WINCHESTER IN LITERATURE 181
INDEX 197
List of Illustrations
FACING PAGE
1. Tower of the College Chapel, Winchester _Frontispiece_
2. St. Catherine’s Hill, Winchester 9
3. Shawford Mill 16
4. The Weirs, Winchester 25
5. Hamble 32
6. At Itchen Abbas 41
7. High Street, Winchester 48
8. St. Peter’s, Cheesehill, Winchester 57
9. Church of St. Cross 64
10. King’s Gate, Winchester 73
11. Martyr Worthy 80
12. Watersplash at Itchen Stoke 89
13. Easton 96
14. The Deanery, Winchester 105
15. Cheyney Court and Close Gate, Winchester 112
16. Brewhouse, Winchester College 121
17. Middle Gate, Winchester College 128
18. Cloisters and Fromond’s Chantry, Winchester College 137
19. Memorial Gateway, Winchester College 144
20. Second Master’s House, Winchester College 153
21. Tower of Ambulatory, Hospital of St. Cross, Winchester 160
22. Church of St. Lawrence, Winchester 169
23. Hursley Vicarage 176
24. Winchester from St. Giles’s Hill 184
WINCHESTER
CHAPTER I
‘WYNGESTER, THAT JOLY CITÈ’
Me lyketh ever, the lengerè the bet,
By Wyngester, that Joly citè.
The ton is god and wel y-set,
The folk is comely on to see;
The aier is god both inne and oute,
The citè stent under an hille;
The riverès renneth all aboute,
The ton is ruelèd upon skille.
_Benedicamus Domino,
Alleluia,
Alleluia._
Fifteenth-century verses, DE WALDEN MSS.
The magic of the city--whence comes it? Every people, every age has felt
it, this mysterious sense of personality, this deep, alluring spell
which age after age, nation after nation, has woven round the city of
its dreams. Rome, Naples, Damascus, Mecca, Seville, each of these has
been and still is a name to conjure with, while the long pent-up fervour
of national feeling with which the Hebrew of old time invested the
thought of Salem, the City of Peace, has from its very intensity and
sincerity established it in the eyes of all Christendom as the permanent
type of that New Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, the centre of all divine
influence and of every divine appeal.
And here in England, dull, matter-of-fact, money-grubbing England, have
we not too, under our leaden skies, cities also not unworthy of a claim
on our regard--cities which possess the same picturesque and appealing
elements which have, in people of warmer and more emotional type, evoked
such feelings of romantic devotion, of national pride, and the rich glow
of enthusiastic attachment? True, such feelings express themselves here
in less exuberant and conscious manner, but they exist, and have existed
all through our history, and the old fifteenth-century singer quoted
above, whose quaintly expressive verses sum up so happily even for us of
modern time the attractions of the delightful old mediaeval city which
is our common theme, was doubtless one who felt this to the full.
‘Wyngester, that Joly citè,’ that is his keynote--a note at once sincere
but restrained.
He is no pilgrim, rapt in enthusiastic devotion, singing of
urbs caelestis, urbs beata,
as he approaches the city of his passionate desire; but a plain,
sober-minded citizen, who sees in the town which shelters him a ‘Joly
citè’ of attractive aspect and pleasantly seated, surrounded by the
mingled delights of hill and stream; and, moreover, one ‘ruelèd upon
skille,’ as becomes the mother of municipalities.
And to lovers of Winchester--and who that knows it is not of these?--it
must ever be a pleasant task to follow out in detail the themes
suggested by our mediaeval singer--to enjoy one by one those attractive
features which endear it still to us, as it did to him. To clamber up
the breezy heights which gird it round, for the sake of the ‘aier’--that
air which, as the poet Keats himself remarked, is alone worth “Sixpence
a pint”; to trace the windings of the ‘riverès renning all aboute’--both
within its confines and beyond; to linger in its streets and catch the
echoes of its wonderful past, with even more appreciation than our
fifteenth-century poet was capable of feeling. For our singer, sincerely
appreciative as he was, had one sense lacking--the sense of history. The
present only appealed to him; but to us, as we thread its
quaintly-inconvenient, narrow streets, its passages and gateways, it is
something more than merely a ‘Joly citè,’ a city of comfort and good
rule; it is a city of dreams as well, a city haunted with the sense of a
mighty past, a living testimony alike to the permanence of our national
institutions and to the dignity of the associations to which they make
appeal.
Winchester, then, is a city with an atmosphere--an atmosphere of the
reality and range of historic things, through which the gazing eye can
peer, mile after mile as it were, till it loses itself in a vaguely
distant and indistinct horizon, where the mists of myth and legend blur
the outline and mingle inextricably together fact and fancy, record and
surmise.
For in Winchester antique tradition and historic association are not a
mere adjunct or picturesque accident: they are the keynote of its very
existence. In Winchester we stand on the threshold of national history;
here we may, as it were, study history _in situ_, as perhaps we can
study it nowhere else in the land--in the soil beneath our feet, in its
stones, its institutions, its quaint survivals of early or mediaeval,
Tudor or Stuart days.
Where else but in Winchester can we meet with so many picturesque
reminders of an ancient feudal past,--reminders which have survived not
because they are merely picturesque, but simply because here they have
not outlived their usefulness or natural appropriateness? The Cathedral
bedesmen, the brethren of St. Cross, the scholars of ‘Sainte Marie
College,’ the almsmen of Beaufort’s Order of Noble Poverty, the brethren
of Christe’s Hospitall, the masters of the College, and the college
queristers also, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the diocese with
their quaintly uncomfortable attire,--each and all of these wear their
distinctive garb as a matter of course, just as centuries ago every one
wore the garb distinctive of his rank or occupation. Anywhere else one
of these might excite remark: here they pass unnoticed. They are part of
the place, part of the spirit of the past, which, dead elsewhere, here
survives in vigour and undiminished vitality.
Here was the cradle of Saxon rule and Saxon civilization; here also the
cradle of national historical record. Here Saxon Alfred ruled and prayed
and wrought; here Danish Cnut took the golden crown from his brow and
laid it in token of humility upon the Holy Altar; here Norman William
wore his crown yearly at Easter-tide; here Curfew first was pealed, and
here ever since it has continued to peal; here Rufus was buried, “many
looking on and few grieving”; here Henry I. ruled and earned the title
of the ‘Lion of Justice’; here Matilda fought with Stephen in the dark
days of civil warfare; here John received the papal absolution, having
sunk the English crown to a lower depth than any other sovereign either
would or could have done; here Henry III. was born, and here he held
wild revel; here later on was founded the great college of William of
Wykeham, whose motto--“Manners makyth man”--has served as an inspiration
for generations of public school boys for over 500 years; here Henry
VIII. welcomed and fêted the puissant Emperor and second Charlemagne,
Charles V.; here his daughter Mary was married to a Spanish prince; here
James I. kept his Court, and here Raleigh received his shameful
condemnation and sentence; here, with alternate fortune, Cavalier and
Roundhead strove together, till Cromwell himself captured its citadel
and razed its fortifications to the ground; here Charles II. repeatedly
kept his Court; here he presented the Corporation with his own portrait,
and it may even be, left the citizens to pay for the gift--for the Merry
Monarch was often forgetful, and always short of money; here was
perpetrated the most infamous, perhaps, of all the crimes of the
terrible Bloody Assize, the judicial murder of Dame Alice Lisle for an
act of natural humanity; here died and here was laid to rest that most
charming and natural of women novelists, the bright and vivacious Jane
Austen.
Yes, if a poet could do for Winchester what Longfellow did for Bruges,
and could conjure up the scenes of the past and the personages whose
memories still linger here, what a rare series of absorbing pictures,
what a medley of historic personalities, what a wealth of varied types
should we see embodied before our eyes! Rude Belgic tribesmen of
pre-Roman days, Roman legionaries, rough, wild Berserkers and Danish
vikings, Saxon thegns and Norman knights, abbots and priors, merchants
and gildsmen, friars and pilgrims,--these and many more would contend
for our notice, mingled with kings and queens, prelates and chancellors,
bishops and cardinals. If historical memories can sanctify any spot in
the realm, surely Winchester must be sacred soil.
To separate Winchester from the history which is enshrined within her is
a thing impossible and unthinkable. It is in the light of her historic
past alone that Winchester can be rightly viewed; and attractive and
fair as are her buildings and her natural surroundings, it is only in
their historical setting that they can be adequately appreciated.
Let us, before we set foot within any of her streets, endeavour to get
some general mental picture of the city in which so many associations
are centred and enshrined; let us take our stand on the bold hill which
dominates the city towards the east, St. Giles’s Hill. Had we mounted up
here on the 1st of September--the feast of St. Egidius--some six or
seven centuries ago, it would have been a busy and motley throng that we
should have had to elbow our way through. Englishmen from every county,
foreigners from every land--Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, and Jews--all
mingled together in hopeless confusion. A city in miniature--street
after street of wooden booths, all enclosed in a wooden wall or
palisade--would meet the eye. And the inhabitants! What varied types
should we see--merchants and chapmen, citizens and countrymen, pedlars
and ballad-mongers, all eager and excited, bargaining, jesting,
quarrelling--a babel of tongues, peoples, and languages; while here and
there a bailiff or officer wearing a bishop’s mitre figured on his
livery passes along and scrutinizes the merchandise. No friendly
reception does he meet with, for this is the Great Fair held in honour
of St. Giles, where merchants from all parts of Europe congregate to buy
the wool for which the south of England is so famous, and during the
sixteen days that the fair lasts no merchant or shopman in Winchester,
or ten miles round, may buy or sell except within the fair itself, and
whoever is a welcome and popular figure, it is not the Lord Bishop of
Winchester nor the bishop’s bailiff, for all merchandise must first pay
toll--and heavy toll--for the bishop’s exclusive benefit, before it may
pass within the barriers, and be exposed for sale.
But to-day it will be the city, lying at our feet to the westward,
which will interest us, and there will be nothing on the hill to turn
our attention from it as we note its chief points one by one. It is a
beautiful picture of mingled red and grey that lies before us. The
Cathedral--a mass of grey stone--here presents its most interesting
aspect to us: a mass of grey stone set with pinnacles and flying
buttresses and heavy square tower. To its left lies the College, hidden
partly behind the trees of the Close and the Deanery garden, the light,
graceful ‘Two Wardens’ tower of its chapel contrasting strikingly with
the solid tower of the Cathedral--a noticeable and attractive object.
Almost between the two lies a green patch of meadow, with grey walls and
ruins round it. This is Wolvesey, with its memories of Alfred and the
English Chronicle. Beyond Wolvesey and the College we shall see St.
Cross, like the Cathedral in outward form, but a cathedral in miniature.
Close at our feet in the foreground lie the Guildhall, with its clock,
and the statue of the great Alfred, and the line of the High Street can
be clearly followed till it terminates with the West Gate at its far
extremity. On either side of the city are seen the many channels of the
river Itchen--here and there rises the tower or spire of one of the
numerous city churches--and far away on the high ground to the left
appears a clump of trees which, under the name of ‘Oliver’s Battery,’
recalls the thought of the grim Lord Protector to us. It is a pleasant
and, indeed, poetic picture at any period of the year, and perhaps most
poetic on an afternoon in late autumn, when the
[Illustration: ST. CATHERINE’S HILL, WINCHESTER
The fine bold chalk hill which dominates the river valley to the South
of Winchester, has memories of early Celtic days, of Cnut, and of the
_ancien régime_ at Winchester College. Round its summit is the ‘ring’ of
the great refuge camp of præ-Roman days which it is estimated required
some 3000 people to defend it. Cnut made a grant of ‘Hille’ and other
lands to the old minster. On the summit there was once a pilgrimage
chapel dedicated to St. Catherine. St. Catherine’s Hill was formerly the
playing area for College boys on ‘remedies’ or holidays, and the curious
‘mismaze’ cut on its summit is supposed to have been their handiwork.]
light smoke from the houses and the thin mists from the river have
mingled together to weave a silvery grey network, through which the
details of the city seem, as it were, to filter slowly and dreamily--a
harmony of haze and mist, to which the imagination can most
sympathetically attune itself, a vague dreamland scene which fancy seems
almost naturally to repeople with the shadows of the past.
CHAPTER II
EARLY DAYS
Et penitus toto orbe divisos Britannos.
Antiquity and long-continued vitality such as have fallen to
Winchester--for to go back to its early humble beginnings takes us back
very far indeed--lead us naturally to look for causes, and prompt the
questions, Why, in the first instance, did a human community settle here
at all? What through so many alternations of human vicissitude and
political circumstance has operated to maintain these intact? _Tempus
edax rerum_--Time, the devourer of constituted things, is written not so
much on its stones, as in its stones, yet Winchester remains Winchester
still. For, be it noted, there is nothing in the nature of things which
gives to cities and communities any prescriptive claim or assurance of
permanence. We have not, indeed, to travel far from Winchester to find
instructive instances, to the very contrary, among its earliest
neighbours and contemporaries. Silchester, Sarum, Portchester, its early
British contemporaries, which once flourished even as Winchester, have
long since sunk, the last named into inanition, the two former into
dissolution so complete that no trace now remains, save what little the
ploughshare or the antiquary may from time to time unearth; and that
little would probably, but for the worms’ unceasing activity, have long
since perished beyond recall. For with cities, as with the animal world,
the secret of continued vigour is the secret of continued adaptation to
environment; towns and cities, like other organized existences, are just
as old as the arteries which feed them, and as long as function is
efficiently performed, so long will there be health to perform it.
And yet as years go, Winchester is old,--how old none can say. Ancient
Neolithic interments on St. Giles’s Hill, old Celtic barrows on Morne
(_Magdalen_) Hill behind, carry us back far indeed beyond the days of
permanent settlement, and her continuous existence goes back far beyond
the days of any written historical record, yet all these years she has
retained her identity and her vigour unimpaired. What physical causes
have contributed to this we shall perhaps be better able to appreciate
if we quit St. Giles’s Hill and clamber up to the top of St. Catherine’s
Hill, the bold chalk hill which dominates the view southward from the
city. An interesting hill it is, with modern associations which we will
not stop to consider now, but turn our thoughts to the view before us.
Below us is a flat-bottomed valley, a mile or two across, with the
numerous winding channels of the river intersecting the water meadows at
our feet. To our north lies the city, seen from this point to excellent
advantage, occupying the flat of the valley, and creeping up the hill
slopes on either side, while far away in the distance the chalk upland
seems to roll away, ridge succeeding ridge, till all detail is lost in
distance.
Two thousand years or more ago, the country which we are now gazing over
would have borne a fundamentally different character, though its
superficial aspect, viewed from this point, might not, apart from signs
of human agency, have been so very dissimilar. For at that time
practically the whole of the south of England, through all the lower
levels, was a wild stretch of brake and forest all but impenetrable, the
haunt of wolf and wild boar, of beaver and badger, alternating at the
lowest points with swamps and morasses, which formed the beds of the
valleys, and either fringed the edges of the streams or mingled
composedly with them. This was the great Weald Forest, of which a few
detached patches still remain--a tangled sea of green, beneath which all
lay submerged save the chalk heights, the North and South Downs,
Salisbury Plain, and the mid Hampshire plateau over which we are now
looking.
At one spot, and practically one spot only, was this forest barrier
broken, and that was in mid Hampshire, where the great estuary of
Southampton Water and the Vale of Itchen pierced it like a wedge, and
gave fairly free access from the coast to the rich midland counties to
the north. And so up or by this natural highway the stream of
immigration from the south flowed. Celtic peoples from the north of
Europe, Goidels, Brythons, Belgans,--all in turn came this way, and
here it was, where the Vale of Itchen narrowed, that a settled community
began to form--a ganglionic point, as all such communities are, along
the nervous thread of intercourse and communication.
Down then in the valley at our feet, on the actual ground where our city
now stands, amid the morasses wherein peat abounded, and where even now
it may still be found, was the first settlement or village of
Winchester--a collection of rude hovels, of wattle-work covered with
mud, and stockaded with a stout timber palisading as additional
protection, while the hill-top, where we now stand, was converted into a
fortress or refuge-camp, to all appearance impregnable, so long as heart
and hand still existed to defend it.
Of the village below all trace has long vanished, but the lines of the
earthwork round the hill remain still broadly scarped out, and seemingly
imperishable. No mean achievement this--this great rampart over 1000
yards in circuit, and still 25 feet or more in height in places; and
when the feebleness of the resources with which those early Celtic
sappers and miners worked is borne in mind, the unserviceable pick of
deer antler, the absence of means of transport, we wonder more and more
at the magnitude of the achievement which has had such permanent result.
They dreamt not of a perishable home, who thus could build,
and to-day, though two, perhaps three, thousand years have passed since
it first gave security to the primitive Winchester settlement below,
the great camp still remains, keeping watch over the modern city like a
sentinel forgotten, but still under orders, whom no change of guard has
relieved.
One other inheritance, besides these piled-up ramparts, these first
Winchester burghers have left us, and that is a name. Cær Gwent, the
Celtic name, first Romanized into Venta Belgarum, passed in Saxon days
into Vintan-ceastir, or Venta the fortified, and so on by a natural
transition has become the Winchester of to-day. What the name means is a
venerable antiquarian puzzle, on which we prefer to hazard no opinion,
nor indeed does it greatly matter. The name, like the city itself, is
venerable in antiquity, and its origin, like that of the city itself, is
lost in the mists of the past.
And as we look round about us from this hill-top, and direct our eye up
and down this valley, we begin to realize what it is that has made
Winchester what it has been in the past, and what it is now: not merely
the accident of circumstance, the flotsam and jetsam of human migratory
tribes, floated fortuitously hither on the tidal waters of our southern
estuaries and here casually deposited, but a natural centre in a great
continuous stream of humanity, in which Celt and Belgan, Roman, Saxon,
Dane, and Norman have all pushed forward, each eager to bear his part in
the building of that great national polity, the England of to-day.
CHAPTER III
THE ROMAN OCCUPATION
Foursquare to all the winds.
The part played by physical causes, outlined above, is illustrated by
the successive stages in the Roman occupation. The two first invasions
by Julius Caesar were little more than desultory raids; the next, under
Aulus Plautius and Vespasian in A.D. 43, had important and permanent
results. Pevensey (_Anderida_), Portchester (_Portus Magnus_), and
Southampton (_Clausentum_) were all occupied in turn; up the Itchen
valley the invaders came, and its strategic position made them choose
Venta Belgarum as their military base in the south of England.
History is silent as to the actual occupation of Venta, but Bede and
others mention the occupation of the Isle of Wight, and the silence of
Roman writers on this point merely makes it clear that little resistance
was encountered here. Nor does Roman literature give us any account of
Venta; the only mention of it is in the Antonine Itineraries, the great
road-book of the Roman Empire, dating probably from about 320 A.D.; but
its importance in Roman days is to be inferred from the remains the
Romans have left behind, as well as from Bede and other indirect
evidence.
No Roman structure, except, perhaps, some part of the ancient wall still
existing, remains above ground now, but the site of the city, as marked
out by the Romans, still remains clearly shown, and the spade and
pick-axe are continually bringing to light evidences of what Winchester
was like in Roman days.
The Roman city formed a rectangle aligned almost exactly with the four
points of the compass. Intersecting it from north to south was the great
highway leading to Clausentum, and another road, practically
corresponding to the present High Street, crossed this at right angles,
dividing the whole area of the city into four rectangular blocks or
tesserae. All round this area was a wall of stout masonry, with gates at
the four points where the two main highways pierced it; upon the same
lines were reared later the walls of the Norman city, and their general
direction is clearly traceable now. A walk along Westgate Lane, North
walls, Eastgate Street, the Weirs (where portions of the ancient wall
may still be seen), College Street, Canon Street, and St. James’s Lane,
would practically carry us round the circuit of the Roman as it would of
the later mediaeval city.
The temples of the gods occupied the south-eastern area where the
Cathedral now stands, and a well in the Cathedral crypt is pointed out
to visitors as having
[Illustration: SHAWFORD MILL
Shawford Mill, near Shawford. The river channels here are fringed in
summer-time with mimulus, yellow iris, and forget-me-not, and are
delightful to ramble along.]
been connected with heathen worship in Roman times. Numerous pieces of
tesselated pavement, vases, urns, and votive objects generally, articles
of adornment, for household use and the toilet, are frequently found
even still, mingled with innumerable coins and relics of a military
nature.
More important still are the Roman roads which led from Winchester, the
routes of which are still unmistakable, and which remain the great
enduring monument both of the Roman occupation and of the Roman
civilizing instinct. Indeed, the chief service the Roman occupation did
for Winchester was to bring it into effective contact with the rest of
the country. The Belgic tribesmen had no common organization or polity;
a number of scattered and incoherent units linked together merely by the
accident of position, and a more or less common racial descent, they
resembled one of the lower animal forms, not possessing a common nerve
centre, but controlled by local ganglia and responding merely to local
stimuli. The Roman genius was to link up the whole land into one united
organism and to supply a nervous and arterial system regulated by
central control. Law and Order were the great lessons it taught the
world, and open and secure lines of communication were the necessary
preliminary of the _Pax Romana_. No succeeding age save our own has so
fully recognized the value of good and effective road communication. Our
modern roads and tracks very often merely follow routes first marked out
by Roman hands, and the common occurrence of the title ‘High Street,’
generally applied to the leading thoroughfare of town or village, is a
constant reminder to us of the debt we owe to the Romans.
Radiating from Venta Belgarum were no less than five thoroughfares, of
which four were undoubtedly important arteries. The first led to the
sea, to Clausentum, the port. It followed the line of the existing
Southampton road as far as Otterbourne, and then straight on through
Stoneham (the _ad Lapidem_ of Bede) to Clausentum. This road passed
straight through the city from south to north, and from the northern
gate of the city it branched off into two, one going north-east, along
the existing Basingstoke road to Silchester (_Calleva Attrebatum_), the
other north-west, following the line of the existing Andover road to
Cirencester (_Durocornovium_). Both these roads can be still traced for
a distance of a good many miles from Winchester. The fourth led directly
west to Sarum, and can still be followed as a well-defined track all the
way. The fifth led to Portchester (_Portus Magnus_) over Deacon Hill,
and through Morestead, but with the exception of the first few miles all
trace of it is now lost.
Details of some of these roads as given in the Antonine Itinerary
already mentioned are quoted below, and the names of the stations and
their distances apart are of more than usual interest, particularly from
the assistance they give us as regards identification of the Roman
sites.
Londinium (_London_) to Pontes (_Staines_), mille
passuum (_miles_) xxii
Pontes to Calleva Attrebatum (_Silchester_) xxii
Calleva to Venta Belgarum xxii
Venta to Clausentum (_Southampton_) x
Clausentum to Portus Magnus (_Portchester_) x
The Roman routes are not comfortable to follow now, particularly to the
cyclist; their course is invariably straight, leading direct from point
to point, over hill and valley alike, without regard to gradient or the
lie of the land. The appeal they make to the thoughtful imagination is
distinct and striking. Direct and uncompromising, they follow their
course regardless of obstacles, suggesting irresistibly the genius and
energy of the imperious people who met difficulties only to subdue them.
Primarily imperial in character, if not always military, few things
conduced so much to the settlement and growth in civilization of the
land. Commerce followed in the wake of security, and the arts of war
ministered thus as handmaid to those of peace.
CHAPTER IV
SAXON WINCHESTER
Post tenebras, lux
The Roman occupation lasted some 400 years, after which Winchester
history becomes a blank, and it is not the settlement and conquest of
the next occupiers, the Gewissas or West Sexe, but their conversion to
Christianity which begins to dispel the historical just as it did the
spiritual darkness of the period.
Of these years, could we but trust the romantic pages of Geoffrey of
Monmouth, who has preserved for us the legendary stories of the period
as preserved in the early Welsh tradition which he followed out, we
might have a complete and circumstantial history, telling us of Arthur
and his Knights, of Merlin, and Uther Pendragon, all focussed round our
own Hampshire country, with Winchester and Silchester as the chief
centres of action.
Thus arose the mediaeval tradition connecting Winchester with Arthur and
the Knights of the Round
Table--a tradition consolidated by the presence in the great Hall of
Winchester of the curious relic which popular imagination has for
hundreds of years identified with the actual Round Table round which
that famous brotherhood feasted. But of this more anon. And attractive
as are the speculations into which Geoffrey of Monmouth might lead us,
we must put him sternly by till some greater hand has winnowed the
grain--for some grain his record undoubtedly possesses--from the chaff
of credulity, if not of deliberate invention.
And so for 200 years our Winchester history remains a blank, till the
Saxon invader had in turn made his way hither, by the same natural
channel which Celt and Roman before him had followed, and a kingdom of
Wessex had grown up, rude and barbarous, but firmly planted, with the
Hame-tun (_Southampton_) as its first capital, till, with the growth of
institutions, the natural advantages of Winchester made it in turn the
centre of rule of the West Saxon kingdom.
How Jute and Angle warred in turn with Saxon and with one another: how
order was gradually evolved, and Christianity planted in Britain by
Augustine and his band of monks, we cannot here pursue in detail. It is
the coming of Christianity to Hampshire that immediately concerns us,
and with this a new chapter of great interest opens in our Winchester
story.
Augustine had landed in Kent in 597, and it is a noteworthy fact that
while Christianity had spread gradually thence to the East Saxons, to
Northumbria, and to East Anglia, the stream of influence from
Canterbury had, as it were, flowed by and left Wessex, Sussex, and
Mercia entirely untouched, so effectually had the natural barriers of
the forest belt isolated the south-west of England from Kent and even
London; and when at length Christianity was brought to Wessex it was by
a special mission from Italy and not from Canterbury at all that the
message came. Thus the founding of the Church in Wessex was an act
independent entirely of Augustinian influence; not for many years after
did the diocese acknowledge the supremacy of Canterbury, and when Bishop
Henry of Blois in the twelfth century was scheming to convert Winchester
into a separate province, with himself as Archbishop, he had at least a
historical basis on which to rest his claim. Sussex and Mercia were
evangelized later still, and the Isle of Wight last of all.
There is indeed a local tradition which connects the name of Augustine
with Winchester. In Avington Park, some five miles from the city, a
moribund oak still stands, known as the Gospel Oak, from the tradition
that Augustine himself preached the Gospel under it. But the tradition
is entirely unsupported, and certain it is that, even if it were true,
the preaching had no permanent result.
The story of the conversion of the Gewissas is told by Bede, and
deserves to be translated in full.
At that time (_A.D. 634, English Chronicle_), during the reign of
King Kynegils, the race of the West Saxons, anciently termed
Gewissas, received the faith of Christ, which was preached to them
by Birinus, who had come to Britain at the instance of Pope
Honorius. His intention had indeed been to proceed direct into the
heart of the land of the Angles, where as yet no teacher had
penetrated, in order there to sow the seeds of the faith. For which
purpose, and by direction of the Pope himself, he was consecrated
Bishop by Asterius, Bishop of Genoa. But on his arrival in Britain,
and coming in contact first of all with the Gewissas, he found them
everywhere to be in a state of the grossest heathenism, and so he
considered it to be more profitable to preach the Word to them,
rather than to go farther to seek a field to labour in.
The actual conversion of King Kynegils took place the year after, not at
Winchester, but at Dorchester, near Oxford, on the river Thames. Here
Birinus first placed his bishop’s stool; but Bede’s narrative directly
implies that he visited Winchester and dedicated a Christian church
there, which only a bishop could do; for he goes on to say that
having erected and dedicated many churches, and having by his pious
ministrations called many unto the Lord, he departed himself to Him
and was buried in that city (_Dorchester_), and many years after,
by the instrumentality of Bishop Hædda (_bishop from 676 to 703
A.D._), his body was translated thence to the city of Venta and
placed in the church of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul,
which he himself had dedicated.
We learn from the _English Chronicle_ that this Christian church was
erected not by Kynegils, who died in 643, but by Kenwalh or Kenulphus
his son. Here then we have the beginning in a sense of the Winchester
Cathedral of to-day. True, successive and more glorious buildings have
been erected on the same site, but they have been but the successors in
direct line of that primitive church of St. Peter and St. Paul, rudely
constructed, and possibly roofed with thatch, which Birinus dedicates;
and the bones of its two founders, father and son--for so we are
entitled to regard them--are traditionally preserved in the Cathedral
to-day, in two of the beautiful mortuary chests above the side screens
of the choir.
What a link with the past do the inscriptions on these chests afford us,
for the facts are perfectly historical whatever the identity of the
bones may be. What imagination is there that cannot be deeply stirred in
the very presence, as it were, of these two West Saxon chiefs Kynegils
and Kenwalh in the very church which Birinus himself first erected, and
which was dedicated to the service of God by Birinus himself? Nor was
this all, for in A.D. 648, side by side with the church, was erected a
monastery, the beginning of that religious house afterwards so famous as
the Priory of St. Swithun. Kynegils endowed it with an important grant
of land--nothing less than all the King’s land for several miles round
Winchester, the first church endowment in Wessex of which we have any
authentic record; an endowment all the more memorable as some portion of
this land, in and around the adjoining present parish of Chilcomb,
remained after some twelve and a half centuries of consecutive church
tenure in possession of the Dean and Chapter of Winchester, the
successors in direct line of the religious community
[Illustration: THE WEIRS, WINCHESTER
The delightful balustraded stone bridge at the east end of the city
replaces the very early bridge built by Bishop Swithun in King
Æthelwulf’s days. The river rushes with a glorious swirl from out the
mill just above the bridge, and all along the Weirs, from mill to mill,
is of beautiful clearness and transparency. The walk along ‘the Weirs’
takes you between the river and the old city wall.]
of St. Peter and St. Paul, right up indeed to 1899, when it was taken
over by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
The development of Winchester during the early Saxon period was steady
and continuous. This was marked in 676 by the transference by Bishop
Hædda of the Bishop’s stool from Dorchester to Winchester, and from this
point onwards Winchester became the centre of the diocese as well as the
capital of rule--a great diocese, spreading far and wide over all the
western country. When Danihel succeeded Hædda--“Danihel the most revered
bishop of the West Saxons,” as his contemporary Bede calls him--the
diocese was divided, and Sherborne became the centre of the western, as
Winchester was of the eastern see. And so Winchester history is brought
down to the days of our first really contemporary historian, the
Venerable Bede.
The pages of Bede are full of interest, not only for the light they
throw on the early history of Saxon Winchester, but also because
incidentally they establish its identity with the earlier township of
Roman and Belgan days, for, as already noted, he speaks of it as “the
city of Venta, which is called by the Saxon people _Vintan-ceastir_,”
_i.e._ Venta the fortified, implying that the Roman defences round the
city were still in existence, and giving us the first mention in
recorded history of that name of our city, which by a simple and natural
transition has become the name by which we know it still.
CHAPTER V
THE CAPITAL OF ENGLAND
This royal throne of kings ...
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth.
With the dawn of the ninth century came further development. During the
200 years or so of the so-called Heptarchy, a gradual and continuous
movement of cohesion--social as well as political--had been in progress.
The strength of the Anglo-Saxon was his courage, a determination and
persistence hardly distinguishable from obstinacy; his weakness was his
lack of imagination and his narrow political horizon. He had never
learnt to think nationally, hardly even tribally, far less imperially;
his thoughts centred themselves in the little hamlet or home settlement
where all were kin at least, if not kind. He took
the rustic murmur of his bourg
For the great wave that echoed round the world.
And if he thought of his fellow-countrymen at all, apart from family
blood-feuds which called for vengeance, it was probably in the exclusive
spirit of Jacques:
I do desire we may be better strangers.
These individualistic ideas were being slowly modified by existing
conditions: families had been grouped into tythings, tythings into
hundreds, hundreds into shires; the communal system of land tenure was
merging into the manorial system, and with the consolidation of
individual kingdoms came a struggle for political supremacy and a
movement towards national cohesion and unity. It was the glory of a
Wessex king, ruling in Winchester, to render this conception an
accomplished fact.
It was at the Court of the great Charlemagne that Egbert gained his
political training and insight. Forced as a youth to flee from Wessex,
he had been made welcome at the Emperor’s Court, and there in the centre
of great world-movements, in a Court which numbered the most
accomplished scholars of the time, Egbert began to ‘see things.’ When in
802 A.D. he was called to ascend the throne of Wessex, Charlemagne, it
is said, gave him his own sword as a parting gift, but something far
more potent--political insight and training--was his already.
Egbert set himself not only to consolidate his power in Wessex, but to
weld the separate jangling factions into one under his personal
supremacy. The details of this long struggle are part of English history
and do not concern us here: suffice it that he asserted the supremacy of
Wessex over the whole land, and it is in connection with him that the
term England--Angleland--was first used. In 829 A.D. he held a council
at Winchester and proclaimed himself King of Angleland.
Winchester thus entered on a new phase, as capital of England and not of
Wessex merely, and its importance rapidly developed.
It was well for the land that internal union was thus in sight, for with
Egbert’s reign a new danger arose. The migratory racial movements of
which the coming to Britain of Jute, Angle, and Saxon was but a phase,
had never ceased, but the conditions had altered. In earlier unsettled
days new-comers as they crossed the Swan’s Bath had been usually
welcomed as allies, now when the land had become settled, when wealth
had accumulated in town and monastery, the late-comers came in guise of
a foreign foe. Egbert’s reign saw a great revival of the descents of
these Danes or Northmen as they were called. Wherever their ‘aescas’ or
longships appeared panic seized the countryside. Murder, outrage,
conflagration, and ruin were the ordinary incidents of a Viking raid.
Men might well pray as they did, “From the fury of the Northmen, good
Lord, deliver us,” for the invader knew nothing of mercy, and his
enterprise and desperate valour were only equalled by his fiendish
delight in cruelty. Egbert struggled long, and, on the whole,
successfully, against these foes. In 839 he died, after a reign of
thirty-seven years, and his bones are still preserved in a mortuary
chest in the Cathedral of his capital.
The words on the chest are:
Hic rex Egbertus pausat
(Here rests King Egbert).
Surely Winchester, which preserves the bones of him who first strove for
and successfully realized the conception of national unity, should be
the Mecca for all true devotees of Great or Greater Britain.
Like master, like man, and great kings have always had great subjects.
Such a one was Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, whose influence was all
powerful during the next half century, and was reflected in Egbert’s
still greater grandson, Alfred. Swithun belongs essentially to
Winchester; he laboured incessantly for the kingdom, the diocese, and
the city, and his shrine became for centuries afterwards the glory of
its Cathedral, and the place of pilgrimage for thousands of pious feet.
He built churches; he protected the Cathedral and Monastery by building
a wall round it; he built a bridge across the river, outside the East
Gate of the city, where the present graceful Georgian structure stands.
As some old verses tell us:
Seynt Swithun his bishopricke to al goodnesse drough,
The towne also of Winchester he amended enough,
For he lette the strong bruge without the towne arere,
And fond thereto lym and ston and the workmen that were there.
Fate deals unkindly with some, even at times with those who deserve most
at her hands; Swithun is one of these. A man of saintly life and
far-reaching influence, his humility and aversion to display were among
his most striking personal characteristics. With an instinctive and
indeed prophetic dread of superstitious veneration being paid to his
remains after death, he gave orders that his body should be buried, not
within the Cathedral, where kings and saints reposed, but in the open
graveyard outside, among the poor and the unnoticed. But in vain: with
the monastic revival in King Edgar’s reign, one hundred years later,
came the erection of a new and more splendid cathedral. Tales of
miraculous occurrence began to be told of Swithun’s tomb, and nothing
would serve but the translation and enshrinement within the new
Cathedral of the saint, so pre-eminently national, whose bones had such
potent virtue. Accordingly, in solemn state, in the presence of King
Edgar, Archbishop Dunstan, and Bishop Æthelwold, the pious translation
was performed. Thus Swithun, never formally canonized, became by
universal consent dignified by the appellation Saint, and his mortal
remains were for centuries the object of that superstitious worship
which he himself had so earnestly dreaded. Later years obscured his
reputation even more: a tradition grew up that the saint had signified
his displeasure at the translation of his body by sending a violent
deluge of rain, which for forty days rendered his exhumation impossible.
No foundation for this impossible story can be found in any contemporary
account, and several contemporary accounts both minute and
circumstantial still exist; but the tradition has passed into a proverb,
and so the name of Swithun--his virtues, his piety, and his personality
all forgotten--serves often merely to suggest the school-boy jingle:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain;
St. Swithun’s day, if thou be’est fair,
For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.
For the general public he has ceased to be a historic personality at
all, entitled to veneration and esteem, and has come to be regarded as a
mythical being, malignant and capricious, the patron saint of discomfort
and of stormy skies.
The century which followed Egbert’s death was one of unremitting
struggle against the Danes--a struggle during which the newly formed
kingdom seemed more than once in imminent danger of being submerged.
Æthelwulf and his sons faced the danger manfully, through which, at
length, Alfred emerged victorious. The history of Winchester is in large
measure merely the history of these movements.
Æthelwulf, the priest-monarch, the son of Egbert, who succeeded him in
839, will be best remembered in Winchester as the father of Alfred, and
by the charters, particularly two of extreme interest, which he executed
here. The more important of these is still extant, and the original is
preserved in the British Museum. This is often spoken of as the origin
of tithes, but erroneously, as Æthelwulf’s gift was a gift to the Church
not of produce, but of one-tenth of his landed possessions.
The charter conferring this grant, having been duly executed, was
solemnly laid on the high altar of the Cathedral in the presence of
Swithun and the assembled Witan. The actual original of the second
charter no longer exists, but an ancient copy is preserved among the
treasures of the Cathedral Library. Even as a copy it possesses extreme
interest: it bears the names of King Adulfus (Æthelwulf), Swithun, and
the King’s four sons, Æthelbald, Æthelbert, Æthelred, and Alfred--the
two elder sons being described as ‘Dux’ (Earldorman), and each of the
two younger, mere boys at the time, as ‘Filius Regis,’ son of the King.
Each name is attested, according to Saxon custom, not by a seal, but by
a cross. The date is 854, when Alfred was five years old, and the
document is the earliest tangible link still existing between the city
and the great King.
Of Æthelwulf’s other acts, his two marriages, his journey to Rome, and
his grant to the Pope of Peter’s Pence, as a ransom to relieve the
sufferings of English pilgrims journeying thither, we cannot speak in
detail. Suffice it that Alfred was taken to Rome by him when quite
young, and was solemnly confirmed by the Pope himself. Æthelwulf died in
857, and was buried in the Cathedral. His bones rest in a mortuary chest
mingled with those of Kynegils.
Each of his four sons succeeded him, one after other, and during their
reigns the Danish incursions grew in frequency and intensity: 857 saw
them repulsed with heavy slaughter in Southampton Water; in 860 they
came again, forced their way to Winchester itself, burnt and sacked it.
The Cathedral and Monastery appear to have escaped, thanks possibly to
the strong, defending wall which Swithun had erected.
[Illustration: HAMBLE
A characteristic seaport village at the mouth of Hamble estuary--the
centre of an important crab and lobster trade. In the mud of the tidal
river lies embedded an ancient Danish “longship,” supposed to have
figured in the Danish descents of Alfred the Great’s time. The _Mercury_
Training Ship lies moored here; its masts and yards can be seen up the
river. The rich red brick and tile work of Hamble village forms in
summer-time a delightful picture from the water, with the blue of the
river and the yachts in front and the dark trees behind. Warsash lies
just opposite Hamble, and Netley just behind it.]
Æthelbert succeeded to Æthelbald, Æthelred to Æthelbert, and ever the
struggle increased in intensity. In the last year of Æthelred’s reign he
and Alfred fought no less than nine pitched battles against the Danes.
In the winter of 871 Æthelred died, as it would seem, mortally wounded
in battle, and was buried at Wimborne, and Alfred, the last of the four
brothers, became king.
CHAPTER VI
ALFRED
A prince that draws
By example more than others do by laws.
That is so just, to his great act and thought
To do, not what kings may, but what kings ought.
BEN JONSON, _The Hue and Cry_.
Alfred the Great belongs in a peculiar sense to Winchester; here he was
proclaimed king; here he lived, and ruled, and made his laws; here he
gathered round him that assemblage of divines and learned men with whose
co-operation he gave the first great impetus to a national literature;
here he commenced the English Chronicle; here he devised his plans for
constructing a navy to defend the land against foreign foes; here he
founded a monastery, the Newan Mynstre, destined to play a great and
honourable part for some 600 years after him; here his queen founded a
sister institution, the abbey of St. Mary; here he died and was buried,
leaving behind him the savour of a life strenuous, blameless, and
devoted, having shown his world that the fullest development of manly
vigour was compatible both with the saintliness of the devotee and the
culture of the book-lover and the student.
It was a rude age, the age of Alfred, but nevertheless it was a great
age, for it was, in spite of all its crudeness and brutality, an age in
which ideals were sought after, and indeed worshipped. It was Alfred’s
high distinction that he not only steered the ship of state successfully
through seemingly overwhelming dangers, but that in his own life he
exhibited to the world a realized ideal--an ideal that comparatively few
monarchs have made any attempt to strive after, and which, it is safe to
say, none ever achieved so completely. There have, indeed, been great
empire builders like Charlemagne, great law-givers like our first
Edward, saints with the spiritual elevation of St. Louis, scholars and
patrons of learning like Henry VI., but none have combined these high
qualities with such just balance and self-restraint as Alfred, who may
be truly said to have embodied in his own life the earnest,
long-continued prayer which his own words expressed:
I have sought to live worthily while I lived, and after my death to
leave to the men that should be after me my remembrance in good
works.
Alfred was born at Wantage in 849, and there is little to connect his
early life definitely with Winchester. His association in quite early
days with the king’s court, so frequently held in the city, with the
aged Swithun, who rarely left the city, not to mention the charter of
Æthelwulf, above referred to, which bears his name, all render his early
connection with Winchester more than probable. It was an active and
stirring boyhood, including one, if not two, visits to Rome, and a
solemn confirmation at the Pope’s own hands--events which must have
profoundly stirred him, young as he was. The bent of his mind was early
displayed when his mother Osberga (or, it may be, his stepmother,
Judith; Asser says the latter) showed him and his brothers an
illuminated volume--Anglo-Saxon poetry, very possibly the songs of
Caedmon--and promised the book to the one who should first learn to
repeat them. Alfred immediately sought his tutor’s help, and won the
prize, which appealed so much more keenly to him than to his elder
brothers. For all that it was as a warrior, prompt in action, resolute
in difficulty, that he first rose to distinction. At the critical
moment, while his brother, King Æthelred, delayed, he hurled himself on
the Danes, and overthrew them at the fierce battle of Ashdown, in the
Vale of the White Horse. It was but an episode in the continuous
struggle, and the end of the year saw the death of Æthelred, and Alfred
was called upon by the Witan, against his will indeed, at the age of
twenty-two to mount the throne.
It was a thankless and, as it would seem, hopeless task that the
youthful king had before him. The last thirty years had changed the face
of the land; bit by bit the Danes had made good their footing; province
after province had fallen into their possession. Edmund, the saintly
king of East Anglia, had died a martyr’s death at their hands; Alfred’s
three brothers had mounted the throne one by one, but, bravely as they
had struggled, they had merely been able to retard, not to prevent the
resistless advance. As he looked round on the blackened ruins of the
capital in which he had just been crowned, his heart might well have
sunk within him. Nor was it merely the fate of England which then hung
in the balance; that of northern Christendom equally depended on the
issue of the conflict. It is not generally recognized that during the
early years of Alfred’s reign the heroic determination of the youthful
king, and the loyal devotion of the sorely dismembered little kingdom of
Wessex--for all else in England was lost--were all that stood between
northern Europe and an ever-advancing tide of pitiless and savage
heathenism, which, had it not been stemmed, would have engulfed the
whole northern continent, with little hope of Christian enlightenment
and development, it may have been for centuries. We may well be proud of
the part that Winchester, as the capital of Wessex, played in the course
of civilization during those dark days; and when, as indeed happened 150
years after, Winchester did see the Danish kingdom realized and herself
the capital of it, it was a Christian and civilizing kingdom, and not
one of violence and unbridled slaughter, over which she was called to
preside. Well was it that Alfred was
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
It is to Alfred, to the men of Wessex, and in part to Winchester that
the cause of civilization owes the deliverance from this impending
danger.
For seven years the conflict went on, but it was a conflict almost of
despair, though Alfred met all attacks with unfailing heart and
resourcefulness. At length in 878 all seemed lost. Alfred was surprised
at Chippenham during the Twelfth Night festivities, and forced to take
refuge in the morasses of Somersetshire. The story is too well known to
need retelling here; suffice it that in less than six months Alfred had
reasserted himself, had conquered the Danes, had made peace, and had
divided the realm with them. 878, with the refuge in Athelney and the
peace of Wedmore, was the turning-point in the struggle and in the fate
of the whole nation.
The second period of the reign, the period of more peaceful
reconstruction and consolidation, for plenty of fighting still remained
to be done, centres largely round Winchester, and it is more
particularly round Wolvesey and the scanty remains of Hyde Abbey that
the memory of Alfred still most closely lingers. Wolvesey was the royal
seat. Here he formed his court; here he inaugurated his reforms; here he
laboured, studied, deliberated. The defence of his kingdom, the repair
of the material ruin caused by foreign invasion, the construction of a
fleet of ships, the promulgation of wise laws, the promotion of
education, the encouragement of literature and travel, the actual
founding of a national English literature and an English historical
record, which no other nation can find a parallel to, the endowment of
religious worship--all these in turn occupied his attention while he
dwelt at Wolvesey. The command of the seas he early recognized to be the
real defence of the land, and as soon as opportunity served he set
himself to build a fleet. The Chronicle tells us that he
commanded long ships (_aescas_) to be built against them (_the
Danes, that is_) which were full nigh twice as long as the others.
Some had sixty oars, some more; they were both swifter and
steadier, and also higher than the others. They were shaped neither
like the Frisian nor the Danish, but as it seemed to him they could
be most useful.
The Chronicle gives us also a stirring account of a sea-fight in one of
the Hampshire harbours between Alfred’s vessels and three Danish long
ships. It is a graphic and well-told narrative, too long to be quoted
here. The crews of two of the pirates were captured, and brought to the
king at Winchester. The king, who was then at Wolvesey, commanded them
to be hanged, very likely above those very walls of Wolvesey, grey and
weather-beaten, which we see now, and which in their “herring-bone”
masonry still show the hand of the Saxon builder who erected them. In
the bed of the Hamble River there lies still embedded the keel of a
‘long ship.’ One would dearly like to believe that it was one of those
very pirate vessels which were driven aground, and whose crews were
captured as related above, and the fact is not indeed impossible. Some
planks and portions of this vessel may be seen in the Westgate Museum in
Winchester, and various mementoes, such as the ceremonial casket
presented to Lord Roberts with the freedom of the city on his return
from South Africa, have in recent times been made from it.
Of Alfred’s life of study and devotion we have a pleasant picture in
Asser’s _Biography_. Asser, afterwards Bishop of Sherborne, was a monk
of St. David’s whom Alfred persuaded to come to Winchester, and to enter
his service as scribe and literary helpmate. Asser tells us that “it was
his usual custom both by night and day, amid his numerous occupations of
mind and body, either himself to read books or to listen while others
read them.” The roll of Alfred’s literary productions is a long
one--_Orosius_, the _Consolations_ of Boethius, the _Pastoral Care_ of
Pope Gregory, and Bede’s _History of the English Church_ were all
rendered into the vernacular. More important still was the English
Chronicle, of which no less an authority than Professor Freeman says,
“It is the book we should learn to reverence next after our Bible.” It
is a treasure-house of contemporary record, systematically kept and
reliable, such as no other nation, save the Hebrews, has ever possessed.
In all probability the
[Illustration: AT ITCHEN ABBAS
A village on the Itchen, five miles above Winchester, surrounded
everywhere by picturesque scenery. The ‘Gospel Oak’ in Avington Park, is
some mile or so distant. Kingsley wrote part of his _Water-Babies_ while
staying at the Plough Inn at Itchen Abbas in the course of a fishing
holiday. Big trout may often be seen lying under the bridge here.]
original was compiled and kept at Wolvesey, and copies were made for use
at various other places, as Canterbury, Hereford, Peterborough. Six
ancient copies are extant, of which four are in the British Museum. One
of the two others is an actual Winchester copy of extreme antiquity, and
is preserved in the Parker Collection of MSS. at Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge.
Alfred’s last years were devoted to founding religious houses--one at
Shaftesbury, one at Athelney, and one, which concerns us most
immediately, at Winchester, the ‘Newan Mynstre,’ and his queen,
Alswitha, founded a nunnery at Winchester also--‘Nunna Mynstre’ or St.
Mary’s Abbey.
Alfred matured his plans for the Newan Mynstre in conjunction with
Grimbald of Flanders, whom he invited over to England, and whom he
induced to remain by making him the first abbot. But he only lived to
acquire the site, for which, it is said, he paid the enormous rate of a
mark of gold per foot. The spot selected was north-west of the present
cathedral churchyard, in the angle near St. Laurence’s Church, and the
minster was completed by Edward the Elder, King Alfred’s son, who
succeeded him. The further history of the Newan Mynstre, its removal and
rebuilding as Hyde Abbey, its dissolution and its decay, will be related
in due course.
Alfred died in 901, and his remains have been thrice interred--first of
all in the ‘Ealden Mynstre,’ the old minster, as the cathedral began
then to be called; then at the completion of the Newan Mynstre they
were translated thither with solemn pomp and reverence; and again at the
reconstruction and removal of the fabric with equal pomp and
circumstance to Hyde Abbey. The abbey is now merely a ruined fragment,
and every trace of the abbey church has disappeared. The citizens of
Winchester, so careful in the main of their treasures of antiquity, have
permitted Alfred’s resting-place to be lost sight of and forgotten
altogether, and modern search has not as yet identified the spot. In
1901, the year of the millenary of his death, an attempt was made to
atone in some measure for this irreparable neglect, and the boldly
conceived statue of Alfred, erected in Winchester Broadway, in front of
the spot which his own queen’s abbey had actually occupied, is a
reminder, not unworthy so far as outward monument and statuary art can
serve, of the hallowed association of Winchester with this, the greatest
of all our English monarchs. True is it that little tangible now
remains, whether of Wolvesey, Newan Mynstre, or Hyde which we can
directly connect with him--but his story, and his work, the inspiration
of his life, and his example are things more real and more tangible in
their way even than brick or stone or carven figure, and Alfred’s memory
can never here be lost, even though his tomb remains lost sight of and
slighted, and ‘no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’
CHAPTER VII
ALFRED’S DEATH AND SIXTY YEARS AFTER
Erunt reges nutritii tui, et reginae nutrices tuae.
When Alfred died in 901 he had accomplished a great work; a work great
and lasting, as the next sixty years were to show, and during these
years the ascendancy of Wessex and of the line of Egbert was to grow
more and more undisputed, till it culminated in the reign of Edgar the
Magnificent. These days were days of rapid development in Winchester,
and the fortunes of the city at this period were closely linked with
Alswitha, Alfred’s widow, Grimbald, the monk, and the two strong kings
of Alfred’s line, Edward, his son, and Athelstan, his grandson.
As already related, Alfred had planned the important foundation of the
Newan Mynstre, and had settled the site before his death. Its completion
was the work of the early days of Edward the Elder, who, almost
immediately on ascending the throne, convened a great meeting of the
Witan at Winchester to discuss the matter at the outset. The king’s own
views were limited and parsimonious, and he was anxious to lay the
lands of the Ealden Mynstre under contribution as a means of defraying
the cost, but the venerable Grimbald, now over eighty years of age, was
inflexible. “God will not,” said he, “accept robbery for
burnt-offering,” and he carried his point. The king made a liberal
endowment for the purpose, and the walls of the minster rose apace. At
the same time the abbey of St. Mary, founded by Alswitha, was proceeded
with, and the monastic quarter of the city saw a trinity of fair
monasteries, grouped side by side, rise rapidly into prominence.
Accident served to invest the new abbey with peculiar interest and
sanctity. A Danish descent on Picardy had driven a crowd of refugees to
seek shelter across the sea, and they had crossed over to Hampshire,
bearing with them their greatest treasure--the hallowed bones of their
patron saint, St. Judocus or St. Josse. The king received them
hospitably at Winchester, and the sacred relics were solemnly and
splendidly enshrined within the partially completed church of the New
Minster. Then in 903, in the presence of a great concourse of nobles and
clergy, the dedication of the New Minster was solemnly performed by
Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury. Scarcely was this completed ere
another equally striking act was performed, viz. the translation within
the walls of the new church of the remains of the founder, the great
Alfred himself--a solemn and imposing rite, carried out with all the
pomp and dignity of impressive circumstance:
cum apparatibus regali magnificentia dignis
(with solemn pomp befitting his royal state),
as the _Liber de Hyda_ informs us.
Then in rapid succession Grimbald, Alfred’s first nominated abbot, and
Alswitha, his devoted queen and widow, were called to rest, and the
queen’s remains were piously interred side by side with those of her
husband. Thus within three years of Alfred’s death the Newan Mynstre had
risen not merely into being, but had already become invested with
ascendancy and popular prestige as the hallowed repository of the mortal
remains of a wonder-working saint, a venerated abbot, of a saintly king,
and of his royal consort. Some twenty years later, within the same abbey
church--thus already established as a venerated mausoleum--Edward the
Elder himself was also laid, after a strenuous reign, in which he had
consolidated the Anglo-Saxon power and had re-established firmly the
unity of the kingdom. Thus, as year succeeded year, Winchester grew in
extent and importance. The prestige and dignity of its ecclesiastical
foundations established it thus early as the leading centre of pious
pilgrimage in the south of England, and shopmen and merchants followed
eagerly the pilgrim stream. Accordingly Edward the Elder drew up what
may be called the first commercial code of the city--laws regulating the
selling of goods and the making of bargains in open market in the city.
In the same reign associations or confraternities of traders for mutual
support began to be formed--confraternities which, under the name of
‘gilds’ or guilds, were destined to become in time corporate municipal
bodies, with the ‘Hall of the Gild Merchant’ as the centre of civic rule
and influence. A formal mayor and corporation were to come later, but
the elements and something more of civic rule in Winchester can be thus
traced continuously back and recognized for full a thousand years.
Of Athelstan the warrior we have but little actual Winchester history to
record; he reigned from 925 to 940, and was buried not at Winchester but
at Malmesbury. To atone for this historical paucity we have one glorious
romantic legend--the legend of the fight between Guy of Warwick and
Colbrand, the Danish giant and warrior, a story which has long been a
classic fairy tale. Rudborne, in his _Major Historia Wintoniae_, copying
from the _Liber de Hyda_, solemnly records how Athelstan, invested in
his capital city by Anelafe, King of the Danes, agreed with his besieger
to decide the issue by a combat between champions, and he tells us how a
new Polyphemus,
monstrum, horrendum, informe, ingens,
Colbrand, “a giant wondrous of stature, hideous of aspect, and of
unparalleled ferocity,” came forward to champion the Danish cause, and
how the English protagonist, Guy of Warwick, his opposite in every
attribute, “prudent, self-restrained, resolute, manly in mind and
skilled to combat,”
Against great odds bare up the war
“in a certain meadow lying northward of the city, now called De Hyde
mead, then called Denemarck,” while Athelstan watched the combat
anxiously from a corner of the city walls. Swords flashed, splinters
flew, long was the conflict doubtful; each antagonist in turn prevailed,
while hearts beat fast and lips grew white with tense compression, till
right prevailed, and the head of the second Goliath was severed from its
trunk by our Saxon David.
The worthy Knighton, in his _De Eventibus Angliae_, amplifies the story,
and the details fairly scintillate at his imaginative smithy. The fight
occurs in Chiltecumbe or Chilcomb valley; Guy of Warwick takes the
field, mounted on Athelstan’s own steed and girt with arms of wondrous
potency--the sword of Constantine the Great, the spear of Saint Maurice
himself.
Colbrand, also mounted, bears with him a whole armoury--axe, and club,
and iron hook--while a waggon by his side bears a whole assortment of
miscellaneous ironmongery for him to use at need against his adversary.
It is strength, and stature, and brute force against courage and
address, and for a long time Guy appears to be at the mercy of his
adversary. The latter, however, in dealing a ponderous blow--the _coup
de grâce_ as he imagines--contrives to let his weapon slip, and as he
reaches to recover it, the English champion rushes in and severs his
hand from off his arm. Nevertheless, the issue is for long in doubt, and
it is not till darkness has all but fallen that the giant’s strength
ebbs from weakness and loss of blood, and his nimble adversary shears
off his head with one sweep of his sword. Readers of Kingsley’s
_Hereward the Wake_ will recall in the above act something more than a
reminiscence of the strong conflict between Hereward and Ironhook, the
Cornish giant. The story is indeed a Cornish legend, localised round
Athelstan and the Wessex capital. Gerald of Cornwall, a writer whose
writings exist now only in fragments, related it in his _De Gestis Regum
Westsaxonum_, and it is his account, incorporated in the _Liber de
Hyda_, which is the source of its introduction into our local history.
Yet strange as it may seem, this wildly impossible romance was accepted
for centuries as historical; Danemark mead still exists as a local name,
and an inn known as the Champions only disappeared from the reputed
locale of this wonderful conflict a few years ago.
And so through legend and historical record alike, our city’s history
moved forward step by step. King after king of Egbert’s line succeeded
to the throne and ruled in Winchester. Edred the Pious succeeded Edmund
the Magnificent and was buried in the Old Minster. Edwy the Inglorious
succeeded Edred, and died and was buried in the New Minster, and thus in
959 the realm passed under the rule of Edgar, his half-brother, Edgar
the Peaceable, whom the monks named also Edgar the Magnificent. With his
reign a fresh chapter of interest and importance opens in our city’s
history.
[Illustration: HIGH STREET, WINCHESTER
The ‘Butter Cross,’ as the City Cross is invariably denominated, forms
the most characteristic feature of the delightful old-world High Street.
Close by are the ‘Piazza,’ and a charming old timber-fronted Tudor
house, now a well-known picture shop. Behind the Cross is the opening of
‘Little Minster Passage’ leading to the Cathedral.
In 1770 it was decided to remove the Butter Cross, and it was actually
sold to a purchaser for this purpose, but the inhabitants rose in
indignation, forcibly removed the scaffolding erected round it, and so
preserved it from destruction.]
CHAPTER VIII
ÆTHELWOLD, SAINT AND BISHOP
O see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the land of righteousness,
Tho’ after it but few enquires.
THOMAS THE RHYMER.
With the death of Edwy in 959 a new chapter of interest opens, a period
of revival, of growth, of development, the golden age of Saxon
Winchester, during which the Saxon city was at its zenith of importance,
the reign of Edgar the Peaceable and Magnificent.
The monkish chroniclers have for the most part painted Edgar in glossy
colours; they sang his virtues, his magnificence, his piety, his love
for Holy Church. They spoke of him as a second Solomon, and the
comparison was in its way not inapt, for, like Solomon, he enjoyed peace
and loved display; like Solomon, he allowed his private life to drag him
to a low level; and, like Solomon, he left a son behind him, who was to
see his kingdom rent asunder and a better than he bearing sway in it.
But it is neither Edgar, who, with all his faults, ruled wisely, nor his
son, Æthelred, of Evil Counsel, who, with all his vices, did not, who
are the leading figures of interest at this juncture; neither is it the
great Dunstan, of whom we get fleeting glances, Dunstan, the great
archbishop, the master-mind of his time, in whose hands the would-be
masterful and imperious king was indeed but as clay unto the potter,
little though he realized it. It is Æthelwold the bishop, Æthelwold the
saint and revivalist, Æthelwold the builder and lover of learning, who
is the dominating figure, and it is rather by the commencement and
completion of his work than by the accessions or deaths of kings that
the limits of the period are to be assigned.
For estimating the course of Winchester history at this important and
interesting stage we have fortunately more than an abundance--a wealth
of historical materials. Not only do the _English Chronicle_ and all the
leading monkish chroniclers contain full references, but numerous other
local sources of history, _e.g._ Rudborne, the various Winchester
annalists, and the _Liber de Hyda_, exist, which deal fully with it.
Besides these we have a minutely circumstantial life of Æthelwold
himself, and, perhaps most interesting of all, a remarkable account by
the same author, Wulfstan, precentor of Winchester, describing, in
curiously involved and almost interminable Latin elegiacs, the wonders
of the new Winchester cathedral which Æthelwold built, and the splendour
of various great and striking ceremonies which he saw performed within
it.
Æthelwold did more than merely leave his mark on Winchester; he
transformed it. He found its ecclesiastical life poor, self-centred, and
stagnant; he left it active, influential, creative; he found the Old
Minster, with its cathedral church, bare, distanced, and neglected,
eclipsed and outshone by Alfred’s later foundation, the Newan Mynstre.
He left it not merely with an acknowledged ascendancy, but a new fabric,
the finest in the land, the pride of the city, and almost one of the
wonders of the age, a centre of pilgrimage of great resort and renown,
with a new shrine containing a new patron saint, the wonder-working
shrine of St. Swithun. He found the domestic buildings small, damp,
unhealthy; he rebuilt them and brought to them a supply of pure water,
irrigating the city and its river valley by streams whose courses still
remain, to all intents and purposes, unchanged. _Nullum tetigit quod non
ornavit_ might well have been the epitaph over his tomb.
Ecclesiastical life in England had, in fact, never really recovered from
the Danish _débâcle_ of the later ninth century: monasteries had been
burnt, plundered, impoverished: recovery had been but slow and partial:
slackness and sloth were almost universal. It is not known how far in
the earlier English monasteries the Benedictine rule and the common
cœnobitic life had ever been strictly followed, but when Dunstan rose to
influence there were practically no religious houses where monks were to
be found; in their place non-resident canons, or seculars, as they were
called, had become the established order of things, and the various
annalists have painted for us in vivid colours the laxity and debased
standard of the ordinary church life of the day. The canons, or
‘seculars,’ released from the severe toil and discipline of the
Benedictine rule, allowed themselves numerous indulgences, and were in
many cases even married. Loving comfort and ease, they neglected the
church, and the daily services were grudgingly carried out by deputy, by
‘vicars’ paid, and paid poorly at that, to conduct the services while
the absentee canons expended the income of their ‘prebends’ elsewhere at
their ease. Thus Wulfstan tells us--
There were then in the Old Minster, wherein is the bishop’s stool,
canons of disreputable manners and morals, so swollen with pride
and insolence that numbers of them would not condescend to
celebrate the masses when their regular turn came, who turned
adrift the wives they had unlawfully married, and took others in
their stead, and who gave themselves up to gluttony and
drunkenness.
It is always interesting to note the snowball principle of accretion in
the various annalists’ accounts, and the fifteenth-century Winchester
annalist improves upon this picture, depicting them as
... canons, canonical only in name, who neglected their duties in
the church, and left the pious labours of vigils and the service of
the altar to be performed vicariously, absenting themselves from
the sight of the church, or even, so to speak, from the sight of
God. Bare was the church within and without. The vicars, scarcely
able to keep body and soul together, could not give: the
prebendaries would not. Hardly could you find one who, except on
compulsion, would offer a shabby altar cloth or present a chalice
worth a few shillings.
Be this as it may--and the monkish chroniclers would not be likely to
spare the seculars--the standard of life was terribly lax, and Dunstan,
originally abbot of Glastonbury, then Bishop of Worcester, and finally
archbishop, set out, with King Edgar’s sanction, on the path of reform,
and Æthelwold assisted heart and soul in the movement.
In their respective abbeys, Glastonbury and Abingdon, and in these only,
monks had been re-established. Now the movement for the replacing of
seculars by monks became general, and when in 963 he was consecrated
Bishop of Winchester by Dunstan, Æthelwold set himself to revive the
monastic orders in the three Winchester houses and elsewhere in the
land.
The canons of the Old Minster, however, flatly refused to adopt the
monastic life and discipline, and finally Æthelwold brought monks from
Abingdon to replace them. Wulfstan relates their coming thus:--
It happened on a Sabbath in the beginning of Lent, as the monks
from Abingdon were standing at the entrance to the church, that the
canons were finishing mass, chanting together, “Serve the Lord with
fear and rejoice unto Him with reverence. Take up the discipline,
lest ye perish from the right way,” as if they should say, “We will
not serve the Lord, nor keep His discipline; do you do it in your
turn, lest, like us, ye perish from the way which opens the
heavenly realms to those who follow righteousness.” Accepting this
as an omen, one of them exclaimed, “Why do we stand still outside
the church? Let us do as these canons exhort us; let us enter and
follow the paths of righteousness.”
The canons, however, struggled hard for reinstatement. They appealed to
the king, who inclined to temporize with them, and a great meeting of
the Witan was convened at Winchester, where Dunstan and Æthelwold urged
strongly the monastic view. The king, however, was still undecided when
a voice was heard from the crucifix built against the walls bidding him
not to waver longer. Thus, so the _Liber de Hyda_ informs us, the monks
were confirmed in occupation.
Next year it was the turn of the canons of the New Minster to follow
suit, for, in the words of Wulfstan, “thereupon the eagle of Christ,
Bishop Æthelwold, spread out his golden wings, and, with King Edgar’s
approval, drove out the canons from the New Minster, and introduced
therein monks who followed the cœnobitic rules of life.” The Nunnery,
St. Mary’s Abbey, was at the same time placed under the strict
Benedictine rule.
And now events moved fast, and with monks established in the monastery
strange rumours and portents began to prevail. It was noised abroad that
the saintly Swithun, buried humbly in the common graveyard on the north
side of the church, had begun to manifest his virtues by acts of healing
at his tomb. The churchyard became the resort of crowds of pilgrims,
until
... the holy father, Æthelwold, warned by a divine revelation,
translated the holy Swythun, the special saint of this church at
Wynchester, from his unworthy sepulchre, and piously placed his
holy relics with due honour in a shrine of gold and silver given by
the king, and worked with the utmost richness and craftsman’s
skill.
The same account tells us that the bones of St. Birinus were similarly
deposited in another shrine, but St. Swithun was the popular saint, and
the miracles wrought at his shrine soon made the Old Minster renowned
throughout the whole land.
Indeed, as Rudborne, the monk, quaintly and naïvely tells us, “as long
as canons held the Church at Winchester there were no miracles
performed, but no sooner were they ejected and replaced by monks than
miracles were wrought abundantly.” Doubtless Rudborne was right. At all
events crowds of pilgrims thronged to Winchester, and the name of
Swithun, the Saxon saint, became a power in the land.
But all this time Æthelwold was at work rebuilding the Cathedral, and
the church he reared was the finest in the land--one of the wonders of
the age.
Wulfstan in his long-winded way describes the building, its aisles, its
towers, its crypt, both mystifying the reader and losing himself over
and over again in the description, as he relates how the newcomer passes
bewildered from one wonder to another, till he knows neither how to
advance nor to get back again.
Nesciat unde meat, quove pedem referat.
The gilded weather-cock on the top of one of the towers in particular
fired his imagination. Glorious and superb, it grasped the ball of
empire with its splendid talons, and from its lofty standard dominated
the whole populace of the city:--
Imperii sceptrum pedibus tenet ille superbis,
Stat super et cunctum Wintoniae populum.
The mighty organ placed in the church by Æthelwold’s successor he also
enlarges upon. This mighty instrument had twenty-six bellows--twelve
above, fourteen below--worked laboriously by seventy full-grown men, who
sweated at their task, while two organists hammered vigorously upon the
manuals, flooding the whole city with the volume of the sound.
Wulfstan not only gives us these details of the building, but he
describes the various splendid ceremonies which he himself witnessed
within it--the translation of St. Swithun’s bones in the presence of
King Edgar; the dedication in 980, when King Æthelred and nine bishops
were present, including the “white-haired and angelic Dunstan”:--
Canitie nivens Dunstan et angelicus.
Then of the feast which followed, telling us how a tenth bishop--one
Poca--who arrived too late for the labours of the ceremony, atoned for
it amply by the depth of his potations.
Nulla laboris agens, pocula multa bibens.
[Illustration: ST. PETER’S, CHEESEHILL, WINCHESTER
One of the oldest of Winchester Parish Churches, of Norman date.
Cheesehill--a corruption of Chesil--a word still surviving in Chesil
Beach, near Portland--denotes the dry or gravelly strand along the bank
of the Itchen, and has no connection with cheese. Cheesehill Street,
though somewhat ‘slummy,’ is very picturesque and contains many
interesting old houses.]
Later on there was a second dedication. Altogether it was a period of
splendid and impressive ceremonial.
Æthelwold’s monks displayed their zeal in another channel. In both
monasteries scriptoria were established, and Winchester became the
centre of an unrivalled school of MS. illumination. The MS. treasures of
Æthelwold’s monks may still be seen in the British Museum, in Winchester
Cathedral Library, at the Bodleian, and at Rouen. Loveliest of all is
the priceless ‘Benedictional of St. Æthelwold,’ the glory of the
Chatsworth collection, a MS. of rare beauty and interest, for it
preserves for us the figure and features of St. Æthelwold himself as
well as some of the architectural details of the new cathedral he had
erected. How the ‘Benedictional’ came into the possession of the
Cavendish family is unknown. Is it too much to hope that later on the
day may come when such a treasure may be restored to its natural
home--the Cathedral Library at Winchester?
Æthelwold’s last work for Winchester we have already mentioned--the
rebuilding of the monastery. He transformed the channels of Itchen, and
brought its purifying waters through the city and the monastery by fresh
courses.
Quoting again from Wulfstan:--
Hucque
Dulcia piscosae flumina traxit aquae
Successusque laci penetrant secreta domorum
Mundantes locum murmure coenobium,
Here great Æthelwold led sweet fishful courses of water.
And murmurs of mingling streams pervade the recesses monastic.
Such, then, was Æthelwold. In 984 he died, and was buried in the crypt
of the cathedral he had erected. The place of his sepulture is now
unknown. There are few among the makers of Winchester greater than he.
We have dealt with this era of constructive effort as if the full design
was brought to completion in Æthelwold’s lifetime. Such was not indeed
the case, and it was left to Ælfeah, his successor in the episcopate, to
actually finish the building schemes inaugurated by his predecessor. But
it was Æthelwold, not Ælfeah, whose creation it really was, and Ælfeah
(_St. Alphege_) will always be remembered more feelingly as the
Archbishop of Canterbury, martyred by the Danes, rather than as the
completer of Æthelwold’s great master-work in Winchester.
CHAPTER IX
THE CAPITAL OF THE DANISH EMPIRE
Saxon and Norman and Dane are we.
Æthelwold’s work was still in full progress when King Edgar died in 975.
Young as he was--he was only some thirty-two years old when he died--he
had reigned for some sixteen years, and his reign had had notable
results. It had been a reign of uninterrupted peace; indeed it was the
only peaceful reign, save Edward the Confessor’s, of any Saxon king in
England, and a reign, moreover, of good government and wise laws. And
though the memories of Edgar’s domestic life, his intrigues, and his
tragic murder of his false friend, Earl Æthelwold, belong rather to
Wherwell and Andover than to Winchester, we have many personal touches
reminding us of his close connection with Winchester history. We see him
holding his court continually at Wolvesey. Tradition even derives the
name of Wolvesey from the wolf’s head tribute which he caused to be paid
to him there, and which brought about the practical extermination of
wolves in the land; but be that as it may, at Wolvesey Edgar royally
kept his state, presiding over many a great meeting of the Witan, and
promulgating his laws with the imperious formula, “I and the
Archbishop”--an involuntary acknowledgment of what was, after all, the
great power behind the throne, the influence of Dunstan. We see him
attending the imposing ecclesiastic ceremonies of his reign, such as the
enshrinement of the bones of Swithun, and we read of the wise laws and
reforms he inaugurated. He standardized the coinage and the weights and
measures of the realm. “Let one weight and one measure be used in all
England, after the standard of London and of Winchester.” “Let there be
one standard of coinage throughout the king’s realm”--regulations which
serve to show the development of commerce and prosperity in the kingdom.
Another was a curious law passed to check the excessive drinking habits
to which in particular his Danish subjects were addicted. Pegs were
placed at certain intervals in the drinking cups, and no one was
suffered to “drink below his peg.” Yet notable as King Edgar was as a
king, his personal claim entitles him to little respect. Allowing fully
for the lowly standard of his age, his life was sensual, loose, and so
smirched with squalid self-indulgence that even his monkish admirers,
who had every reason to laud him highly, were forced to mingle censure
with the lavish encomiums they heaped upon him, and it was a bitter
legacy which his loose domestic life left behind him for the nation to
inherit. The national record, the _English Chronicle_, accords him an
appreciative but discriminating epitaph, praising his good rule and
reciting his virtues indeed, but concluding in words which we can all at
least re-echo:--
May God grant him
that his good deeds
be more prevailing
than his misdeeds
for his soul’s protection
on the longsome journey.
And now followed years of tragedy and strife. Edgar’s elder son, Edward,
was very soon murdered by his stepmother, Ælfrida, and the throne passed
into the hands of Edgar’s second son, Æthelred the Redeless, or Æthelred
of Evil Counsel, the feeblest, most inept, most hopeless of all our
monarchs, whether Saxon or English. His reign was to witness the
recrudescence of Viking inroad and savage assault, and when, after
bleeding the resources of the realm to death in a vain and hopeless
effort to buy off the invaders, his foolish brain conceived the
wickedness of murdering all the Danes in England--a fatuous and
desperate act of villainy, hatched at Winchester and consummated on St.
Brice’s Day 1002--the tragedy of misery was exchanged for the ruin of
despair, and the terrible vengeance the Danes exacted was only ended by
the conquest of the realm and the passing of it into Danish hands, and
so Winchester became the capital of a greater empire than ever before or
since--the capital of the great Scandinavian empire of Cnut.
Most striking of all the figures of this period, more interesting far
than the ignoble king, was Æthelred’s queen, Emma, daughter of Richard,
Duke of Normandy, the beautiful, fascinating, and designing woman whom
for her beauty the Saxons called Ælfgyfu Emma--Emma, the gift of the
elves--whom Æthelred married at Winchester in 1002. A rare personality
this Ælfgyfu Emma, but not a pleasing one. “I governed men by change,
and so I swayed all moods,” she might have said of herself. The wife of
two successive kings, and the mother of two more, she was to be for
fifty years, and during five successive reigns, the central influence in
Winchester history; for Æthelred on the day he married her presented
Winchester and Exeter to her as her ‘morning gift,’ or wedding present,
and when he died, Cnut the Dane, Æthelred’s successor, wedded her in
turn. Of the details of her career we have yet to speak more fully, and
after Cnut’s death she ‘sat’ or kept her court at Winchester for many
years as the ‘Old Lady,’ the beautiful Saxon phrase for Queen Dowager.
Her memory lingers now most closely around the charming old Tudor
building, Godbegot House, fronting Winchester High Street, which
occupies the site and still re-echoes the name of a little manor which
once belonged to her--the little manor of Godbiete. Queen Emma granted
it to the prior and convent of St. Swithun, “Toll free and Tax free for
ever,” and toll free and tax free it remained for years and years,
wherein none had right of access, and even the king’s warrant lost its
authority. And so for some hundreds of years the liberty of Godbiete
remained a source of division and evil influence, a sanctuary or
‘Alsatia’ right in the heart of the city, where those obnoxious to the
law might shelter and defy its terrors. For “no mynyster of ye Kinge
nether of none other lords of franchese shall do any execucon wythyn the
bounds of ye seid maner, but all only of ye mynystoris of ye seid Prior
and convent”--a rarely suggestive illustration of mediaeval life and
method. Destined ever to bring trouble with her in her lifetime, her
very legacy seemed to bear with it the same evil fruit of civil
disturbance to the city and much bickering of rival authorities for
centuries after her death.
Of Winchester in Cnut’s reign we have frequent mention in the chronicles
of the time. The story of Cnut rebuking his courtiers on the seashore at
Southampton we need not repeat, except as regards its sequel. “After
which,” to quote Rudborne’s account, “Cnut never wore his crown, but
placing it on the head of the image above the high altar of the
cathedral (_at Winchester_), afforded a striking example of humility to
the kings who should come after him.”
Nor was humility the only virtue Cnut displayed. His munificence to the
Church was striking and ample, and one chronicler after another the
gifts made by Cnut and Emma jointly to the religious houses both at
Winchester and in the district round. “This same Cnut,” we read,
“embellished the Old Minster with such magnificence that the gold and
silver and the splendour of the precious stones dazzled the eyes of the
beholders.” Two of Cnut’s gifts were indeed to become memorable in after
years. One was the great altar cross of solid gold which he and Queen
Emma presented jointly to the New Minster, a presentation quaintly
portrayed in the _Liber Vitae_ of Hyde, a register and martyrology
illuminated at Winchester during this reign. For years it remained the
glory of the houses till it was destroyed at the burning of Hyde Abbey,
and even then its history was not ended, for Bishop Henry of Blois,
having stolen the precious metal mingled with the ashes from the
conflagration, was forced by the monks of Hyde to make restitution. The
other historic gift was that made to the Old Minster, of “three hides of
land called Hille,” usually identified as St. Catherine’s Hill, whereon,
in centuries to come, generation after generation of Wykeham’s scholars
were to make regular pilgrimage for purposes of play on ‘remedies’ or
days of relaxation. The land is still Church property, and is held now
by the ecclesiastical commissioners.
Cnut is a great figure both in Winchester and in English history.
Foreigner though he was, he ruled not as an alien conqueror, but as an
English monarch, and Englishmen are proud to claim him as one of the
greatest among our national rulers. He died in 1035, and his body was
brought to Winchester for interment in the Old Minster, and in the
Cathedral his bones are still preserved in one of the mortuary chests
already referred to, along with those of Emma his
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. CROSS
St. Cross Hospital founded by Bishop Henry of Blois in 1136, and placed
by him subsequently under the protection of the Knights of St. John of
Jerusalem, from which circumstance the Brethren wear the characteristic
_croix pattée_ or eight-pointed cross of the Order.
[Illustration]
Cardinal Beaufort built ‘Beaufort’s Tower’ and most of the present
domestic buildings, and founded the Order of Noble Poverty.
The hospitality to travellers for which the Knights Hospitallers were
noted is still practised in the form of the ‘Wayfarer’s Dole’ of bread
and ale, dispensed at the hospital gates to those applying for it, very
much as in mediaeval days.]
queen, and--strange companionship--William Rufus also.
With Cnut’s death came faction and strife. Cnut’s two sons, Harold and
his half-brother Harthacnut, Æfgyfu Emma and Earl Godwine, had all
intrigued desperately for power. The various accounts differ, but
Harthacnut, who, as son of Emma and Cnut, had a strong following in the
country, was abroad at the time, and in his absence Harold secured the
throne. Emma had played her cards well, perhaps too well, for she had
managed to secure possession of Cnut’s treasure and to assert her
influence as ‘lady paramount’ over Wessex, for we read
... it was resolved that Æfgyfu, Harthacnut’s mother, should dwell
at Winchester with the king, her son’s hûscarls, and hold all
Wessex under his authority.
But this was not to last. Harold asserted himself and raided his
‘mother,’--she was his stepmother, of course,--while
... Ælfgyfu Emma, the lady, sat then there within, and Harold ...
sent thither, and caused to be taken from her all the best
treasures which she could not hold which King Cnut had possessed;
and yet she sat there therein the while she might.
Nor was this all. Harold’s violence became impossible to make head
against, and the poor queen was driven into exile
... without any mercy against the stormy winter, and she came to
Bruges beyond sea, and Count Baldwine there well received her ...
the while she had need.
And so, for some three years, both Emma and Harthacnut were fugitives at
Baldwin’s court, till on the death of the violent and worthless Harold,
some three years after, they returned. Harthacnut, equally inglorious,
reigned some two years only, and actually died during his own marriage
feast as he stood up to wassail his bride. His body was brought to
Winchester for interment in the Old Minster, as a modern inscription in
the Cathedral serves to remind us; while his mother enriched the New
Minster with a gruesome relic--the head of the blessed Saint Valentine
the Martyr--to pay for masses for his soul. Then in 1043 came Edward the
Confessor, son of Emma and Æthelred the Redeless, who was “hallowed king
at Winchester on the first Easter day”; and the realm had peace at
least, if not rest, for over twenty years.
Since her return to England, Emma, ‘the lady,’ had not been idle, for at
the accession of the new king she was not only re-established in all her
old supremacy, but had recovered much of the wealth which Harold had
wrested from her, and the remaining seven years of her life witnessed a
continual struggle for ascendancy between her and Edward her son. Edward
had no sooner been crowned than he set himself to seize her
treasure--doubtless it was national rather than personal property--but
Emma, skilled to fish in troubled water, had landed both loaves as well
as fishes in her net, and this time Godwine the earl, unfortunately for
her, cast his weight into the opposing scale; accordingly, six months
after Edward’s coronation, we read--
The King was so advised that he and Earl Leofric, and Earl Godwine,
and Earl Siward, with their attendants, rode from Gloucester to
Winchester unawares upon the Lady (_Emma_), and they bereaved her
of all the treasures which she owned, which were not to be told ...
and after that they let her reside therein--
a passage notable in its way, for it brings before us, in close
juxtaposition, practically all the great characters of the Confessor’s
reign--Ælfgyfu Emma, and the king her son, and the three great earls,
with their attendants--Godwine, the great Earl of Wessex, accompanied
possibly by his sons Harold and Tostig: Leofric, Earl of Mercia, the
‘grim earl’ of Tennyson’s poem, husband of the famous Godiva: and
Siward, Earl of Northumbria, the old Siward of Shakespeare’s
_Macbeth_--and suggests a striking subject for pictorial representation,
which as yet, unfortunately, no artist’s brush has attempted. It was
doubtless in the national interest that the three rival earls were led
to combine to support the king against his mother, but we cannot but
regret that the circumstance which united this notable and noble trio
together in the support of the king--probably the only occasion in his
reign when the king ever commanded their united support--should not have
been one more heroic than that of forcing a defenceless if grasping old
woman to render up the keys of her treasure-chest.
We have one more picture of the ‘Old Lady’--the legend of Queen Emma and
the ploughshares, a legend peculiarly characteristic of mediaeval
sentiment, which is quaintly narrated in full and charming detail by
more than one chronicler. Her enemies had slanderously connected her
name with that of Alwine, Bishop of Winchester, and she had appealed to
the ordeal by fire to clear her reputation.
Coming from Wherwell Abbey, where she had been forced to retire for
refuge, she had passed the night in prayer and fasting, and in the
morning, in the presence of the king and a great concourse of people,
she had been led forward by two bishops, to pass barefooted over nine
red-hot ploughshares laid in order in the nave of the Old Minster
church. Yet such was the potency of the protection she derived from her
blameless conduct and unsullied conscience, that she was not only
unharmed but had actually passed over the ploughshares before she became
conscious that she had even reached them, whereupon the king,
overwhelmed with contrition and remorse, implored her forgiveness, in
the words of the repentant prodigal: “Mother, I have sinned against
Heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to be called thy son”;
while in token of his sincerity he presented his own body before the
queen and the bishops for punishment. The bishops touched him each with
a rod, after which the pious king received three strokes from the hand
of his weeping mother.
The Winchester chronicler, conscious of a ‘divided duty,’ has managed
very dexterously to extricate the king from severe censure, while
honourably loyal to the lady paramount of his city. In 1052 Emma died,
and was buried by her second husband’s side in the Old Minster. Her
bones still rest, as already mentioned, mingled with his, in one of the
Cathedral mortuary chests.
After Emma’s death Edward the Confessor was frequently at Winchester; he
revived the practice of the earlier Saxon kings, and “wore his crown at
Winchester at Easter time”--in other words, held his Easter Court there.
Into the details of his reign we need not enter. Most striking, perhaps,
from the point of view of our Winchester annals, is the amazing
accumulation of extravagant legend, beneath which the history of this
reign is buried and obscured. One such legend we have just related;
another one is that of the mysterious death of Earl Godwine. The
_Chronicle_ records the circumstance briefly and naturally. “On the
second Easter day he was sitting with the king at refection (_doubtless
at Wolvesey_) when he suddenly sank down by the footstool, deprived of
speech and of all power.... He continued so, speechless and powerless,
until the Thursday, and then resigned his life, and he lies within the
Old Minster.” A plain story, plainly told--an old man, a sudden stroke
of paralysis, and death in its natural course. But not so in the hands
of the fifteenth-century annalist; the story had grown, by the snowball
principle, by then: Godwine was no friend of the monks, and Edward was a
Saint--the Confessor. Godwine in this account, while feasting at the
royal table, is under grievous suspicion of compassing the death of the
king’s brother, Alfred the
Ætheling. A cupbearer, in handing the cup to the king, slips with one
foot on the floor, but dexterously recovers his balance with the other
foot. “Thus,” remarked Godwine, “brother brings aid to brother.” The
king retorts fiercely, “But for the wiles of Earl Godwine, my brother
would have been able to bear aid to me.” The earl earnestly protesting,
and in token of his innocence, lifts a piece of bread, praying that it
may choke him if he is in any way complicated in the crime of murder.
The pious king solemnly blesses the bread, which proves a fatal
mouthful, for “Satan entered into him when he had received the sop,” and
the earl falls speechless before the incensed king, who spurns the body
with his foot, while his sons Harold and Tostig remove it, and later on
bury it surreptitiously in the Cathedral. So was history written ‘once
upon a time.’ Whereabouts in the Cathedral the great earl was buried is
unknown.
One more legend--for legend, unfortunately, we must so deem it--the
legend of Abbot Alwyn and the monks of Newan Mynstre, and we must
conclude. Edward’s reign is marked by the struggle between Saxon and
Norman interest for supremacy in England, and to the Confessor Norman
art, Norman culture, Norman thought were dear. Doubtless his instinct
was so far right, but, unaccompanied as it was by any national sentiment
or attachment, this predilection must be accounted in him a weakness,
and not a virtue, and opposition to the king’s policy took on a national
and therefore patriotic colour. This was reflected in the
Winchester religious houses, and the Newan Mynstre, staunch in its
attachment to the Saxon cause, became the rallying point for Saxon
patriotism, while the Old Minster had leanings towards the Norman cause.
Thus it came about that when, on the Confessor’s death, Harold marched
to Senlac to repel the Norman invader, Abbot Alwyn and twelve monks of
Newan Mynstre donned coats of mail, shouldered each a battleaxe, and
fought sternly and heroically in defence of the cause.
There, in the thickest of the fight, they plied their axes bravely, and
when all was over their bodies were found, lying dead round the dead
king’s banner, and it was seen from their habit that they were monks of
the New Minster at Winchester. The Norman Conqueror, on being informed
of the discovery, remarked with grim irony that “the Abbot was worth a
barony, and each of the monks a manor,” and mulcted the New Minster
accordingly. The story, which is to be found in Dugdale’s _Monasticon_,
is picturesque and appealing--unfortunately there is no confirmation of
it. It is not given in the _Chronicle_, nor in any local sources such as
the Hyde Abbey records (where assuredly it would have been preserved),
in Rudborne, or the _Annales de Wintonia_. Rudborne gives, indeed, a
long list of lands which the Conqueror deprived the New Minster of, but
that in itself would be no confirmation of the story, for in the same
passage he states that William also seized lands belonging to the Old
Minster. William, it is true, kept the Abbacy of the New Minster vacant
for some two years, but that again was but an act of minor tyranny, too
familiar to call for much remark. The story, indeed, appears to be quite
discredited by the entries in _Domesday Book_, which seem to afford no
evidence of spoliation, but rather to prove that the New Minster lands
were added to by William, while the Old Minster certainly suffered at
his hands; and we fear that the story of the abbot and the twelve monks
of New Minster must, like so many others, be offered up reluctantly as
one more sacrifice on the altar of historical accuracy. The subject may
be pursued in the _Victoria History of Hampshire_, where it is fully
discussed.
With Harold’s death on Senlac field Winchester opens on a new phase.
Saxon history in Winchester is glorious and fascinating, but of Saxon
buildings in Winchester few visible traces remain. Norman Winchester is
with us still, and under the Normans Winchester was to expand and attain
greater outward beauty and glory than perhaps a thousand years of
undiluted Saxon rule would ever have conferred upon her.
[Illustration: KING’S GATE, WINCHESTER
The smallest of the five original gates of Winchester, of which it and
Westgate alone are standing now. Abutting on the great gate of St.
Swithun’s Priory--now the Close Gate--it was burnt down during the
Barons’ War, and when rebuilt a small church was built above it for the
use of the lay servitors of the Priory. This church is now the Parish
Church of St. Swithun’s, Winchester. An absurd local tradition connects
the name with the number of sovereigns of the realm who have passed
beneath it.]
CHAPTER X
NORMAN WINCHESTER
Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.
It is safe to say that no other event so thoroughly affected the
fortunes of Winchester as the Norman Conquest. Not only was the city
completely transformed in outward form, but its relationship to the
country at large was to undergo profound modification, and a train of
political circumstance opened up the effect of which was ultimately to
deprive her of the leading national position she had hitherto occupied,
and to relegate her to second if not lower rank in the national polity.
The decline of Winchester was, however, as yet still far distant, and
the immediate result of Norman rule was to bring Winchester into even
greater prominence than in the closing years of Saxon rule.
We have spoken of Winchester as the capital of Saxon England, and so it
had been, but not in the exclusive sense in which the word is employed
nowadays. In fact, in the modern sense, viz. that of a permanent seat
and headquarters of government, no capital existed then at all. The
details of government were far less complex, government as an art far
less specialized and far less an exact science, and its whole character
took on a far more personal and direct complexion than at present, so
that while Winchester and London might both correctly enough be termed
capitals in the sense that the permanent symbols of rule, the official
records, and so forth, were kept in them, it was in reality the king’s
headquarters, wherever he might happen to be, that formed the effective
capital. But though Winchester was being, and had been for many years
past, hard pressed by London, she still retained the Royal Treasury, and
the state records were still kept there, and she could therefore still
claim something more than a nominal pre-eminence, even though the growth
and commercial development of London were rapidly diminishing her
relative influence.
The position of London William had recognized by being crowned there,
before the ceremony had been carried out at Winchester or elsewhere; but
other circumstances--political motives, reasons of personal convenience,
and indeed of personal preference--drew him largely to Winchester.
Indeed, when in England he ‘wore his crown,’ _i.e._ held his ceremonial
court, three times a year--at London at Pentecost, at Gloucester at
Christmas, and at Easter, the leading festival of the year, at
Winchester.
And both policy and convenience were largely involved in William’s
action. Communication was slow and difficult, the country sparsely
habited, and government then, even more than nowadays, rested on
prestige--the appeal to imagination.
William had posed as the lawful heir to the Saxon throne; he appealed,
whenever he could advantageously do so, for sanction for his acts to the
laws of Cnut or Edward the Confessor, and he was far too prescient a
ruler to underestimate the effect produced on his Saxon subjects, by his
sitting on the throne of his predecessors and ruling his Saxon subjects
in their historic centre of rule, quite apart from the subtle appeal his
so doing made to his own personal vanity. Moreover, apart from all
personal considerations, the position of Winchester marked it out as a
natural capital--for England was after all but a part of his realm, and
the English Channel was the bridge between it and the Norman provinces,
with the estuaries of Southampton and of the Seine as the ends of the
bridge. Indeed, as long as the link with Normandy remained firm,
Winchester could hold its head up high. When Normandy fell away,
Winchester declined also.
But beyond these reasons of state, Winchester appealed personally to the
Conqueror’s passion for the chase. The great forests all round it--for
it was still but a clearing, as it were, in the great primeval
forest--afforded him facilities for hunting at his convenience, such as
few other spots could offer. Here then he erected a royal residence,
some scanty traces of which may still be seen; here, very shortly
after, the inevitable sign of Norman domination, a great, impregnable,
and awe-inspiring fortress was to be seen rapidly rising on the high
ground in the south-western angle of the city area, and here too--and,
we are glad to say, almost equally inevitably--Norman culture and Norman
devotion expended themselves in raising a stately and glorious temple
for the worship of God, worthy alike in the dignity of its conception,
the beauty of its execution, and the scale of grandeur on which it was
carried out. Added to, modified, reconstructed or transformed, as
various of its parts have subsequently been, it is in essential features
the Norman Cathedral, which is standing still, and which is the glory of
Southern England to-day.
Foremost among the questions of the time was that of ecclesiastical
policy. William proceeded with caution. The position of Stigand,
Archbishop of Canterbury, had long been canonically irregular, for he
held Winchester as well as Canterbury, and he was guilty of other
irregularities also, and so at first William assumed a non-committal
attitude towards him. He refused to permit him to officiate at his
coronation, but treated him with respect and courtesy, until a
convenient opportunity arose to depose him, when he had him brought to
trial and deprived. The remaining years of his life Stigand spent as a
kind of state prisoner in Winchester.
Many tales are told of his hoarded wealth and his penurious habits; a
part of it, a great crucifix of massive gold and silver, he bestowed
upon the Cathedral. He was buried within its walls, and a figure of him
has been of recent times placed in one of the niches on the great Altar
Screen.
Stigand’s deposition made room for two notable appointments. Lanfranc,
perhaps the keenest intellect of the day, certainly the foremost among
ecclesiastical statesmen, was made archbishop. William Walkelyn, a
relative, there is some reason to believe, of the Conqueror, became the
first Norman bishop of Winchester.
Walkelyn enjoyed a high reputation alike for learning and for personal
piety. The monkish author of the _Annales de Wintonia_ describes him as
a man “of perfect piety and sanctity of life, endowed with wondrous
sagacity and withal of such abstinence that he eschewed both meat and
fish and rarely tasted wine or mead, and then only with extreme
moderation.”
To such a man, imbued with the culture as well as the genius of Norman
civilization, the Saxon Cathedral of Æthelwold--albeit barely one
hundred years before it had seemed so sublime to the restricted and
untutored imagination of precentor Wulfstan--appeared meagre and quite
insufficient. He set to work to rebuild the Cathedral, and this fact
alone must serve to make his name ever memorable among the ’ makers of
Winchester.’