘George’ at Winchester on the fateful 29th December, and
walked straight to the Cathedral. The organ was playing, the
winter’s day was already growing grey, as he passed under the
street arch into the Cathedral yard and made his way into the
ancient solemn edifice.
Wonderful is the chapter that follows--when Esmond and his ‘mistress,’
reconciled once more, first become mutually conscious of their love, and
the words of the anthem, “He that goeth forth and weepeth shall
doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him,”
find their joyous refrain in the loving words they exchange.
But where is Walcote? Conjecture would almost naturally settle on
Lainston House, some three miles away, the memories of which, in the
person of the notorious Duchess of Kingston, doubtless suggested the
character of Beatrix the incomparable, the breaker of hearts, the wilful
and selfish beauty, did not distance put this out of question. Prior’s
Barton House, at St. Cross, would fit us better. But the problem is a
baffling one, if indeed it has any solution at all.
Of a different kind are the memories which linger round the immediate
neighbourhood--the villages of Twyford, Otterbourne, Hursley. At Twyford
the poet Pope was sent to school, and in a house close by the great Dr.
Benjamin Franklin composed his autobiography; Otterbourne was the
birthplace and lifelong home of Charlotte Yonge, the high-minded and
accomplished, whose books will always be a standard for what is highest
and most womanly in fiction--who loved to weave the details of local
association with the stories she told so skilfully and well; and on a
higher level still we have at Hursley the memories of Keble and the
_Christian Year_,--not that Keble wrote the _Christian Year_ at Hursley,
though his connection with the place as curate commenced before it was
completed, but his life-work was in reality here. Hursley Church,
practically rebuilt by him from the profits of the sale of his
_Christian Year_, is his truest memorial, and the beautiful church and
peaceful churchyard, where he sleeps his last earthly sleep, will be
ever a spot of hallowed association and pilgrimage. Winchester may be
proud of its hymn-writers: Ken and Keble were two, and a third less well
known, but certainly deserving to be honoured, was William Whiting,
master of the College Choir School some two generations or so back,
whose beautiful hymn, “Eternal Father, strong to save,” will ever hold a
high place in the affections of church-going people.
Following on these memories we have a host of references in modern
fiction which centre more or less definitely round the neighbourhood.
Trollope’s _Barchester_ has been conjecturally identified with
Winchester, and there is a wonderfully minute and circumstantial
correspondence in _The Warden_ between the details of _Hiram’s Hospital_
and St. Cross. Miss Braddon takes us to Winchester indeed, but gives us
little, if any, actual picture of the city. The immortal Sherlock Holmes
honoured it also with a visit in the _Adventure of the Copper Beeches_,
keeping an appointment at the ‘Black Swan,’ “an inn of repute in the
High Street,” and the Cathedral and Close seem to be suggested in the
_Silence of Dean Maitland_. Allusions direct, and what seem allusions
barely veiled, are frequent, but none can vie in tragic interest and
solemn faithfulness with the last awful scene in Hardy’s _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_--when Angel Clare and Liza, her husband and sister, are
awaiting the moment of poor Tess’s execution:--
When they had reached the top of the West Hill the clocks in the
town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes, and walking
onwards yet a few steps they reached the first milestone ... and
waited in paralysed suspense beside the stone.
The prospect from the summit was almost unlimited. In the valley
beneath, the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings
showing as in an isometric drawing--among them the broad Cathedral
tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and
nave; the spires of St. Thomas’s; the pinnacled tower of the
College; and more to the right the tower and gables of the ancient
hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of
bread and ale....
Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other
city edifices, a large red brick building with level grey roof, and
rows of short barred windows speaking captivity, the whole
contrasting greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities
of the Gothic erections.... From the middle of the building an ugly
flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east horizon, and
viewed from this spot, on its shady side and against the light,
seemed the one blot on the city’s beauty. Yet it was with this blot
and not with the beauty that the two gazers were concerned. Upon
the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were
riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck, something
moved slowly up the staff and extended itself upon the breeze. It
was a black flag.[7]
Poor Tess! was it necessary for the author to mete out measure thus
cruelly upon the children of his imagination--was it kind to Winchester
to burden her memories with one so appallingly harrowing, so much in
contrast with her quiet peace?
And yet, after all, is it anything more than retributive justice? Have
not her citizens--those of a generation or so back, at least--been
responsible for permitting the one really commanding elevation and
landmark she possesses to be marred and dishonoured by this same ‘blot,’
these obtrusive prison-walls, capped by this self-same ‘ugly flat-topped
octagonal tower’? Is not rather the creator of _Tess_ displaying a fine
and just critical perception in thus exacting from them the full
literary penalty for so unpardonable an outrage on the outward
attractiveness of their own fair city?
Such are some of the phantoms which pursue or elude us as we pass to
and fro through the circle of Winchester and its surroundings--yet are
they actual phantoms? Have not these seemingly impalpable nothings as
complete an identity as the memories and records of the actual
happenings of the past? The writer well recollects, after hunting
through Salisbury and exploring its treasures of architecture and
interest, the delight with which he came upon the old Cathedral organ,
now for some years past removed from the Cathedral to one of the city
churches, and recognized in it a real bond of relationship--not because
it was originally the gift of George III., though that indeed was the
case, but because it was the organ on which Dickens’s Tom Pinch had
played when the Cathedral service was over, and his friend the
organist’s assistant had permitted him to touch the keys. Not a great
circumstance, nor a great character--far from it,--but sufficient to
supply the one touch of human sympathy by which soul recognizes soul,
and which binds all--past and present, student and subject, reader and
author--alike in one. And even as these phantoms, whether of history or
legend, of actual existence or fancy, have been conjured up before us
for some brief spell, let us, now our task has drawn to a close, bid
them adieu with what kindliness of recollection we may:
Come like shadows, so depart.
Index
_The titles in black type refer to illustrations._
Adam of Gurdon, 123
Ælfeah, 58
Æthelbert, 32
Æthelred the Redeless, 61, 85
Æthelwold, Bishop, 20, 30, 49, 54, 58, 78, 85, 147, 153, 154
Æthelwulf, 30, 32, 85, 153
Alfred, King, 5, 32, 34, 91, 143, 152, 153
Alfred, a refugee, 38
Alfred, statue of, 42
Alresford, 111, 184
Alswitha, 41, 91, 145
Alton, Pass of, 123
Alwarenestret, 94
Alwine, 71
Anderida, 15
Anselm, Archbishop, 87, 96
Antonine, Itineraries, 15
Arthur, King, 15, 168, 183
Arthur, Prince, 151, 173
Arthur, Round Table, 21, 168, 174, 184
Asser, Bishop, 36, 40
Assize, Bloody, 7, 175
Athelstan, King, 43
Augustine, 21
Aulus Plautius, 15
Austen, Jane, 7, 154, 171, 185
Avington Park, 22
Barons’ war, 113
Beaufort, Cardinal, 147, 151, 171
Bede (Venerable), 22
Benedictines, 131
Birinus, 23, 24, 153, 154
Bishop’s Waltham, 162, 169
Black Death, 139, 160
Bredenestret, 94
Broadway, 177
Browne, Harold, Bishop, 154
Bucchestret, 93, 94
Burton, Dr., 163
Buttercross, 80, 118, 177
Cædmon, 36
Cær Gwent, 14
Calais, 121
Calpestret, 94
Camden, 143
Castle, Norman, at Winchester, 86, 94, 172
Castle, Brabantine merchants in Winchester, 115
Cathedral, 8, 29
Cathedral of Æthelwold, 56, 77
Cathedral, bedesmen, 4
Cathedral, pilgrims at, 128
Cathedral, preservation of, 77, 155
Cathedral, transformation by Wykeham, 149
Cathedral (Winchester), 23, 146
Celts, 12
Charlemagne, 27
Charles II., 6, 178
Charles V. (Emperor), 6, 174
Chenictes, 96
Chenichetehalla, 96, 177
Chepemanesela, 96, 177
Cheyney Court, 155
Cheyney Court and Close Gate, 112
Chilcombe, 47
Christes Hospitall, 5, 179
_Christian Year_ (Keble), 192
Christianity in Hampshire, 21
Clausentum (Southampton), 15, 18
Close, the, 125
Cnut, 5, 65, 85, 91, 144, 153
Colbrand, 44, 91
Cole, Edward, Mayor, 178
Colet, Dean, 160
College, Brew House, 164
College, Winchester, 145, 158
Commoners, 163
County Hall, 172
Cromwell, Oliver, 172
Cromwell, Thomas, 142
Curfew, 80
Curle, Bishop, 145
Danemark Mead, 47, 91
Danes, 28, 36, 60, 85, 153
Danihel (Bishop), 25
David, King of Scotland, 105
Dean and Chapter of Winchester, 144
Deanery, 145, 155
Deanery, The, 105
De Montfort, Simon, 113, 173
Domesday Book, 72, 80, 92, 182
Domesday (Winchester), 92
Domum, 166
Dorchester, 23
Drayton’s _Polyolbion_, 184
Dunstan (Archbishop), 30, 50, 56
Ealden Mynstre, 41, 44, 51, 183
East Gate, 94, 95
Easton, 96
Edgar, 30, 48, 49, 59, 85
Edmund, King, 48
Edred, King, 48
Edward the Confessor, 66
Edward III., King, 120
Edward, Prince, 114
Edward the Elder, King, 43, 91
Edwy, King, 49
Edyngton, Bishop, 147, 151
Egbert, 27, 85, 153
Election chamber, 162
Emma (Ælfgyfu), Queen, 62, 65, 85, 91, 153
_English Chronicle_, 22, 34, 39, 40, 50, 61, 69, 82, 101, 168, 182
Escheopes, 95
Esmond, 190
Estals, 95
Ethelmar, Bishop, 154
Eton College, 152
Evesham, battle, 114
Feudal system, 80
Flesmangere Stret, 94
Font (cathedral), 100
Fox, Bishop, 147, 151
Franklin, Benjamin, 192
Friars in Winchester, 139
Fromond’s Chantry, 167
Fyfhyde, Walter, Abbot, 139
Gabell, Dr., 166, 187
Gardiner, Bishop, 151
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 20, 183
George, 121, 191
George Hotel, 97
Gere (Gar) Stret, 93
Gewissas, 20, 22
Ghetto, 97, 180
Gild merchant, 46, 80, 121
Gilds, 95, 177
Godbegot House, 62
Godbiete, 62, 80, 120
Godfrey de Lucy, Bishop, 111, 147
Godwine, Earl, 65, 66, 85
Godwine, Earl, death of, 69, 153
Golde Stret, 94
Gospel Oak, 22
Grimbald, Abbot, 41
Guild Hall, 97
Guy of Warwick, 46, 91
Hædda, Bishop, 23
Hamble, 32
Hamble River, 40
Hampshire, Christianity in, 21
_Hampshire, Victoria History of_, 72
Hantachenesle, 94, 96, 177
Hardy, Thomas, 193
Harold, King, 65
Harold II., King, 71
Harthacnut, 65, 85, 153
Hempage Wood, 77
Henry I., 6, 80, 88, 98
Henry II., King, 105, 110
Henry III., King, 6, 111, 154, 173
Henry IV., King, 151
Henry V., 173
Henry VIII., 6, 91, 140, 173
Henry of Blois (Bishop), 22, 64, 92, 100, 154, 168, 171
Henry of Blois, Papal Legate, 102
Heptarchy, 26
_Hereward the Wake_, 48, 85
High Street, 48
Hoadley (Bishop), 154, 178
Horne (Bishop), 144
Hours, services of, 133
Hursley, 192
Hursley Vicarage, 176
_Hyda, Liber de_, 45, 50, 54, 183
Hyde, Abbey, 41, 90, 105, 115, 127, 133, 145
Hyde Abbey, dissolved, 143
Hyde, _Liber Vitæ_ of, 64, 183
Itchen Abbas, 41
Itchen Stoke, Watersplash at, 89
James I., 6
Jewry Street, 97
Jews, 97
Joan of Navarre, 151
John, King, 6, 111
Julius Cæsar, 15
Judith, Countess, 83
Judith, Queen, 36
Keats, John, 3, 188
Keble, John, 153, 192
Ken (Bishop), 153, 166, 170, 178, 188
Kenulphus (Kenwalh), 23, 85, 147, 153
King’s Gate, 95, 98, 114, 123, 130
King’s Gate, 73
Kingsmill, William (Prior), 144
Kitchin, Dean, 136
Knighton, Henry, 47, 105, 183
Knights of St. John (Hospitallers), 107, 169
Kynegils, 22, 24, 32, 147, 153
Lachenictahalla, 96
Lainston House, 191
Langton’s Chapel, 150
Lanfranc, Archbishop, 77, 88
Leach’s _Winchester College_, 167
Leland, 143
Lely, 178
Leofric, Earl, 66
Liberty of Godbiete, 62
Liberty of the Soke, 119
Lisle, Dame Alice, 7, 174
London, 74
Magdalen College, Oxford, 152
Magdalen Hill, 10
Manners makyth man, 6, 158, 166
Martyr Worthy, 80
Mary, Queen, 151
Mary, Queen, 5
Mathew of Paris, 115, 183
Matilda, Empress, 5, 102, 169, 172
Mayor, 119
Meads, 140, 166
Menstre Stret, 94
Middle gate, College, 164
Mirabel Close, 132, 155
Moab, 165
Moberley (Doctor), 163
Monastic life, 130
Morley (Bishop), 154, 170, 178
Mortuary chests, 24, 28, 32, 64, 153
Morys, John, 166, 170
Naseby, 172
Natives and Aliens, 176
Nell Gwynne, 178, 185
New College, Oxford, 159
New Forest, 80, 88
Newan Mynstre, 34, 41, 43, 51, 69, 71, 90
Norman Conquest, 73
Novices, Master of, 135
Nunna Mynstre (St. Mary’s Abbey), 41, 54, 98, 104, 109, 118, 145, 183
Obedientiarii, 133
Obelisk, 175
Old Minster, 63, 64, 66, 69
Oliver’s Battery, 8
Order of Noble Poverty, 172
Osberga, 36
Otterbourne, 192
Oxford, 152
Palm Hall, 126
Parliament at Winchester, 114
Pass of Alton, 123
_Pavilionis Aula_, 122, 126
Peter de Rupibus (Bishop), 112, 154
Peter Symonds, 179
Pevensey, 15
Philip of Spain, 151
Piepowder Court, 126
Piers Plowman, 125
Pilgrims, 126
Pilgrims’ Hall, 128, 155
Pilgrims’ Way, 129
Plague in Winchester, 175
Plantagenets, 109
Plegmund, 43
_Polyolbion_, Drayton’s, 184
Portchester, 10
_Portus Magnus_ (Portchester), 15, 18
Raleigh, 6, 174
Richard of Devizes, 97
Richard I., King, 97, 110, 151
Robert, Earl of Gloucester, 104
Roger Bacon, 113
Rome, Alfred at, 32
Roman roads, 17, 19
Roman occupation, 15
Roman walls, 16
Round table, 21, 168, 174, 184
Rudborne (_Major Historia_), 46, 55, 63, 71, 80, 183
Rufus, 5, 65, 79, 87, 88, 108, 153
St. Æthelwold (_Benedictional_ of), 57, 183
St. Alphege, 58
St. Bartholomew, Hyde, church of, 138
St. Brice’s Day, 61
St. Catherine’s Hill, 9
St. Catherine’s Hill, 10, 64, 166
St. Cross, 64
St. Cross, 5, 100, 107, 108, 127, 145, 169, 171
St. Cross, Tower of Ambulatory, 160
St. Elizabeth’s College, 140, 145
St. Giles’s Fair, 79, 95, 117, 121
St. Giles’s Hill, 7, 10, 159, 180
St. John’s Hospital, 145
St. Josse, 44, 127
St. Lawrence, 169
St. Mary’s Abbey (Nunna Mynstre), 41, 54, 109, 118
St. Peter’s, Cheesehill, 57
St. Swithun’s Church, 114
St. Swithun’s Monastery, 24, 32, 51, 91, 98, 110, 113, 115, 118, 130, 133, 144
Sarum, 10
Saxon Winchester, 20
Scowertenestret, 94, 97
Seculars, 52
Senlac, 72
Seventh Chamber, 164
Shawford Mill, 16
Sherlock Holmes, 193
Silchester, 10, 18, 20
Sildwortenstret, 93, 94
Silence of Dean Maitland, 193
Siward (Earl), 66
Slype, the, 145
Snidelingestret, 94
Soke, Liberty of, 119
Southampton, 15
Southgate, 123
Staple towns, 120
Stephen, 6, 100
Stigand (Bishop), 76, 144
Stret bidel, 95
Sustern Spital, 140, 163
Swithun, Bishop, 29, 32, 54, 127, 147, 153, 154
Tannerestret, 94
_Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, 193
Thackeray, 190
Trollope, Anthony, 192
Tron, 120, 180
Trusty servant, 164
Twyford, 192
Venta, 25
Venta Belgarum, 14, 15
Vespasian, 15
Victoria, Queen, 153, 173
Vikings, 28
Vintan-ceastir, 25, 182
Walcote, 191
Walkelyn (Bishop), 77, 147, 154
Waltheof (Earl), 83
Walton, Izaak, 153, 154, 170, 184
Wantage, 35
Warton, Doctor, 154
Wayneflete (Bishop), 151
Weald Forest, 12
Weirs, The, 25
Wenegerestret, 94
Wessex (capital of), 20, 153
Westgate, 94, 123, 175, 177
Westminster Abbey, 147
White Ship, 90, 98, 101
Whiting, William, 192
Wilberforce, Samuel (Bishop), 154
William of Malmesbury, 183
William I., 5, 71, 74, 87, 172
William II. (Rufus), 5, 65, 79, 87, 88, 108
William of Wykeham, 6, 107, 139, 147, 148, 151, 158
Winchester Domesday, 92
Winchester, Alfred’s death and after, 43
Arthurian legend, 20
Bishop Æthelwold, 49
Capital of Danish Empire, 59
Capital of England, 26
Cathedral, 23, 29, 100, 146, 186, 189
Civil War in, 104
Conversion of Kynegils, 23
Dean and Chapter, 144
Early days, 10
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, 117
In Literature, 171
Later Norman, 87
Massacre at, 61
Monastic life, 130
Norman, 73
Winchester, Norman castle, 86
Plague in, 175
Roman city, 16
Roman occupation, 15
Saxon, 20
That Joly Citè, 1
Westgate, 40
Winton Survey, 92
Wolvesey, 168
Winchester from St. Giles’s Hill, 184
Winchester College Brewhouse, 121
Cloisters and Fromond’s Chantry, 137
Memorial Gateway, 144
Middle Gate, 128
Second Master’s House, 153
Tower of the Chapel, _Frontispiece_
_Wintonia, Annales de_, 77, 183
Wolsey, 142, 153, 168
Wolvesey, 8, 39, 59, 85, 98, 100, 102, 104, 118, 126, 170
Wool trade, 120, 180
Wren, Sir Christopher, 178, 180
Wrothesley, Thomas, 142
Wulfstan (Precentor), 53, 55, 77, 118
Wye, Faire, 125
Wykehamica, Adams’s, 167
Yonge, Charlotte, 192
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR AND ARTIST AS _WINCHESTER_.
HAMPSHIRE
PAINTED BY WILFRID BALL, R.E.
DESCRIBED BY REV. TELFORD VARLEY, M.A., B.SC.
CONTAINING 75 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
_Square Demy 8vo._ _Cloth._ _Gilt Top._
PRICE =20/-= NET. (_By Post, price 20s. 6d._)
SOME PRESS OPINIONS
“Mr. Ball’s pictures are delightfully fresh, and recall many pleasant
scenes to the reader who knows the county.”--_Manchester Guardian._
“_Hampshire_ is essentially a book to keep on a handy shelf in the
bookcase, where it can be easily taken down and read with never-failing
delight and pleasure.”--_Queen._
“The Rev. Telford Varley describes vividly and with great charm the many
beauties of this county, while Mr. Wilfrid Ball’s pictures are
exquisitely beautiful.”--_The Tatler._
“Mr. Varley’s _Hampshire_ is a delightful book, entertaining,
instructive, and reliable; and withal it is delightfully and copiously
illustrated.”--_Bournemouth Visitors’ Directory._
OTHER COUNTIES IN THE SAME SERIES
_Square Demy 8vo._ _Cloth._ _Gilt Top._
ESSEX
Painted by L. BURLEIGH BRUHL, R.B.A.
Described by A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF.
Containing 75 Full-page Illustrations in Colour and a Sketch-Map.
PRICE =20/-= NET
(_By Post, price 20/6_)
“Nothing more delightful could be imagined in the way of illustrated
topographical literature than Essex.”--_Illustrated London News._
“Altogether it is an admirable book.”--_Globe._
KENT
Painted by W. BISCOMBE GARDNER.
Described by W. TEIGNMOUTH SHORE.
Containing 73 Full-page Illustrations in Colour and a Sketch-Map.
PRICE =20/-= NET
(_By Post, price 20/6_)
“The acme of the reproductive art is reached in the colour facsimiles of
the artist’s sketches of the famous cathedrals and castles, the antique
houses and quaint villages, the parks, rivers, and coasts of the Garden
of England.... The letterpress, too, has a distinctive charm. The
author’s style is clear and limpid, and he handles his facts with so
much of the master craftsman that his story never ceases to pulse with
human interest.”--_Chatham Observer._
MIDDLESEX
Painted by JOHN FULLEYLOVE, R.I.
Described by A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF.
Containing 20 Full-page Illustrations in Colour and a Sketch-Map.
PRICE =7/6= NET
(_By Post, price 7/11_)
“An admirable book, brightly written and finely
illustrated.”--_Standard._
“Mr. Fulleylove’s score of pictures are beautiful, and, combined with
Mr. Moncrieff’s descriptions, should make many readers of this volume
determine to see for themselves the neglected beauties of the nearest of
the Home Counties.”--_Daily Telegraph._
PUBLISHED BY A. AND C. BLACK. SOHO SQUARE. LONDON. W.
SURREY
Painted by SUTTON PALMER.
Described by A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF.
Containing 75 Full-page Illustrations in Colour and a Sketch-Map.
PRICE =20/-= NET
(_By Post, price 20/6_)
“Of Mr. Palmer’s pictures it would seem difficult to speak in praise too
high; he has chosen his views so admirably and rendered them so
beautifully that we find ourselves wishing there were even more of
them.... These pictures, too, are reproduced in colours so daintily and
so well that we cannot recall a ‘colour-book’ which has given us greater
satisfaction.”--_Daily Telegraph._
SUSSEX
Painted by WILFRID BALL, R.E.
Containing 75 Full-page Illustrations in Colour and a Sketch-Map.
PRICE =20/-= NET
(_By Post, price 20/6_)
“As a literary and artistic work the book is delightful.”--_Liverpool
Courier._
“The whole charm of the county comes into view in Mr. Wilfrid Ball’s
artistic pictures, and in the text of the book which they
adorn.”--_Standard._
“The text, by an anonymous writer, is worthy of the pictures, and both
are first-rate.”--_Daily News._
WARWICKSHIRE
Painted by FRED WHITEHEAD, R.B.A.
Described by CLIVE HOLLAND.
Containing 75 Full-page Illustrations in Colour.
PRICE =20/-= NET
(_By Post, price 20/6_)
“Shakespeare’s county has never, to our mind, been more worthily
presented, and the book is one which it is a pleasure to
possess.”--_Guardian._
“It remains to commend Mr. Whitehead’s water-colours. They are as clever
as they are effective. The pictures range over a great variety of
subjects; they give us a little of everything that is most exquisitely
characteristic of Warwickshire. There is not one that does not take the
eye with pleasure.”--_Daily Chronicle._
WESSEX
Painted by WALTER TYNDALE.
Described by CLIVE HOLLAND.
Containing 75 Full-page Illustrations in Colour and a Sketch-Map.
PRICE =20/-= NET
(_By Post, price 20/6_)
“The author and painter have given a delightful translation, so to
speak, of Thomas Hardy’s imaginative dealings with places and people.
Church and castle, sea and river, town and village, peaceful farms and
wild moorland, are all identified and described, both by words and
pictures, with unfailing charm.”--_Evening Standard._
WORCESTERSHIRE
Painted by THOMAS TYNDALE[.
Described by A. G. BRADLEY.
Containing 24 Full-page Illustrations in Colour and a Sketch-Map.
PRICE =7/6= NET
(_By Post, price 7/11_)
“The illustrations are beautifully done, and the text accurate and very
readable.”--_Oxford Magazine._
“Mr. Tyndale’s two dozen beautiful sketches will be found delightful to
those who know Worcestershire, while they ought to tempt those who do
not, to visit it on the earliest opportunity.”--_Daily Telegraph._
YORKSHIRE
Painted and Described by GORDON HOME.
Containing 70 Full-Page Illustrations in Colour and a Sketch-Map.
PRICE =20/-= NET
(_By Post, price 20/6_)
“A volume of great and varied interest. Famous houses and ruins, great
churches, moorland and sea-coast--the many things that put Yorkshire so
high among English shires--are to be found here. It is a most attractive
volume.”--_Spectator._
PUBLISHED BY A. AND C. BLACK · SOHO SQUARE · LONDON · W.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Or _Hantachevesle_ (the spelling is obscure).
[2] Knighton’s _De eventibus Angliae_.
[3] _Memoir of Jane Austen_, by Austen Leigh, pp. 163 and 164, inserted
here by kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan and Co.
[4] This and the following extracts are inserted here by kind
permission of Messrs. Macmillan and Co.
[5] Letter to George and Georgina Keats, September 21. From _Letters of
John Keats_: Sidney Colvin: p. 310.
[6] _Letter to G. and G. Keats_, September 20.
[7] Inserted by kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan and Co.
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