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.

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A. AND C. BLACK, 4 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.

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.

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Winton Domesday, The Liber de Hyda, Rudborne’s Major Historia Wintoniae, various of the Annales Monastici, the valuable historical documents published some time back by the Hampshire Record Society, Milner’s History, Mr.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

List of Illustrations

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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,

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