WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX
BUT, to have done with these preliminary triflings in the marches of the
Hardy Country, let us consider in what way the Londoner may best come to
a thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land. On all counts—by force
of easy access, and by its ancient circumstance—Winchester is indicated.
“The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore-time capital of
Wessex,” stands at the gate of this literary country and hard by the
confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and history it is
closely akin. At one in feeling with that hoary hunting preserve, it is
itself modern in but little measure, and loves to linger upon memories of
the past. Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical
counters with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty
game of history was played; but do, by the presence of their works, make
the least impressionable feel that they were creatures of blood and
fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake nations; groping darkly in
superstition, without doubt, but perceiving the light, distant and dim,
and striving with all the strength of their strong natures to win toward
it. They fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had done for
paganism, and were not—it really seems necessary to insist upon
it—creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals are sealed; but
lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and hated, and despaired
and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with perhaps even greater keenness,
than any Edwardian liege of this twentieth century. Still runs the
Itchen, bright and clear as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed,
to be in their turn ousted in governance by the Norman-French; and still,
although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of Norman
domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed, stolid, and
long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and Wessex, and in him that
ancient kingdom, although unknown to modern political geographies,
survives.
Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and for your
intrinsic worth, alike. Changing, although ever so slowly, with the
years, your developments make, not as elsewhere, for black bitterness of
heart and vain regrets for the things of sweet savour and good report,
swept away into the dustheaps and potsherds of “progress,” but for
content and happy assent. In these later years, for example, it has
occurred to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior
and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England, ruling
at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in A.D. 901, and buried here in a spot
still shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey. That is a noble,
heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to commemorate the
millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough keeping with
Winchester’s ancient dignity.
[Picture: High Street, Winchester]
Near by, where its imposing bulk is reared up against the giant
background of St. Giles’s Hill, you may still see and hear the Itchen
rushing furiously under the old City Mill by Soke Bridge, where dusty
millers have ground corn for a thousand years. Released from the
mill-leat, the stream regains its placid temper and wanders suavely along
daisy-dappled meads to St. Cross, and so at last to lose itself in
Southampton Water; still fishful all the way, as in the days of old Izaak
Walton himself, who lies in the south transept of the cathedral yonder,
and has a sanctified place in these liberal-minded times in a tabernacle
of the restored reredos, in the glorious company of the apostles, the
saints, kings and bishops, who form a very mixed concourse in that
remarkable structure. I fear that if they were all brought to life and
introduced to one another, they would not form the happiest of families.
But that’s as may be. From this vantage-point by King Alfred’s statue—or
“Ælfred,” as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the
unscholarly—you may see, as described in Tess, “the sloping High Street,
from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the mediæval cross
to the bridge”; but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low
Norman tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being beckoned
afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane, and, diligently
inquiring, at last find it. Best it is to come to the cathedral by way
of that aforesaid mediæval cross in the High Street, hard by the
curiously overhanging penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry,
which, to the astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a
backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike space of
trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old residences of cathedral
dignitaries with nothing to do and exceedingly good salaries for doing
it. It has been remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some
sixty per cent. of the famous men whose careers are included in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ were the sons of clergymen. No wonder
at all, I take it, in this, for it is merely nature’s compensating swing
of the pendulum. The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing
up energy for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest
empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest scoundrels too,
have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of the Church.
That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a history to its
squatness—a history bound up with the tragical death of Rufus. The grave
of the Red King in the cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story
whose inner history has never been, and never will be, fully explained;
but by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless king’s death
at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced by the glanced arrow said to
have been aimed at the wild red deer by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem
that the clergy were more intimately connected with that “accident” than
was seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of that
time. It must not be forgotten that the king had despoiled the Church
and the Church’s high dignitaries with a thorough and comprehensive
spoliation, nor can it be blinked that certain of them had denounced him
and prophesied disaster with an exactness of imagery possible only to
those who had prepared the fulfilment of their boding prophecies. “Even
now,” said one, “the arrow of retribution is fixed, the bow is
stretched.” This was not metaphor, merely: they prophesied who had with
certainty prepared fulfilment. And when the thing was consummated and
the body of the Red King was buried in the choir beneath the original
central tower, the ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was
not, according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the
insufficient support given to its great crushing weight by the inadequate
pillars, but to the fact that one was buried beneath who had not received
the last rites of the Church. If indeed that be so, the mills of God
certainly do grind slowly.
For the rest, the cathedral is the longest in England. Longer than Ely,
longer than St. Albans, it measures from east to west no less than 556
feet. As we read in the story of _Lady Mottisfont_, Wintoncester, among
all the romantic towns in Wessex, is for this reason “probably the most
convenient for meditative people to live in; since there you have a
cathedral with nave so long that it affords space in which to walk and
summon your remoter moods without continually turning on your heel, or
seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll under cover from the
rain or sun. In an uninterrupted course of nearly three hundred steps
eastward, and again nearly three hundred steps westward amid those
magnificent tombs, you can, for instance, compare in the most leisurely
way the dry dustiness which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and
bishops with the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of
commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest out-of-doors.
Then, if you are in love, you can, by sauntering in the chapels and
behind the episcopal chantries with the bright-eyed one, so steep and
mellow your ecstasy in the solemnities around that it will assume a rarer
and fairer tincture.”
[Picture: Winchester Cathedral]
In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old Guildhall every
evening at eight o’clock, the sentimental survival of an old-time very
real and earnest ordinance; the West Gate remains in the wall, hard by
the fragments of the royal castle; down in the lower extremity of the
city the bishop’s palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered,
ivy-covered walls: much in fine remains of Winchester’s ancient state.
But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for Salisbury.