replaced. It is a moot point how far the sites of the two buildings were
identical, and a passage in the _Annales de Wintonia_ seems to show
they certainly were not entirely so, though in any case they could not
have differed much; but in historic continuity, in the dust of the early
kings it preserved, in the shrines of the saints which it displayed to
the devout, it was still the historic cathedral of the Saxon capital,
transformed and glorified indeed on a scale of noble vastness and
dignity hitherto unattempted in England.
Foremost among cathedral traditions is the story of the building of the
roof, recorded in the same _Annales de Wintonia_ to which reference has
been several times already made, and in them alone. Walkelyn had
strained his resources to the full, and still needed timber for the
roof. He applied accordingly to the Conqueror for a grant of timber, and
received permission to take from one of his woods--Hempage Wood, near
Avington, five miles from Winchester--as much timber as he could fell
and cart away within three days. “Make hay while the king smiles,” was
the bishop’s maxim. He collected a whole army of wood-cutters, carters,
teams of horses, and in three days removed every timber tree in the
wood, leaving one oak only, the so-called Gospel Oak under which
tradition reported Augustine to have preached. Unwarranted as the
tradition appears to have been, it served to protect the tree, which
still stands, though to all appearance dead, an interesting reminder of
Walkelyn and his cathedral. When William discovered what a sweep the
bishop had made of his “most delectable wood,” he was furious, and was
only with difficulty appeased. “Certainly as I was too liberal in my
grant, so you were too exacting in the advantage you took of it,” he
said, when at length he readmitted the bishop to his presence and his
favour.
The story acquires additional interest from the subsequent history of
these huge and venerable timbers. For some 800 years they have continued
to support the mighty roof, though quite recently some of them have had
to be replaced, owing to the destructiveness of a grub--the grub of the
_Sirex gigas_--which had in places eaten them through and through. A
portion of one of these beams with a specimen of the destructive _sirex_
can be seen in the city museum, and curios made of this so-called
‘cathedral oak’--though much of it by the way is chestnut--are being
sold now for the benefit of the Cathedral Preservation Fund: thus is
exemplified Earl Godwine’s remark, “Brother brings aid to brother.”
Two other items relative to Walkelyn are of interest. Curiously
enough--and it speaks eloquently for his detachment of mind and freedom
from professional narrowness--he wanted at first to revoke Æthelwold’s
policy and put back secular canons for monks. The monks were aghast,
and, more important still, Lanfranc was hostile, and accordingly after a
struggle the bishop gave way and abandoned the project. The other item
is the connection between Walkelyn and the great Fair of St. Giles, to
which reference has been already made. Walkelyn persuaded William’s son,
William Rufus, to grant him the right to a three days’
Fair, on the hill eastward of the city, and to apply the tolls so
obtained to the erection of the Cathedral. To the development and
further history of the Fair we shall return in a later chapter.
The residence or ‘Palace’ of the Conqueror stood in the very centre of
the city, near where the Butter Cross stands now, and abutting upon the
Newan Mynstre. Indeed, to obtain room for it the monks were despoiled of
part of their site. Interesting remains of it exist in the thick walls
and the cavernous cellars of the ancient houses which now occupy the
spot--the latter vividly suggestive of dungeons and of the Isaac of York
episode in Scott’s _Ivanhoe_. Close at hand were the Royal Treasury and
the Mint, and almost within hail were the quarters of the king’s
executioners, whom he kept always ready ‘laid on,’ as it were--a
gruesome reminder of the darker tones in which life in Norman times was
painted.
The rule of the Norman Conqueror was one which profoundly impressed the
imagination both of his contemporary subjects and of succeeding
generations. No historical events have been more picturesquely told or
more repeatedly dwelt upon than the stories of Curfew Bell, of Domesday
Book, of the Feudal System, and of the New Forest--all these centre in
some form or other either round Winchester or the immediate locality.
The history of William’s reign, as presented in our history books to
children at least, might indeed be almost entirely constructed out of
Winchester and its memorials. The curfew ordinance,
[Illustration: MARTYR WORTHY
One of the old-world villages, some few miles above Winchester, lying in
a reach of the river Itchen of unusual beauty and charm.]
the order to extinguish fires and put out lights--probably as much a
wise precaution to diminish risk of fire in crowded towns built mainly
of wood as directly political in purpose,--was first promulgated here.
Here first of all curfew was rung, as it has rung nightly ever since.
Formerly it rang from the little church of St. Peter in the Shambles,
behind Godbiete; now it rings from the old Guild Hall--the Hall, in
earlier days, of the Guild Merchant of Winchester.
Another event which affected the popular imagination even more
profoundly was the great survey of the kingdom, the results of which
were embodied in the Domesday Book, so called because, as Rudborne says,
“it spareth no one, just like the great Day of Doom.” The compilation of
it was regarded as a great act of oppression. “Inquisition was even made
as to how many animals sufficed for the tillage of one hide of land.” In
reality it was an act of statesmanlike administration, the object of
which was to collect accurate information for the purpose of assessing
‘geld,’ or dues for military service. Exact assessment for taxes is
evidently not a modern terror merely, nor is the modern income tax-payer
the only one who has objected to inquisitorial modes of assessment.
Winchester and London were omitted from Domesday Book altogether--an
omission which was repaired, as far as Winchester is concerned, in Henry
I.’s reign, when the Winchester Domesday Book, as it was called, was
compiled. Needless to say, Domesday Book was merely the popular name
for it; its real name was the _Rotulus Wintoniensis_, or Book of
Winchester, sometimes termed _Rotulus Regis_ or King’s Book. Domesday
Book was kept at Winchester, and a copy of it at Westminster. The
original is now in the Rolls Office.
It is certainly noteworthy that Winchester should have given birth to
the two most valuable records of national history which this country has
ever possessed, two records which no other nation can find any parallel
to, viz. the English Chronicle and the Domesday Book. The value of the
latter is that it gives us in absolutely unquestionable form the raw
material of history, unwarped by personal bias, uncoloured by tradition.
By means of it we can put to exact test many of the time-honoured
statements, accepted for generation after generation without question or
demur, and in that fierce crucible many and many a legendary tradition
treasured hitherto as current historical coin, has been melted down and
revealed as a spurious token merely. Such a one we probably have in the
story already related of Abbot Alwyn and the monks of Newan Mynstre; the
story of the afforestation of the New Forest is another. But the New
Forest, though local, is rather beyond our scope: the reader is referred
to the fuller volume on Hampshire for a discussion of this topic: and,
indeed, the story of Norman Winchester is full enough as it is--replete
with many a thrilling scene, many a notable historical figure. William
himself, strong, stern, far-seeing and determined, a leader among men,
towering head and shoulders above his contemporaries, capable of
cruelty, hard and grasping, indeed, as were all who strove to rule in
those stern days, but never small or moved by petty spite. “He nothing
common did or mean,” might almost be said of him. And side by side with
him, Lanfranc the Italian, smooth, supple, astute--like William, a
master mind, a great man, but with the greatness of the ecclesiastical
statesman rather than of the saint or even the scholar; and in sharp
contrast Walkelyn the Norman, the high-minded, the conscientious, the
ascetic--a scholar and a devotee rather than a statesman; and after
these a host of minor personalities, striking and interesting enough,
too, in their way. Foremost among these stands Waltheof, Earl of
Huntingdon, son of the great Siward, Earl of Northumbria. A picturesque
and pathetic figure he is, with certain virtues and high qualities all
unfitted for his time.
Poor Waltheof--like Saul of old, his outward man striking and tall and
goodly to look upon,--was the idol of William’s Saxon subjects. But the
fair exterior covered after all but a weak and irresolute soul, no match
for the master mind of William, who read him through and through as a
reader reads his book. Yet though in his weakness William despised him,
in his popularity William feared him, and when denounced by his
treacherous Norman wife for the merely colourable part he had played in
the Bridal of Norwich--
That bride-ale
That was many men’s bale--
William, deaf to all entreaty, kept him a close prisoner, and finally,
at the Pentecostal Gemôt held at Winchester, had sentence of death
pronounced upon him. Swiftly and secretly the order was carried out, and
on May 31, St. Petronilla’s day, at early dawn, while the men of
Winchester were in their beds, Waltheof was led out to execution on St.
Giles’s Hill. He came arrayed in full dress as an earl, wearing his
badges of rank, and on reaching the place of execution knelt down to
pray. He continued sometime in prayer while the executioner, fearing
interruption, grew restive and impatient. “Wait yet a little moment,”
pleaded the victim; “let me, at least, say the Lord’s Prayer for me and
for thee,” and the Earl’s voice was heard uttering the petitions one by
one, till at the words, “Lead us not into temptation,” the axe
descended. But, as the severed head fell from the body, the lips were
seen still to be moving, and the words, “But deliver us from evil,” were
distinctly heard. Such is the moving account we have of Waltheof’s
death. The last chapter of the story belongs rather to Crowland than to
Winchester. Buried in the first instance obscurely at Winchester, his
body was later on permitted to be reinterred at Crowland, and, on
raising it, the head was found to be miraculously reunited to the trunk,
a thin red line alone revealing the death he had died. Kingsley has told
it in masterly style in _Hereward the Wake_ and the episode of his false
wife Judith’s visit to her husband’s tomb forms a thrilling incident
most picturesquely told.
Of Hereward himself Winchester history is silent, but Kingsley, in
another striking passage, brings him too upon our local stage, when he
rides to Winchester to make submission to the king. With his companions
he rides along the Roman road which leads still from Silchester, till,
from the top of the downs, they catch sight of the city lying beneath
them.
Within the city rose the ancient Minster Church, built by
Ethelwold--ancient even then--where slept the ancient kings,
Kennulf, Egbert, and Ethelwulf, the Saxons; and by them the Danes,
Canute the Great and Hardicanute his son, and Norman Emma, his
wife, and Ethelred’s before him; and the great Earl Godwin, who
seemed to Hereward to have died not twenty but two hundred years
ago; and it may be an old Saxon hall upon the little isle, whither
Edgar had bidden bring the heads of all the wolves in Wessex, where
afterwards the bishops built Wolvesey Palace. But nearer to them,
on the downs which sloped up to the west, stood an uglier thing,
which they saw with curses deep and loud--the keep of the new
Norman castle by the west gate.
We will not stop to discuss this striking passage; and though Hereward
be but a figure imported into our local history, the castle which he saw
was, both then and for many years to come, the most noticeable and
striking feature in Winchester, as also the leading outward symbol of
the Norman presence and power. For centuries it was to hold its place
supreme, to see one sovereign after other add and re-add to its palace,
to stand siege and battery, to be the residence of kings and queens, to
witness the birth of more than one heir to the throne, to gather within
its walls councils and parliaments. For 600 years it was to endure till
Cromwell laid siege to it, and then razed it to the ground, all save the
great Hall, built in Plantagenet days, by Henry III. which still remains
glorious in its associations as in the beauty of its proportions. Yes,
Hereward and his companions might utter curses loud and deep, for the
rebirth of the nation, which the Norman period heralded, was not
accomplished without much labour and travail, both of body and of
spirit; but could he have looked forward, as we can look back, upon all
that Norman rule has been the stepping-stone to, both in Winchester and
elsewhere, he would have found, like the unwilling prophet of old, a
blessing on his lips and not a curse, and we too shall be ready to offer
up our Te Deum in a spirit of thankfulness, earnest and sincere, though
the appropriate accompaniment to it be rather a subdued strain, and in a
minor key, than an unbroken outburst of triumphal joy.
CHAPTER XI
LATER NORMAN DAYS
They shot him dead on the Nine-stone Brig
Beside the Headless Cross,
And they left him lying in his blood
Upon the moor and moss.
BARTHRAM’S _Dirge_.
When William the Conqueror died, the link with Normandy was temporarily
severed, and during the reign of Rufus of evil memory Winchester
declined in political importance; nor, apart from one or two episodes,
are the Winchester memories of the reign of a striking character. It
witnessed, indeed, the practical completion of Walkelyn’s life-work--the
great cathedral--as well as the institution of St. Giles’s Fair, as
already mentioned, but these belong in essence, though not in time,
rather to the epoch of the Conqueror than to that of his violent-minded
successor.
Most characteristic of all events of the reign was the long-drawn-out
struggle between Rufus and Archbishop Anselm--“the fierce young bull and
the old sheep,” as Anselm himself had in dismal prognostication dubbed
them. On Lanfranc’s death in 1089 William kept the see vacant for
several years, as was his practice in matters of church preferment, in
the meantime shamelessly appropriating the temporalities of the see; and
when as a result of a dangerous illness he at last agreed to appoint a
successor, it was only with extreme reluctance and forebodings of ill
that Anselm was at last prevailed on to accept the king’s nomination.
Anselm’s fears were fully justified, and a state of hopeless strife soon
existed between the two. To all Anselm’s demands, particularly his
demand to go to Rome for investiture, the king returned an inflexible
refusal, until a crisis was reached at a great council held in
Winchester, memorable as the last personal meeting between the king and
the archbishop. Every form of pressure was brought to bear on Anselm; he
refused, as a matter of conscience, to give way, and finally announced
his intention of going to Rome without the king’s sanction, as he could
not go with it.
The king raged and stormed in vain, till Anselm, as he turned to leave
the royal presence, begged permission to give him his blessing. “I
refuse not thy blessing,” said the king, somewhat subdued; he inclined
his head, and Anselm signed the sign of the cross over him. They never
met again.
The last scene of all in the reign is, however, Winchester’s most
dramatic, as well as tragic, recollection. On the afternoon of Lammas
Day (August 1), 1100, news came to Winchester that the Red King, who had
been hunting that day in the New Forest, had
[Illustration: WATERSPLASH AT ITCHEN STOKE
Perhaps the prettiest reach of the river Itchen--and that is saying a
good deal--lying between Itchen Stoke and Ovington. The road between
them crosses the main stream in a delightful ‘watersplash.’]
there met a violent death. Prince Henry, his younger brother, with his
followers had spurred into the city bringing the tidings, had seized the
Royal Treasure, and had summoned the Witan to pronounce him king.
Meanwhile the Red King’s body, alone and untended, lay weltering in
blood on the spot where he had fallen, till a charcoal-burner, Purkess
by name, travelling along had found it and placed it in his cart, that
the poor remains might at least have decent sepulture in the cathedral
of the diocese. As the news spread in the city an eager throng gathered
and watched the road to await the sorry funeral cortège, as it made its
mournful way, probably along the road from Compton through the south
gate, and so into the old monastery. The interment took place the very
next day, right under the tower--“on the Thursday he was slain, and on
the morning after buried”; and when a few years later the Norman tower
fell upon the tomb, men said it was the Red King’s crimes and not
structural weakness that had occasioned the fall. His bones were
transferred later on to one of the mortuary chests on the side screens
of the choir, but popular tradition still points to a tomb beneath the
tower as the tomb where he was originally buried, and speaks of it as
Rufus’s Tomb.
And now, with Henry on the throne, Winchester resumed its former
political importance. Henry reunited the Norman provinces to England,
and the old activity of intercourse across the seas was resumed. But
more than that, Henry identified himself with the city more closely
than any king has ever done before or since. His romantic marriage with
the Saxon princess Eadgyth, of Romsey Abbey, grand-daughter of Edmund
Ironside, made him popular, and after his marriage he and his queen--the
good queen Molde the people called her--made Winchester Castle their
residence, and here their son William, the ill-fated hero of the _White
Ship_ tragedy, was born.
With its old political position restored, and the king reigning and
residing here in person, Winchester rose to the zenith of its importance
in Norman days.
A number of events of interest are identified with this reign. First and
foremost, the birth of Hyde Abbey. Newan Mynstre, the pious offspring of
Alfred and Edward the Elder, had since the translation of Swithun’s
bones, during Æthelwold’s régime, steadily declined in importance, and
its activity had been much hampered. The proximity to the older and more
extensive foundation, which eclipsed and overshadowed it in importance,
was one cause; another was the cramped nature of the site upon which the
New Minster had been erected.
Always small and confined, so close were their respective churches that
chanting in one disturbed the devotions in the other. The erection of
William the Conqueror’s palace had made matters still worse, and the
monks had had to forego a portion of their already over-congested area.
Under these circumstances William Giffard, who had succeeded Walkelyn as
Bishop of Winchester, obtained from Henry permission to move the
monastery to the village of Hyde in the northern suburbs of the city,
and here near Danemark Mead, where Guy of Warwick was said to have
vanquished Colbrand the Dane, the new structure was commenced. The
immediate result was highly satisfactory.
The monks of St. Swithun’s, who also had suffered from the over-close
proximity and congestion, as well as from the rivalry of its over-close
neighbour, heartily co-operated and granted the site for the new abbey.
Old rivalries were allayed, and for a time a spirit of cordiality
prevailed, while as a means of raising funds to assist both houses the
king’s grant of a three days’ fair was added to, and an extension given
for five additional days, making eight altogether.
In 1110 all was ready, and the monks of Newan Mynstre proceeded in
solemn procession to take possession of their new home, bearing with
them their sacred relics--the great cross of gold given by Cnut and
Emma, and the remains of their illustrious dead, Alfred and Alswitha and
their son Edward, for reinterment in the glorious new Abbey Church.
Newan Mynstre had so far lasted for some 200 years; now it entered on a
new and amplified existence--an existence destined to endure for over
400 years, during which, as Hyde Abbey, it was to maintain a proud and
exalted position among the monasteries of the land, till Henry VIII.’s
commissioners dissolved and swept it away, leaving what is now a scanty
ruin merely--a gateway and little else--to speak of the former glories
of the once famous foundation of Alfred the Great.
Of interest and importance only second to that of the erection of Hyde
Abbey was the appointment of the bishop, Henry of Blois, who succeeded
to the see on the death of William Giffard in 1129--a man of high birth
and extreme eminence, who was to play a leading part both in the
national fortunes and in the fortunes of the city for over forty years.
His career we shall deal with more fully in the next chapter.
As to the condition of Winchester in Henry’s reign we have fortunately
sources of exact and unusually ample information. From the Domesday
Survey of William the Conqueror, Winchester and London had been entirely
omitted. Henry gave orders for a Winchester Domesday, as it is sometimes
termed, to be compiled--a survey limited, it is true, to the king’s
lands, that is, the lands in Winchester paying land-tax and brug-tax
(the latter a tax of uncertain nature, perhaps dues on brewing). This
was supplemented by a second survey made some years after by order of
Bishop Henry of Blois; and the results of the two surveys are of
peculiar importance and interest, for though the church properties are
left entirely unnoticed, we glean from it knowledge, not only of the
streets and properties, but also of the occupations and handicrafts, _et
hoc genus omne_, of Norman Winchester.
The mode of taking the census was peculiar. Eighty-six of the leading
burghers were empanelled and sworn to hold a grand inquest, and to
return a faithful verdict. From their labours we gather not only that
the Norman city, in its general ground plan, its walls, gates, and the
dispositions of its streets, reproduced very closely many of the
features of the original city erected by the Romans, but that that
general character has remained practically undisturbed to the present
day. The main artery and commercial thoroughfare was then, as now, the
High Street, referred to only indirectly in the census as _Vicus
Magnus_. Nearly all the other streets crossed it at right angles and
were named after the different trades followed in them; and we gather
that in Winchester, as in all other mediaeval towns, each trade had its
own special street or quarter, and their general disposition was
somewhat according to the scheme annexed.
Some few of these names linger still, though practically all the special
industries have long since disappeared. Minster Street has survived and
for obvious reasons, Sildwortenestret and Bucchestrete have survived to
modern times in Silver Hill and Busket Lane respectively, while Gere
Street or Gar Street, curiously enough, survives, though all but
unrecognisably, in Trafalgar Street. The list of the trades alone is
lengthy and varied, and in itself a telling testimony to the prosperity
of the city at the time. The occupations of cloth-weaving,
tailoring, tanning, remind us of the great industry of the
district--sheep-rearing--the wool and other products of which formed the
staple attraction for continental merchants to throng to the city
[Illustration:
Westgate.
The Castle. --||-- Snidelingestret (_or Tailors’
|| Street_), _now Westgate Lane_.
||
Gerestret (_or Gar Street, --||-- Bredenestret (_now Staple Gardens_).
now Trafalgar Street_). || _Here later on the
|| Wool Staple was placed._
||
Goldestret (_or Gold Street, --||-- Scowertenestret (_Shoe-waremen’s
now Southgate Street_). || Street or Cobblers’
|| Street_), _now Jewry Street.
|| The Jewish Ghetto was here--hence
|| its present name._
||
Calpestret (_or St. Thomas’s --||-- Alwarenestret (_All-wares-men’s
Street_). || Street or Drapers’ Street_),
|| (_now disappeared_).
||
Menstrestret (_now Little --||-- Flesmangerestret (_Flesh-mongers’
Minster Street_). || Street or Butchers’
|| Shambles_), _now St. Peter’s
|| Street_.
||
The Monastic Quarter. --||-- Sildwortenestret (_or Shieldware-men’s
|| Street_), _now Upper
|| Brook Street. The name survives
|| in Silver Hill._
||
||-- Wenegerestret (_or Wongar
|| Street_), _now Middle Brooks_.
||
||-- Tannerestrete (_or Tanners’
_On this side also was_ || Street_), _now Lower Brook
Colobrochestret (_or Colebrook || Street_.
Street_). _Close by was the ||
[1]Hantachenesle, the quarters ||-- Bucchestrete (_near Eastgate_).
of one of the ‘Gilds.’_ ||
Eastgate.
]
during the fairs of St. Giles. The shieldmakers reflect its military
importance, and the goldsmiths the rank and material wealth of those for
whom it catered.
Naturally enough, many other interesting details are to be gathered
incidentally, _e.g._ the names of the inhabitants, among which many
names still familiar as distinctively Winchester names are to be found,
and their various ranks and occupations. We read, for instance, of a
market near the three minsters, of which the present Market Street is a
survival; of ‘estals,’ or stalls, in the High Street, a reference with a
curious modern echo, inasmuch as the stalls in the High Street and
Broadway have been quite recently the source of much local heart-burning
and contention; of ‘escheopes,’ or shops, which had belonged to the
Confessor’s queen, Edith; of reeves (_prepositi_), and of a ‘stret
bidel’ (or _street beadle_). One curious entry relative to Eastgate
speaks of certain steps which gave access to the church above the gate
(_qdā gradˢ ad ascendendā ad ecclam sup portā_), showing that King’s
Gate was not alone among the city gates in having a little church above
it.
Another important feature we gain information on is the position of the
Gilds. These trade organisations had now become important and fully
organised; they served for the protection of their members, they made
regulations for the conduct of the several trades, and their
headquarters were used as clubs or places for general meeting and
discussion--the latter including almost as a _sine qua non_
ale-drinking, and that not always in moderation. The Survey contains
references to three halls or ‘gild’ headquarters--_Lachenictahalla_ (or
_chenictes’ hall_) near Westgate, the _Chenichetehalla_ near Eastgate
(on the site of the present St. John’s Rooms), and the _Hantachenesle in
Colebrook Street_. What the very obscure term _Hantachenesle_, applied
to the last named, means is a problem on which so far no satisfactory
light has been thrown. Nor is it clear who the ‘cnechts’ or ‘chenictes’
were--whether, as is generally assumed, they were ‘knights,’ _i.e._
young men of rank, or ‘cnechts,’ _i.e._ sons of burghers not yet
admitted to the ‘Freedom.’ We read that at the Chenichetehalla, the
‘chenictes’ drank their gild (_chenictehalla ubi chenictes potabant
Gildam suam_), and at the Hantachenesle the ‘approved’ or freemen drank
theirs (_Hantachenesle ... ubi pbi homiēs Went potabant Gildā suā_).
That this beer-drinking was often inordinate we gather from various
contemporary references, such as Anselm’s rebuke of a certain monk who
was given to frequenting the gilds and drinking deeply: _in multis
inordinate se agit et maxime in bibendo ut in gildis cum ebriosis
bibat_. There is also a reference to a ‘_Gihald_’ or
‘_Gihalla_’--possibly a ‘Gild’ Hall,--and the Pipe Rolls of this reign
mention a Tailors’ Gild, and a _Chepemanesela_, or _Chapman’s Hall_. The
whole subject of these gilds, as well as of their halls, is one of great
obscurity, and the references in the Winton Surveys, full of interest as
they are, serve rather to whet our curiosity than to actually solve any
problems they suggest.
[Illustration: EASTON
A typical Itchen valley village, one of the most picturesque in the
county, with an old Norman church, quaint thatched cottages, and clipped
yews.]
But whatever their exact function and organisation at the time, from
them the important Merchant Gild grew, and its hall in High Street (on
the site occupied now by the old Guildhall) was the centre for many
years of corporate and civic rule, till the erection some forty years
ago of the present and more pretentious Guildhall in the Broadway.
The whole circumstances of this so-called Winton Domesday are of unusual
interest. The original MSS. exist, bound in an ancient leather binding,
considered to be the work of contemporary Winchester craftsmen. These
are now the property of the Society of Antiquaries.
Significant among other features of the mediaeval city was the Jewish
quarter, or Ghetto, a survival of which we have in the present Jewry
Street, at that time Scowertene Street. Abutting on this, in the rear of
what are now the extensive premises of the George Hotel, dwelt the
Jewish community, with a synagogue of its own, for the Jews were not
merely tolerated here, but actually welcomed. The extensive commercial
relations now rapidly developing between Winchester and the Continent
were doubtless responsible for this, and the Jew in his ancient
prescriptive capacity of banker was found to be an effective ally in
building up the commercial importance of the rapidly developing city.
References to the Jews at Winchester are fairly frequent all through the
next two centuries, the period of Winchester’s commercial prosperity. In
Richard I.’s reign Richard of Devizes tells us of a Lombard Jew lending
money to the Priory of St. Swithun, and lamenting the leniency shown to
them by Winchester; while later on in the thirteenth century we read of
a Jew--“Benedict, a son of Abraham”--being actually granted the full
freedom of the city. These facts reveal to us the scope and the
importance held by the Winchester of mediaeval times as an emporium and
centre of commerce of more than local repute. But we are anticipating,
and we must now return.
The remaining distinctive feature of the city to be noted was the
monastic quarter, which occupied practically the whole area between High
Street, Calpe Street, and the outer city wall. Foremost in importance
was the great Convent of St. Swithun’s--its great cathedral church
forming its effective boundary to the north, its great gate opening into
Swithun Street close to the little postern gate or King’s Gate, and with
the south-eastern edge of the city wall as its southern limit. Behind
it, eastward, was the bishop’s residence--Wolvesey, the ancient court of
the Saxon kings--and flanking High Street at the eastern end was Nunna
Mynstre, or St. Mary’s Abbey, part of the revenues of which were derived
from the tolls or octroi duties levied on commodities entering the East
Gate.
Such then, in bare outline, was the Winchester of Henry’s reign--not
without its miseries, its injustices, it is true, but, as the times
went, busy, prosperous, and developing. But this state of things was not
to endure for long. Henry’s heir, William, had perished in the _White
Ship_; and though he had done all he could to avert it, the land was to
be shortly handed over to a disputed succession and the horrors of civil
war when he died. Winchester has good reason to cherish the memory of
Henry I. and to recall his reign with satisfaction. He died in 1135, and
was buried in Reading Abbey, which he had himself founded.
CHAPTER XII
A GREAT BISHOP, HENRY OF BLOIS
Let us now praise famous men....
It was he that took thought for his people that they should not fall
And fortified the city against besieging.
_Ecclesiasticus._
Great as has been the part played by kings in the history of our city,
that played by bishops has been even greater still, and few among the
makers of Winchester hold a more prominent or more honourable place than
the great bishop who had succeeded to the see a few years before Henry
I.’s death, Henry of Blois, brother of Stephen of Blois, now king of
England, whose fortunes were to be closely linked during the two
following reigns with those of our city.
A scheming statesman and an ardent churchman, he was to play a leading
part in national affairs in the troublous times that were to follow--to
direct his see for over forty years, and to leave indelible marks of his
occupancy in the see and the city alike, of which St. Cross Hospital,
Wolvesey ruins, the Cathedral font and portions of its fabric are but
some of the most notable and most enduring.
And the times were troublous indeed. The _White Ship_ tragedy had bereft
not only the king of his heir, but the nation of a male claimant to the
throne in the direct line, and all Henry’s influence was insufficient to
secure the crown for his daughter Matilda, the widowed Empress of
Germany. The feeling of the time was adverse to having a female as
sovereign; and Stephen of Blois, Henry’s nephew, actively championed by
Bishop Henry, and strongly supported by the barons, bore down all active
opposition.
But king though he was, Stephen’s personal position was very different
from that of his Norman predecessors. Brave and frank, but personally
easy-going, dependent, moreover, on the goodwill of the powerful
interests which had placed him on the throne, his authority was weak and
his hold on his subjects ineffective. Barons and bishops strengthened
themselves against him, and an era of castle-building commenced, which
was to usher in a period of more terrible oppression than the country
has ever witnessed before or since, for, secure in their strongholds,
the Norman barons fastened themselves on the defenceless countryfolk
like vultures on their prey, and there was none to make them relax their
hold. As the _Chronicle_ says:
They filled the land with castles and they cruelly oppressed the
wretched folk with castle works. When the castles were made they
filled them with devils and evil men. When took they the men who
they thought any goods to have both by night and by day, churls and
women, they cast them in prison for their gold and silver, and they
tortured them with pains untellable--for never were any martyrs so
tortured as they were. They hanged them up by the feet and smoked
them with foul smoke--they hanged them by the thumbs or by the head
and hanged fires upon their feet.... Many thousands they killed
with hunger.... Then was corn dear and flesh, cheese and butter,
for none there was in the land.... And they said openly that Christ
slept and his saints.
Such was the anarchy, such the ruin, which weak rule had brought upon
the realm.
Prominent among the castle-builders--though not among the
oppressors--were certain of the bishops, and none more so than Bishop
Henry. The bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, the ancient seat of Alfred
and the Saxon kings, he converted into a strong Norman fortress, the
ruins of which still stand, while at Merdon (near Hursley, some five
miles from the city), at Bishop’s Waltham, and at Farnham, he reared
fortresses also. Thus Winchester became remarkable in one respect--it
had two fortress castles instead of one, a privilege it was later on to
pay dearly for.
But Bishop Henry had other schemes too. Of royal birth, reared in the
atmosphere of church ascendancy in the great and ambitious house of
Cluny, and naturally masterful in temperament, he was aiming at higher
rank and wider influence. Bishop of Winchester though he was, and Abbot
of Glastonbury--for by special papal sanction he had been allowed to
hold this valuable and influential office alike with his
bishopric--there was still the archbishopric before him, and when in
1136 this fell vacant he seemed by every natural claim to be marked out
for it; but Stephen had begun to feel his brother’s yoke growing heavy
on him, and after some long delay Bishop Henry was passed by and
Theobald, Abbot of Bec, appointed. Henry was deeply mortified; and
though the Pope soon after appointed him as Papal Legate over Archbishop
Theobald’s head, his wounded pride never forgot the affront it had
received.
Disappointed of his hopes of Canterbury he worked hard to persuade the
Pope to divide England into three provinces instead of two, with
Winchester diocese as the third archbishopric; and though not actually
successful in this, the Pope is said to have encouraged him in his
project.
While matters were thus strained between the bishop and the king,
Stephen, who had witnessed with alarm the growth of the castle-building
and the power of the barons, determined to enforce his authority upon
them. He called on several of the bishops to surrender their castles,
and, being met by refusal, treated the Bishops of Lincoln and Salisbury
with such cruelty and personal indignity that the latter died from the
hardships inflicted on him. This act of unparalleled folly--for the
person of a bishop was regarded as sacred--not only estranged public
sympathy, but fanned to active flame the smouldering resentment of
Bishop Henry. As Papal Legate he summoned Stephen to answer for his
conduct before him at a council held at Winchester, and here the king
was not only condemned, but even obliged to do penance. Stephen’s
position was gravely compromised, and Matilda’s supporters, who had
long bided their time, broke into active opposition. Robert, Earl of
Gloucester, her half-brother, took up arms in her behalf; Matilda landed
at Arundel; and Stephen in fighting at Lincoln was taken prisoner.
Such an event seemed a token from heaven. Bishop Henry openly espoused
Matilda’s cause; he proclaimed her at Winchester as “Lady of the
English.” The city opened its gates to her, and she marched in in
triumphal procession with all her forces and took possession of the
Castle, while the occasion was celebrated by a solemn service of
rejoicing in the Cathedral.
But this state of things was not to last. Arrogant and impracticable,
she quickly alienated her own supporters, and finding the bishop by no
means subservient, as she had expected, she summoned him to yield up his
Castle of Wolvesey to her, to which summons he is said to have
enigmatically replied, “I will prepare myself,” and this he did. He
repaired and strengthened his Castle and threw his influence again into
the scale of Stephen. Thus civil war broke out once more, and for six
years the country was torn again by every kind of evil and oppression.
In these troubles Winchester, placed, as it were, between anvil and
hammer, with the empress-queen in the Castle and the bishop at Wolvesey,
suffered terribly. Raid and counter-raid, siege and counter-siege
succeeded one another, till almost the whole city--houses, churches,
monasteries alike--were consumed in the flames. Alswitha’s foundation,
Nunna Mynstre, or St. Mary’s Abbey, parish
[Illustration: THE DEANERY, WINCHESTER
One of the few remaining links with the conventual buildings of St.
Swithun’s Priory, which among the Benedictines were always placed on the
south side of the minster. Formerly it was the quarters of the Prior of
St. Swithun’s. Philip of Spain was lodged here when he came to
Winchester to marry Queen Mary of England.]
churches, domestic buildings, all alike perished. Far and wide the
flames spread--even the new building of Hyde Abbey, only erected some
thirty-one years, was involved in the general conflagration. The
Cathedral and St. Swithun’s Priory alone escaped, and that, it is said,
because Robert of Gloucester generously forbore reprisals.
But the empress’s cause was a declining one, and though David, king of
Scotland, and Robert of Gloucester stoutly attacked Wolvesey, it held
out till relieved by Queen Matilda in person, and it was now the
empress’s turn to suffer siege in the Castle. Various accounts are given
of what occurred; in one it is stated[2] that, being straitened for
provisions, she escaped by feigning herself dead, and was carried out in
a coffin. Be this as it may, her forces were routed--she fled, and both
Robert of Gloucester and King David were taken prisoners. Finally, the
war exhausted itself. The land was ruined, impoverished--nothing seemed
left to strive for. Peace was made on terms of compromise, and King
Stephen, restored to the throne, entered Winchester with the empress’s
son, Prince Henry, who was acknowledged as his heir. Stephen died soon
after, and Henry II. became king.
And now matters went badly for Bishop Henry. Henry the king was
determined to bring the castle-builders to book, and Henry the bishop
was a foremost offender, and in addition he had to defend himself from
charges brought against him by the monks of Hyde.
In marked contrast with his behaviour elsewhere, Bishop Henry had acted
oppressively against them, and when their abbey was destroyed he had
even forced from them the ashes to which it had been reduced. No slight
treasure the latter, for did they not contain the molten remains of
cross and shrine and chalice, the cross of Cnut and Emma, their great
prize and possession, and many another treasure, which though now but
molten metal, still reckoned a value in thousands of pounds? Fortune was
against the bishop, and he found it convenient to retire abroad, to
Cluny and elsewhere, for a time, while the new king established his
authority, made order in the distracted kingdom, and razed the offending
fortresses to the ground. Thus while the bishop’s palace at Wolvesey
still remained, the Norman keep was dismantled and rendered harmless,
and some of these ruins we can see there to-day.
The succeeding years were to present Bishop Henry in a less ambitious
and altogether more attractive light. He had played for his great
stake--played and lost: his legatine commission had expired, his
archiepiscopal dream had rudely disappeared. His political power
shattered, and his personal influence largely compromised, he was glad
to make peace with the king and full restitution to the monks of Hyde,
and he returned to his see to spend the last portion of his life--some
fifteen or sixteen years--in acts of quiet episcopal rule and active
beneficence. During his stay on the Continent he had amassed many
treasures of art, and these he brought back with him--very probably the
wonderful and curious black stone font, one of a rare series of seven
English fonts, four of which are in our own county and diocese, was
placed by him in the Cathedral at this time. But a far nobler and more
noticeable monument he was already rearing for himself in the outskirts
of the city. Some mile down the valley, in the little village then known
as Sperkforde, he had, in the early days of Stephen’s reign, commenced
to build a hospital or almshouse--the Hospital of St. Cross--and to this
he now devoted himself.
Filled as the land then was with misery and ruin, relief of the hungry
and distressed was a peculiarly pressing need, and the bishop’s aim was
to relieve distress. Following the hospitable example of the great
Clugniac house in which he had been reared, the gates of St. Cross were
to be ever open, ready to give kindly welcome to all who should enter
there in want. Thirteen aged brethren were to be maintained in ease and
comfort. One hundred of the poor of Winchester were to be regularly fed
there in the “Hundred Mennes Hall,” and seven poor Grammar School boys
of Winchester--for Winchester had its Grammar School then, earlier even
than the College of Wykeham--were likewise to be fed and provided for
daily. In 1157 Bishop Henry committed the guardianship of his hospital
to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitallers as
they were called, whose special care was to aid wandering men,
particularly the poor pilgrims visiting the Holy Sepulchre. And so the
brethren of St. Cross wear the black gown and the eight-pointed silver
cross of the Knights of St. John to this day.
St. Cross is Bishop Henry’s great memorial. He lived to see it firmly
established, but otherwise in his later years he took but little part in
public affairs. One of his last acts was to receive his cousin, the
repentant King Henry, after the murder of à Becket, when he bade him
welcome him with affectionate admonition and gave him his blessing. He
died in 1171 and was buried in the Cathedral; the tomb popularly
designated William Rufus’s Tomb has been thought to be his. Great and
high-minded as a churchman, he had lived through the period of personal
striving--“the fever, and the watching, and the pain” of
self-advancement and of worldly ambition. His selfish schemes had died
and nobler ones had succeeded, which revealed the man at his greatest
and his best. Truly it might be said of him--
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
And St. Cross, at whose gates the needy wayfarer still receives
hospitable welcome as he did in Bishop Henry’s day, flourishes still,
exercising a far wider measure of beneficence and power for good than
its founder, in all probability, anticipated or even dreamed.
CHAPTER XIII
ANGEVIN AND PLANTAGENET
Ay, that approves thee, tyrant, what thou art,
No father, king, or shepherd of thy realm;
But one that tears her entrails with thy hands,
And like a thirsty tiger suck’st her blood.
_Edward III._
We need not stay to discuss in much detail the course of events during
the reigns which followed. It was but a blackened and ruined Winchester
which emerged from the disasters of the civil war. With two monasteries,
some twenty churches, and most of the domestic dwellings consumed, it
took her all her energies to reconstruct the desolate fabric; nor did
she ever completely recover the blow. Hyde Abbey was at once
recommenced, and gradually, but only very gradually, resumed its former
importance. St. Mary’s Abbey, too, was rebuilt, and Winchester, as the
natural centre of the wool trade, was able steadily to recover her
commercial activity, and managed to retain her importance as a centre of
traffic and intercourse some two hundred years or more longer, but
politically her supremacy had departed for ever, and London henceforth
was more and more to hold unchallenged sway.
Henry II.’s visits in Winchester were not frequent, and in addition were
but casual. It was here, while recovering from illness, that he matured
his great scheme for the administration of justice, the division of the
country into circuits with itinerating judges of assize, to hold assizes
or sittings for the due dispensation of the king’s justice, from which
circumstance Hampshire has always occupied a foremost position in the
assize list, but Winchester was in no sense his capital.
Richard I. paid the city the compliment of coming here after his release
from captivity to be crowned in the Cathedral, and though at the royal
banquet following thereon the citizens of Winchester strove with those
of London for the honour of serving the king with wine--a privilege
involving the reversion of the golden goblet in which the wine was to be
served--their claims were overruled and London bore off the prize.
More important were the building projects of the Bishop of Winchester,
Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, who had succeeded to the see the year before
Richard came to the throne. The pilgrim stream which flowed through
Winchester had swollen to such proportions as to embarrass the monks of
St. Swithun’s. Bishop Godfrey formed a confraternity to raise funds and
carry out an extension eastward of the fabric, to make it possible for
the pilgrims to visit the shrine of the saint without invading the body
of the church, an extension which, owing to the limited area of firm
ground on which the Cathedral stood, had to be made on an artificial
foundation, in peaty and waterlogged soil, and to this fact must be in
part attributed the insecurity of the fabric, which has necessitated the
enormous and heroic labour of repair now actively in progress. Of this,
however, more anon.
But Bishop Godfrey de Lucy had wider aims also. As bishop and receiver
of the dues from St. Giles’s Fair, the commercial prosperity of the city
was of great moment to him, and he improved and developed the Itchen
navigation by means of a canal--or “barge river,” as it is termed--and
constructed a huge reservoir at Alresford, much of which remains still
as Alresford Pond, to retain the water necessary to keep the channel
full. The trade of Winchester was evidently still a highly valuable
asset.
Of King John’s reign we have memories in keeping with the general course
of his doings. He was frequently here, hunting regularly in the forests
all round the city, and here his son and successor, Henry of Winchester,
afterwards Henry III., was born. It was at Winchester that John received
Simon Langton and the other bishops exiled during the interdict, and in
the chapter-house of the Cathedral that he received the papal absolution
for his offences against Holy Church. But the peace thus dishonourably
ushered in was of short duration, and a year or so later Winchester was
in foreign hands, being held by Louis, Dauphin of France, whom the
barons had invited over to expel John from the throne.
But when John died, as he did shortly afterwards, the barons withdrew
their support from the Dauphin, and John’s son Henry, then a lad of nine
years old only, ascended the throne--Henry III., Henry of Winchester.
We cannot give in full the story of Henry, interesting and important as
it is, and intimately associated as much of it was with our city; for
Henry was here continually, he made it his chief residence, and in the
years that followed Winchester had often reason to pay dear for his
attachment to his parent city. Wild disorder, riot and revel, profuse
expenditure and pinch of consequent poverty, anarchy and siege and civil
warfare in her streets, all followed in turn, till order was at last
evolved, and dignified and noble parliaments assembled in her Castle
Hall, the symbol of the reign of law that was to follow, and the earnest
of that rule by representative assembly which has made our nation--and
almost Winchester herself--the mother of parliaments, honoured through
the length and breadth of the world.
Chequered as the reign was to be, the early years were quiet and
prosperous, till Henry’s evil genius, Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of
Winchester, gained ascendancy over the king. The king’s marriage to a
French princess, Eleanor of Provence, followed, and the king, under the
influence of a foreign wife, and a prelate and justiciar of alien
sympathies, entered on a
[Illustration: CHEYNEY COURT AND CLOSE GATE, WINCHESTER
The outermost ‘court,’ if such a term may be used, of the Cathedral
Close, from which the great Close Gate gives access to Swithun’s
Street and King’s Gate. The Close Gate is guarded by a porter, as
in mediaeval days, who locks and unlocks it regularly by night and
day. Near Cheyney Court stands part of the old ‘Guesten Hall,’
where poor pilgrims to the Shrine of St. Swithun used to be lodged.
Weird tales of ghostly visitors haunting the Close are told by
persons still living. The name Cheyney appears to be derived from
the French _chêne_, an oak.
]
reckless course of extravagance and anti-national policy which estranged
all his subjects’ sympathies. To all posts of honour and preferment,
whether civil or ecclesiastical, foreign claimants were preferred, and
the land groaned under the tyranny of alien domination, while its
resources were being drained away from it to provide revenues for
foreign beneficiaries abroad. Protest after protest, discontent, active
opposition, ridicule, and remonstrance were all in vain. The king was
once significantly asked by the witty Roger Bacon what dangers by sea a
skilful pilot would most avoid, and on evading the question was told
‘Petrae et rupes’ (_stones and rocks_), a faintly-veiled allusion to the
chief influence for evil in the state. But all was in vain, and at last
armed opposition could no longer be prevented, and the barons under
Simon de Montfort broke out into open revolt.
In the Barons’ War which followed, Hampshire and Winchester were
intimately involved. It has been the fate of Winchester, almost from
early Saxon days, to have within more than one rallying point for
popular sympathy, and so to suffer peculiarly at all crises of national
division; and so it was now.
Few in the land had suffered more acutely from the king’s policy of
preferring aliens than the monks of St. Swithun, and when the Barons’
War broke out the monks of the convent sided strongly with De Montfort.
The citizens, however, held loyally to the king, and thus it came about
that when in May 1264, a few days before the battle of Lewes, De
Montfort marched against the city, the citizens rose against the
convent, fearing lest the monks, who controlled part of the walls and
the King’s Gate, should welcome the invaders and admit them to the city.
A violent attack was made on them, the Close Gate was burnt down, and
the invading citizens burst their way in and slew several of the monks.
The fire spread to the King’s Gate and burnt it down; and when later on
the gate was rebuilt, the monks of St. Swithun built above it a little
church for the use of the lay servitors of the convent, and so the
little church--now the parish church of St. Swithun’s, Winchester--came
into existence, perched in mid air above the little postern gate. Nor
was this all, for the year after, when Simon de Montfort the younger
appeared again in arms before the city walls, the monks actually
admitted him, and a wild night followed in Winchester; his troops
revenged themselves on the defenceless citizens for their opposition by
burning and plundering a portion of the city, and putting many of them
to the sword. But the ascendancy of the barons was but brief, for in the
same year, 1265, Prince Edward defeated and slew De Montfort at the
battle of Evesham, rescued his father, and restored him to the throne.
A memorable year was this both for England and for Winchester, for Henry
summoned to Winchester his first representative Parliament, notable
because for the first time representatives of the cities and boroughs
appeared there with knights of the shires, along with the barons and
prelates, and the abbots and priors of the leading monasteries. The
Prior of St. Swithun’s and the Abbot of Hyde were both present at that
remarkable assembly. In 1268 a second Parliament assembled at
Winchester, and four years later the king died, and Edward I. became
king.
Henry III.’s reign was indeed a notable one for the city, and one
notable addition he made to it remains still as one of its foremost
architectural and historical treasures. This is the great and noble hall
which he added to the castle, and which retains still, with some
alteration, much of its original character. Many a notable scene has
this noble hall witnessed, both during Henry’s reign and since, the
early Parliaments of 1265 and 1268 pre-eminent among them. One such
dramatic scene was the one related in full by Matthew of Paris, as
occurring in 1249, when the king unmasked and brought to justice a
confederacy of robbers who had conspired to waylay the highways and rob
the passers-by. None were safe from them: even the king’s own
consignments of wine, coming to Winchester, were stopped and plundered.
Matters were in this state of insecurity when the king, coming to
Winchester, was approached by some Brabantine merchants, who complained
that they had been stopped on the highroad near Winchester and robbed of
200 marks. The king’s anger boiled over, and in hot indignation he
ordered the castle gates to be shut, and a jury empanelled then and
there to find and disclose the offenders. The twelve citizens thus
appointed pleaded inability to throw light on the matter, but the king,
not to be thwarted, shouted, “Carry away those artful traitors; bind
them, and cast them into the dungeons below, and let me have twelve
other men, good and true, who will tell us the truth.”
The second jury, with the fear of death thus before them, promptly
displayed quicker powers of perception, and laid before the king the
detects of a widespread conspiracy, in which many leading men of the
city and neighbourhood, as well as of the king’s household, whose pay
was probably long in arrear, were implicated. And so justice was done,
and for a while travelling abroad was safer.
Thus, now through good report, now through evil, the fortunes of our
city waxed and waned, but, in a sense, her day was over. Mediaeval
Winchester more and more grew to assume the character of a purely
provincial city; one with importance, indeed, with prestige and dignity,
but from which, like the so-called ‘buried cities’ of the Zuyder Zee,
the wide shores whereon the tides of major national circumstance ebbed
and flowed, continually receded more and more, while her citizens found
themselves less and less ‘going down in ships’ to the broad sea of
national life, and ‘occupying their business’ in those ‘great waters.’
CHAPTER XIV
FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY WINCHESTER
What do you lack, what do you buy, mistress? a fine hobby horse to
make your son a tilter? a drum to make him a soldier? a fiddle to
make him a reveller? what is’t you lack?
BEN JONSON.
It is pleasant to turn away from the direct stream of the national
flood, and to explore some of the by-streams, the more local whirls and
eddies in the life of our city, and this theme is naturally suggested by
the thought of Winchester in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
when imperial politics had largely ceased to affect her, and the wider
growth of interests and domestic features had given her life within a
greater diversity, and rendered possible a minuter degree of
specialization.
Interest in the main centres round her civic rule, the pilgrim stream,
the great annual Fair of St. Giles, and the domestic architecture, while
supreme over all these was the dominating interest and control exercised
by the ecclesiastical powers within her--the sway of the crozier and the
tonsure, the cloister and the cowl. We shall deal in this chapter with
the city at large, leaving to the chapter following the more purely
monastic aspects.
The city as a city had been growing--as always was the case with
mediaeval towns closely walled in--continually more and more congested.
The southeastern quarter occupied by the Convent of St. Swithun’s, with
its Cathedral and great churchyard, the adjoining Abbey of St. Mary, and
the bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, was a lung open indeed and well
ventilated, but elsewhere the hemmed in area was a maze of narrow and
crowded thoroughfares, with houses, whose curiously timbered, but
inconveniently picturesque fronts, almost jostled one another across the
narrow passage-ways between,--houses, of the type still to be seen in
the so-called ‘Old Rectory’ in Cheesehill Street, in the pseudo-antique
houses in ‘the Brooks,’ in Mr. Mayne’s Tudor House near the Butter
Cross, and the present Godbegot House almost opposite, of later date
though most of these be--as if the chief office of neighbourly regard of
a mediaeval dwelling to those round her was not merely to
Not beteem the winds of Heaven,
Visit _their_ face too roughly,
but also to religiously exclude that indiscreet and unwelcome intruder,
the all-prying and inquisitive sun, while through many of the low-lying
streets ran broad and open ditches, not always, alas! the _dulcia et
piscosae flumina aquae_, the sweet refreshing streams which Precentor
Wulfstan had once commemorated,--streams whose channels flow now in
well-regulated courses, some open, some underground, but which then
made their way, often through filth and accumulated garbage, in far less
well-ordered circulation through the city.
Though the city, judged by contemporary standards, might be a ‘joly
cité,’ of which
The aere was god both inne and oute,
it must have fallen far short of almost every modern standard of health
and convenience, and its narrow, confined, and ill-cleansed courts were
the lurking-places of contagion and of never wholly absent plague.
The civic management was a strange, incongruous muddle of overlapping
and conflicting authorities, each jealous of its own influence and
envious of its neighbour’s. The authority of the gilds had now become
crystallized into a corporation of more or less definite form, the Mayor
and Bailiffs, who exercised the controlling influence over the major
part of the city. When exactly a ‘Mayor’ first came into existence is
unknown. The civic records go back, indeed, to a certain Florence de
Lunn in 1184, though he can hardly be accepted as a ‘mayor’ in the
technical sense, but the Mayor only exercised authority over the
population within the walls, and ‘the Liberties,’ as they were called,
were excluded from his jurisdiction. Of these there were two, the
Liberty of the Soke, the region, that is, beyond the walls to the east
and north, over which the Bishop had supreme jurisdiction, and which he
entrusted to the care of a special officer, the Bailiff of the Soke,
and the Liberty of Godbiete, the little manor within the city granted
by Queen Emma to the Convent of St. Swithun, from the church tower of
which curfew rang, and within whose ‘liberties,’ as already stated, no
officer bearing warrant, whether of king, mayor, or bishop, might enter.
This tripartite division of authority, in which the civic, episcopal,
and monastic powers were mutually confronted, formed a cunningly devised
preserve, in which the dexterous fisher in the troubled waters of the
day might ply his angle with rarely successful result.
The dominating commercial interest was the Wool Trade. England was
famous for wool, and to this trade Winchester, as a natural centre with
Southampton as her port, owed her prosperity.
North of the High Street, not far from the Westgate, stood the great
Hall where the wool was brought and sampled, and here the great Tron or
weighing machine was kept on which the wool was weighed. In Edward
III.’s time the Winchester wool trade was at its height. His wars with
France, really undertaken to enable him to control the Channel, and so
to keep the trade with Flanders in his own hands, had prospered, and
when he introduced his famous wool-stapling measure, by which ‘staples’
or exclusive wool markets were set up in ten towns in England, of which
Winchester was one, the commercial prosperity of the city increased by
leaps and bounds. But, alas! Edward’s policy was only too successful.
The Flanders trade was considered more important than local English
[Illustration: BREWHOUSE, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
College Brewhouse, adjoining College Street, is one of the oldest
portions of the College buildings. Over the archway one of the turrets
of Outer Gateway is to be seen.]
interests, and when, some years after, he appointed Calais as the staple
town, and removed the staple from Winchester, the days of the commercial
prosperity of our city were numbered.
But while the wool trade lasted,--and it only died out as such trades do
by degrees,--Winchester with all its limitations must have been a rarely
interesting and attractive place in which to “catch the manners fleeting
as they rise.” It is much to be regretted that the Winchester of this
period had no shrewd and genial humorist, no Chaucer or Jonson, to
mingle with the crowd, and to preserve for us, whether by pen or pencil,
the humours of the day,--the varied types, lay and cleric, monk, friar,
pilgrim, merchant, or franklin, who might have been found periodically
gathered either at the Wool Market or the Hall of the Gild merchant, or
at ‘the George,’--for there was a ‘George’ at Winchester then, even as
now,--in as full and diverting variety as ever foregathered at the
Tabard itself; but interesting as those intrinsically were, their
interest was as nothing beside the two great dominating attractions
which periodically gathered all sorts and conditions of men for
temporary hospitality within her walls, the pilgrimages, and the great
Fair of St. Giles. And if it was the Wool Trade which made the Fair,
equally it was the Fair which gave the city its notoriety and its
commercial importance. And the Fair while it lasted dominated
everything--not only was all ordinary business suspended, but even the
jurisdiction of the ordinary civic authorities was equally subject to
its influence, and the already complex problem of civic rule was
rendered topsy-turvy by a temporary transfer of authority within the
city area from the Mayor to the Bailiff of the Soke,--a glorious
opportunity for paying off old scores, which many a modern local
administrator might well envy him.
The early history of the Fair we have already touched on. A fair had
been held on St. Giles’s Hill since very early days, and with the
strange incongruity of association characteristic of early times, fairs
were for a long time regularly held in churchyards. But the Fair of St.
Giles had long since outgrown the limits of the little churchyard of St.
Giles, on the hill which bears his name, and successive charters of
William II. and later sovereigns had made the rights and profits of the
Fair the perquisite and privilege of the Bishop of Winchester, who had
the power of exclusive trading within the area of the Fair during its
duration. Originally granted for three days, Henry I. had extended the
period to eight, Stephen to fourteen, and Henry II. to sixteen, and this
period was confirmed in the last charter granted for the Fair, viz.,
that given by Edward III. in 1349, in which all the privileges of the
Fair were rehearsed and solemnly confirmed. The procedure connected with
the Fair was minute and formal. On the 31st of August, the Eve of St.
Giles, the Bishop took possession, as it were, by setting up his court
in the _Pavilionis Aula_, or Hall of the Pavilion, on the top of the
hill. The court being formally constituted, Justiciaries or Bailiffs of
the Fair were appointed, who at once proceeded either to Southgate or
Kingsgate, where the Mayor, Bailiffs, and citizens of Winchester were
required to meet them, and dutifully to deliver up the keys of the gate,
and from thence to accompany them in turns to the Westgate, the Wool
Staple, and the other gates in succession, and to deliver up the keys of
each, while the Fair was solemnly proclaimed and the transfer of
authority effected. The proclamation made forbade the buying and
selling, while the Fair lasted, of articles of general merchandise,
other than food, anywhere in Winchester or within seven leagues’ radius
(10½ _miles_), except within the limits of the Fair itself.
This done, the humiliation of the Mayor and Bailiffs was completed by
their being required to humbly attend the usurping authorities to the
Bishop’s Pavilion, thenceforward to submit to their jurisdiction, with
what grace they might, till the Fair was over. Nor was it only at
Winchester that the Fair was proclaimed--Southampton, though actually
beyond the seven leagues’ radius, was included in the prohibited area,
and here and at all important points on the boundary of the Fair zone,
the same proclamation was made and formal possession taken. Nor was it
only smuggling that the Fair officials had to guard against. Outlaws of
the Robin Hood type--of whom the notorious Adam of Gurdon, Bailiff of
Alton, and Lord of the Manor of Selborne, was perhaps the most
famous--were accustomed to lay in wait and levy blackmail on merchants
and travellers who had business at the Fair, and at all particularly
dangerous spots, such as the Pass of Alton, as it was called, the spot
on the road from London to Alton where the thick woodland made highway
robbery a comparatively easy matter, sergeants, armed and mounted, were
stationed to keep the Pass.
The Fair itself was a veritable town of booths or stalls within a wooden
palisade, each quarter or ‘street’ within it taking its name from the
merchandise displayed or the nationality of the traders who occupied it.
Then there were the Spicery--the general grocery, or trade in sugar,
spices, and preserved fruits, in which the monks of St. Swithun traded
largely--the Pottery--the Stannary (or Falconry)--the ‘stret’ of the
Flemings, of the Genoese, of the Cornishmen; and the prices paid were
high, for a high ‘tariff wall’ surrounded the Fair. On a burden borne by
one man was levied a penny, on a cask of wine or cyder fourpence, for a
falcon twopence, for an ape or bear--animals much affected as butts and
playthings by the great, and even by the monks--fourpence. Multiplying
these by twelve, as is customarily done, to reduce them to modern
values, we realise how heavy these tolls were. Nor were luxuries and
alcoholic drinks the only article taxed. The raw material paid toll too:
every bale of wool fourpence, of which twopence went to the Bishop, and
twopence, to conciliate popular support evidently, to the check
weighman. Plantagenet times were not a Cobdenite millennium; and,
probably, could a ballot have been taken at the time, while the monks
and the Bishop’s ‘menie’ would undoubtedly have voted for Tariff
Reform, very few Winchester citizens--though the Fair was profitable
enough to them in reality--would have polled with them.
Within the Fair itself, the _mise en scène_ and the humours of the crowd
would have presented a subject fully worthy of Ben Jonson himself, and
it is safe to say that no human concourse, not even Bartholomew Fair in
its most palmy days, could have taxed his genius more than St. Giles’s
Fair during the Edwardian régime would have done. Motley, indeed, was
the crowd gathered here--Jews and Normans, Poles and Italians, strolling
minstrels, quacks and jugglers, ballad-mongers and fortune-tellers,
thieves and swaggerers, Corporal Nyms and Ancient Pistols, rogues and
sharpers of every kind, cheating, swearing, dancing, quarrelling,
drinking,--hawk-eyed chapmen and hard-visaged countrymen, each alike
bent on cheapening the other’s demands, huckstering, gesticulating, and
chaffering in strange dialects and all but unknown tongues--while here
and there vigilant assizemen, wearing the Bishop’s livery, passed
eager-eyed amidst them, keenly scenting out deficient weight or cozening
ell-wand, for in spite of severe penalties imposed on all detected in
such practices, the Fair was pre-eminently a place where
nobody’s virtue was over nice,
and all the ‘tricks of the trade’ flourished in a congenial soil. Thus
Harvey, prentice to Symme atte Stile, who tells us in Langland’s “Piers
Ploughman,” how
at Wye and Wynchestre I went to the faire,
lifts up some part of the veil for us, telling us that
wikkedlych to weye (_wickedly to weigh_)
was his first lesson.
We have already spoken of the Bishop’s Court or _Pavilionis Aula_. Here
the Bailiffs and Justiciaries of the Fair met, not merely to make
regulations, but to dispense justice, for the _Pavilionis Aula_ was also
a court of summary jurisdiction, a ‘piepowder court,’ _cour des pieds
poudreux_ or dusty-foot justice, that is, where the wily Autolycus, or
Artful Dodger of the day, or other picker up of unconsidered trifles,
was awarded short shrift and well-earned punishment either in stocks or
pillory, or in the Bishop’s dungeon under Wolvesey Palace.
Such then for some three hundred years was the great Fair of the
Festival of St. Egidius. For many years it survived, even though trade
in Winchester was falling off and doomed, but it could not survive
indefinitely. In Henry VI.’s time a distinct falling off was apparent;
since then it has dwindled gradually bit by bit, till now the only
tangible memorial remaining is the name of the Bishop’s court, the
_Pavilionis Aula_, the ghostly footfall of which seems still to be
re-echoed in the name “Palm Hall,” a well-known residence standing on
the brow of the hill where ‘all the fun of the Fair’ sparkled and
bubbled so many hundreds of years before.
Side by side with the Fair was the Pilgrim stream, which too reached its
height about this period. We have seen how early in Edward the Elder’s
reign the shrine of St. Josse in Newan Mynstre attracted pilgrims to
Winchester and gave it a reputation--a reputation which the enshrinement
in Edgar’s reign of Swithun’s bones enormously added to. Tales of
miracle were circulated, widespread and equally widely credited,
cripples were healed, the lame walked, and St. Swithun’s became the most
popular pilgrimage centre in all Southern England. From Henry II.’s
reign, though the shrine of Becket rose into importance, St. Swithun’s
did not abate in popularity, and the stream of pious, dust-laden feet
still flowed just the same to and from it, save that many going on
pilgrimage would visit the shrines of both St. Thomas and St. Swithun on
their way. Rich and poor, a-foot or in the saddle, they streamed into
Winchester as soon as the pilgrim season--the early spring, that
is,--arrived. As Chaucer tells us:
Whan that Aprille with his showrès swoote
The drought of Marche hath percèd to the roote,
* * * * *
Thanne longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.
The wealthier lodged in hostelries and inns, the poorer found shelter
and hospitality within the walls of convent or nunnery. From south and
west they came--over the Roman road from Sarum and along the Itchen
valley from Southampton, turning aside to visit St. Cross and receive
the wayfarer’s dole of bread and beer, till they reached the gates of
St. Swithun’s or of Hyde. St. Swithun’s was the chief place of resort.
Here within the Pilgrim’s or Guesten Hall, the greater part of which
still stands, a rough but welcome bed awaited them, while at the buttery
a plentiful meal of broken victuals and beer was to be had for the
asking. Then next morning after mass they would be admitted to the
shrine, to say their prayers, make their humble offering, and depart.
An unwholesome and unsavoury enough crowd, doubtless, in the
main--travel-stained, footsore, and unwashed, disease accompanied them,
frequently enough, from centre to centre, just as plague follows
nowadays the eastern lines of pilgrimage in India and Arabia--and not
even all their piety and devotion could sufficiently endear them to the
monks of St. Swithun as to make them personally acceptable, and secure
unrestricted welcome for them within their church and monastery.
Accordingly, though allowed to enter the Cathedral freely, their liberty
within it was circumscribed. Admitted to the north transept by a special
door--the Pilgrim’s door, now walled up--they could make their way into
Godfrey de Lucy’s retro-choir, the great extension east of the high
altar, where the shrine of the saint was placed. So much and no more of
the Cathedral was open to them, for at the head of the presbytery steps,
leading down to the south transept and nave, massive iron-work gates
barred the way; the gates are to be seen still, though long since
removed to near the western entrance of the Cathedral. And so their
devotions ended, they would journey on--on
[Illustration: MIDDLE GATE, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
Middle Gate gives access to Middle or Chamber Court--so called from
‘Election Chamber,’ the large room over the gateway where
‘elections’ to college were formerly held. The three statues over
the gateway represent the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel, and the
Founder. The quaint old custom of college boys crossing the Quad
bareheaded, in honour of the Virgin, is followed at Winchester
College still.
]
to the great Abbey of Hyde, then on to Headbourne Worthy church, to
visit the Saxon rood at its western end, then on by Alton and Farnham,
probably to rest for the night in the great Cistercian Abbey of Waverley
hard by, and so on by Guildford and St. Martha’s to Canterbury--a
well-defined route clearly marked even now for much of its length, and
still known as the Pilgrim’s way. So great a vogue did the pilgrimage
craving become that at length it had to be controlled and forbidden by
law. Yet the pilgrimage had its uses--the open-air journey, severe
though its hardships were to the ill-found and poorly shod, served,
doubtless, as a magnificent tonic, both mental as well as bodily, and
must have done much to correct the terrible insularity of ideas which a
population otherwise chained to the soil must otherwise have engendered.
Nor, in all probability, was the belief in the efficacy of pilgrimages
in the cure of diseases, particularly mental ones, without at least some
substantial basis of truth.
As in the case of Henry of Hoheneck, so also, _mutatis mutandis_, might
many a pilgrim to Winchester have had it said of him:
And he was healed in his despair
By the touch of _St. Swithun’s_ bones,
Though I think the long ride in the open air,
That pilgrimage over stocks and stones,
In the miracle must come in for its share.
A miracle none the less pronounced because the air of Hampshire Downs
had been a potent but unrealized contributory factor in the result.
CHAPTER XV
THE MONASTIC LIFE
Grosse Städte, reiche Klöster
Schaffen, dass mein Land den euren
Wohl nicht steht an Schätzen nach.
KERNER, _Der reichste Fürst_.
But active as were the currents that circulated in and round the gilds,
the wool markets, the annual fair, and the pilgrimage resorts, the
dominating stream was that which flowed through the monastic channel,
and over mediaeval Winchester the influence of the monastery in one form
or other, whether of priory, abbey, or nunnery, or whether of the
mendicant orders, or nursing sisterhoods, now for a considerable time
firmly established in the city, was supreme.
The Priory was a secluded area, the privacy of which was jealously
guarded. The Cathedral itself, from the eastern angle of the north
transept to the southern corner of the west front, formed the effective
boundary on the city side, with the great churchyard lying between it
and the city proper. The remainder was supplied by the high close-wall
running all round it, much as the greater part of it does now, flanked
to the east by the boundary of the Bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, and
forming, with the latter, part of the external defences of the city, so
that between them the monks and the Bishop relieved the citizens of
something like a quarter of the burden--a heavy one at that time--of
keeping the walls in repair and defending them if attacked.
The main entrance was then, as now, the great close-gate, opening into
Swithun’s Street near Kingsgate,--the point of attack in the troubles of
1264--and besides this a small postern or opening gave access from
‘Paradise’--as the area east of the northern transept was and still is
called--to Colebrook Street and Paternoster Row. From the churchyard to
the domestic quarter no direct means of access existed; the ‘Slype’ or
passage through the great south-western buttress was not yet made, and
to pass from the west part into the cloister it was necessary to pass
through the Cathedral itself.
The domestic buildings--as was always the case with the Benedictines,
and St. Swithun’s was a Benedictine house--were grouped on the south.
The cloister garth was a square enclosure, south of the nave, roofed
overhead and flagged below, but otherwise open to the air, with the open
lavatory or general washing-place in the centre. This was the monks’
usual place of resort, except when the services in church or special
duties called them elsewhere. Here, half in the open air, they read,
they studied, laboured at the occupations of the scriptorium, the
illuminated missal or book of the ‘Hours.’ Here was their library, and
here the _magister ordinis_ held his school for novices, a school where
the instruction, however, was not, as is commonly supposed, the
humanities or even divinity, but the rule of the order of St. Benedict,
to be, to the monk, from the moment he had taken the vows, more than
his conscience. Here in the cloister, too, the monks enjoyed such
minor relaxations as fell to their lot. Here they took their
‘meridian’ or mid-day siesta; and here, for all the world like great
schoolboys--whenever, that is, the prying eyes of Sacrist or Precentor
were not upon them--they even indulged at times in harmless but
unauthorized gossip and “snatched a fearful joy.”
Grouped round the cloister garth--their site now occupied by canons’
houses--were the domestic buildings proper: the kitchen to the west, the
refectory on the south. On the east--its Norman arches still in part
standing--was the Chapter House, where the Prior held a chapter daily
for the regulation of the internal routine, and for the admonition or
correction of offenders against the discipline. South of this, where now
the Deanery stands, were the Prior’s quarters. Farther to the east were
the sleeping quarters, the ‘dortour’ or common dormitory, the sick house
or infirmary, and so forth; while standing by itself at some little
distance in the outer court--Mirabel Close as it was called--was the
Pilgrims’ hall, where the poorer pilgrims were lodged, and now almost
the only part of the domestic buildings of the monastery still
standing.
At the period we are speaking of monastic life had assumed a character
entirely different from what it had borne in Saxon and Norman days.
Poverty, obedience, chastity, and toil had been not only the motto, but
actually the practice, of the earlier monk. He had not only prayed and
wept, and denied himself ease and creature comforts--his life had been
one unceasing round of severe bodily labour. His own efforts had
sufficed for his daily wants, and in ministering to them, he had taught
the savage people round him the arts of agriculture, he had reclaimed
the waste lands, and had literally made the wilderness to blossom like
the rose. But this active, simple phase had passed away. Monasteries
like St. Swithun’s or Hyde now performed important ceremonial and social
duties of an official character. The Prior of St. Swithun’s kept lordly
state; the Abbot of Hyde wore a mitre. These monasteries controlled
extensive interests, swayed large estates, held much church patronage,
and extended generous hospitality to high and low alike. The simple
organisation of earlier times now no longer sufficed, and a considerable
retinue of lay brothers was considered necessary for the domestic
service of the monastery, while the more purely spiritual duties alone
were performed by the monks themselves. The monk was thus left free to
pray and study, to perform his regular offices, and keep his ‘hours’
strictly, and only the more responsible of the domestic duties or those
of supervising the several departments of activity were assigned to
those who had taken the vow. The lay brethren or retainers performed
the menial duties, and were so completely separate from the brethren in
orders that they were even excluded from their churches. Thus the little
parish church of St. Swithun perched above Kingsgate was set apart for
the lay servants of the Priory, and the parish church of St.
Bartholomew, Hyde, in like manner for those of Hyde Abbey. Probably few
at that day could have foreseen that the churches built for the lay
retainers would prove more enduring than the great monasteries
themselves. Thus, spiritually speaking, the monasteries were, if not
actually dead, at least moribund. Shut in from the world outside they
affected less and less the stream of general spiritual life, and gradual
atrophy of spiritual powers followed inevitably on the failure to
exercise them.
Yet it would be a profound mistake to infer--as one easily might,
particularly if one were guided by popular pictorial representations of
it--that the life of the fourteenth century monk was one of ease and
enjoyment. In reality it was one of severe discipline and
self-repression. The eight daily services of the hours beginning at
midnight with nocturnes, and ending at evening with compline, with the
enforced vigils and broken periods of sleep they entailed, were but a
part of the regular daily obligation. In addition there were masses to
be said, study and reading in the cloister, the labours of teaching and
of the scriptorium. It is a somewhat cheap sneer to set down the monk as
merely indolent or self-indulgent, but his life certainly tended as a
rule more to deaden than to exalt, and the monk entered the cloister
only too often to discover nothing but a limited outlook and a dreary
round of humdrum trivialities, instead of the religious peace and the
beatific vision he had expected.
The brethren who controlled the various departments of monastic economy
were termed _Obedientiarii_, or brethren yielding obedience to the
Prior, and responsible to him for performance of their respective
duties. The Prior was over all, and next to him was the Sub-prior. The
church was looked after by the Sacrist and the Precentor. These
regulated the services, while the latter in addition was responsible for
the discipline. He was the general policeman, a kind of peripatetic
conscience, imposing silence in the cloister, and checking illicit
conversation, and particularly on the alert during nocturnal service,
lest the burden of drowsiness should prove too heavy for any of the
worshippers. Armed with a lantern he stole from brother to brother, and
if any was found nodding he placed the lantern at the offender’s feet,
who, thus detected and openly shamed, was required to take up, as it
were, the ‘fiery cross,’ and bear it on until he should find another
guilty like himself, in which case he might pass the unwelcome task on
to his companion in disgrace--a kind of monastic game of touch, not
without its humorous side. The manager of the estates was the Receiver
or Treasurer, the chief domestic official the Hordarian or Steward,
others were the _Custos operum_ or Keeper of the Fabric, the Cellarer,
the
Almoner, the Master of the Novices, or _Magister ordinis_, the Gardener,
and so on.
A somewhat full collection of Obedientiary Rolls, or official accounts
of St. Swithun’s Priory, still exists, and much valuable and interesting
information has been rendered accessible to the general public by Dean
Kitchen, who has edited them, and from these we can learn full details
of the daily life, dietary, and operations of the monks of St. Swithun.
They had two main meals a day, with certain other opportunities for
minor refreshment. Bread, cheese, meat, fish, and eggs appear to have
been freely provided, though it must be remembered that there were
always guests as well as the monks to be catered for. On fast days
‘drylinge,’ or salt fish, and mustard figured largely, the mustard
serving as a corrective to the unpalatable fare, and doubtless, too, a
useful tonic to bodies which had to endure so many hours in a stone
church or in an open cloister entirely unprovided with artificial means
of warming. Beer was the general, and wine a rarer beverage. Relishes
and extra dishes were granted from time to time, as, for instance, on
festival occasions, or as a reward for special duties. To guard against
chills furs were largely worn, and were indeed a heavy item of
expenditure. Spices were largely used as comforts in the same way as the
mustard already referred to, and to keep the monks in health the
gardener was required to supply each monk with a regulation number of
apples daily from Advent to Lent, doubtless, again, a wise provision at
a period when vegetables were
[Illustration: CLOISTERS AND FROMOND’S CHANTRY, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
“But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloister’s pale.”
Cloisters, with Fromond’s Chantry in the centre (for College has two
chapels), forms one of the most poetic spots of Winchester College.
In earlier days school was held in Cloisters during the summer months.
In Cloisters the College dead lie buried. Many former scholars have cut
or carved their names on the stone-work of Cloisters, among them the
famous Ken, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells, who wrote his _Manual
of Prayers_ for the use of Winchester College Boys.
His morning hymn
“Awake, my soul, and with the sun,”
and evening hymn
“Glory to Thee, my God, this night,”
first appeared in this _Manual_. The inscription in Cloisters is “Thos.
Ken, 1665.”]
nowhere readily obtainable as at present. As an additional corrective,
blood-letting, five times a year, was an habitual practice, and as this
involved three days in hospital, _i.e._ practically three days’ holiday,
it was rather looked forward to than otherwise. ‘Shaving day’ was an
important event. On Maunday Thursday the monks washed each other’s feet,
and once a year they had a bath. The straw for the pallets, on which
they slept in the ‘dortour,’ was changed once a year.
The meals were taken in silence in the refectory, while, to transpose
the poet’s words,
The Reader droned from the Pulpit,
Like the murmur of many bees,
The legends of good _St. Swithun_
And _St. Benet’s_ homilies.
Straw litter covered the floor, which was changed seven times a year--a
higher standard of cleanliness and luxury than prevailed generally,
seeing that Erasmus, 200 years later, could still complain of the filthy
rush-covered floors of English houses, where bones, scraps, and ale from
the table accumulated, with even less desirable kinds of dirt, and
which, when it was replaced, was removed so perfunctorily that the lower
layers remained undisturbed, it might be for years.
The Obedientiary Rolls, moreover, supply us with an interesting insight
into the commodities in general use, and also into their prices.
Reducing to modern values we find an egg and a herring practically cost
then, as now, a penny apiece. Sugar existed in various forms--Sugar
Scaffatyn, Sugar of Cyprus, Sugar Roset, and sweetmeats or comfits of
various kinds, varying from one to several shillings a pound. Rice was
largely consumed, and cost threepence a pound. ‘Coryns,’ _i.e._ _grapes
of Corinth_, in other words currants, about two shillings a pound.
Enormous quantities of groceries, ‘spiceries’ as they were termed,
figured in the accounts, but, doubtless, largely because St. Swithun had
his stall at St. Giles’s Fair, and dealt extensively in ‘spices.’
It was at Fair time that the monks had their chief holiday, and made
their chief purchases. It was at the Fair that they purchased also the
furs they wore so largely. On the top of the hill the Prior had his
special pavilion, and kept practically open house--and doubtless the
monks keenly appreciated the rare opportunity the Fair afforded for a
little excursion beyond the walls. For though the Prior mingled freely
with the outer world, as a great political person-age was summoned
regularly to Parliament, and so forth, the monk in general but rarely
left the convent gate, and saw little beyond ‘the studious cloister’s
pale.’
We have fewer details of the Abbey of Hyde, just as we have fewer
remains of its fabric. Such part as remains, apart from some unimportant
ruins, is generally supposed to have formed part of the Tithe barn.
Opposite the gateway of this--which is really an interesting piece of
architectural work, unfortunately very meagre in extent,--is the Church
of St. Bartholomew, Hyde, where, as already stated, the lay servants of
the abbey worshipped. The squared and worked stones which are to be
seen freely in the houses all round the neighbourhood are, otherwise,
practically all that still remains of the great abbey.
Of its internal life we know also but little; the _Liber de Hyda_
preserves most of its history, but we have no obedientiary rolls to
chronicle its small beer. During much of its later history it had a hard
struggle for existence. The Black Death all but brought ruin to it,
though later on William of Wykeham did much to restore its prosperity.
Its best-known abbot was Walter Fyfhyde, abbot from 1318 to 1361.
Of St. Mary’s Abbey we have fewer details still. It enjoyed a
considerable revenue from the tolls, or ‘octroi,’ on merchandise which
entered the city at the East Gate.
Far different from the life of monk or nun was that of the friar. In the
fourteenth century he was firmly established as a Winchester
institution. He was the active missioner, the revivalist, the preacher.
He moved in the world, not in the cloister. He taught, he preached, he
visited the slums; he was the Church-army worker or the Salvationist of
his time, and if he wrought too much on the superstitious fears of his
hearers, even if the relics which he permitted them to kiss were usually
nothing but ‘pigges bones,’ like those of Chaucer’s ‘gentle pardonere,’
as often as not he would have been prepared to defend the fraud as a
pious deception which did no harm to his listeners, while as a class the
friars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were undoubtedly the
salt of the earth.
All the four orders of friars were represented in Winchester--Black
Friars or Dominicans, Grey Friars or Franciscans, White Friars or
Carmelites, and Austin Friars. Their quarters were generally in the
slums. The name ‘Grey Friars’ still lingers in ‘The Brooks,’ and ‘The
Friary’ in Southgate Road preserves the memory of the Austin Friars,
though the latter, strictly speaking, were rather canons than friars
proper. Between the several types of ecclesiastics deadly jealousy
existed, and if monk and friar agreed at all, it was probably in a
common hostility to the ordinary parochial incumbent or parish priest.
Besides these, many smaller religious or semi-religious houses of
various types existed. Adjoining Wykeham’s College was the ‘Sustern
Spital,’ a community of nursing sisters, fronting on to College Street;
the little college of St. Elizabeth of Hungary stood near the boundary
wall of ‘Mead’; and besides these were a number of others, of which
Magdalene College was perhaps the chief. Mediaeval Winchester could
certainly display ‘Pious Founders’ with any city of its day.
The monasteries continued to flourish in greater or less prosperity till
the middle of Henry VIII.’s reign. But though the cloister monk himself
might come but little in contact with the outer world, the aspects in
which the monastery as a whole did so were numerous and important. Not
only in its immediate vicinity did it serve as educator, general
almoner, and physician, relieving want and sheltering distress, but far
away also from its walls its word was law, its control all-sufficient.
As landed proprietors on a widely extended scale the monasteries wielded
enormous territorial influence. At their grange farms, such as the farm
of the Augustinians at Silkstede, they maintained large bodies of farm
hands, they reared sheep, they drove to market, they bought and sold.
Nor was this all; all was fish that came into their net, and Church
patronage not the least important or acceptable, so that more and more
the duty of providing for the spiritual needs of neighbouring or
outlying parishes fell to their share, along with the tithes or dues
paid to support it, and in such cases tithe was no longer paid to the
incumbent direct but to the monastery, who appointed a ‘vicar’ or deputy
to carry out the spiritual duties,--a system satisfactory enough,
perhaps, if faithfully followed out, but leading to every form of evil
and neglect when laxity supervened, and selfishness replaced zeal; and
so the system of ‘vicars’ as incumbents was inaugurated, while the
frequent iteration and survival up and down the country side of such
monastic addenda to the names of Hampshire towns and villages, as Itchen
Abbas, Abbot’s Ann, Monk’s Sherborne, Prior’s Barton, to quote but one
or two, is an eloquent testimony to the firm grasp which the monk had
secured of the spiritual patrimony of the Church, and to this more than
anything else is to be attributed the present poverty of the Church, and
the lay patronage existing in so many rural English parishes to-day.
The closing scene in the monastic story was not, however, to be reached
for some century or so longer. In Henry VIII.’s time, however,
monasteries had drifted so hopelessly from the general stream of
national life, that it was evident their existence could not be
indefinitely prolonged on existing lines, and Wolsey, with an insight
and high zeal for reform which is rarely done sufficient justice to,
conceived the plan of closing them and diverting the funds thus set free
to other religious and kindred purposes, the endowment of schools,
colleges, etc. Henry VIII. availed himself of Wolsey’s suggestion, and
Thomas Cromwell, the supple and unscrupulous instrument of an equally
unscrupulous master, carried it out,--not, however, with any view of a
right-minded diversion of funds set aside for religious purposes, but
with the intention, barely veiled, of selfish misappropriation, and the
satisfaction of personal greed, and in the general scramble for plunder,
not only did the monastic property, as such, get swallowed up, but the
parochial endowments--where vicars were in being, at least--were
swallowed up also.
The actual closing was carried out by two commissions. In 1536 some of
the smaller Winchester houses were suppressed, including the Sustern
Spital and the various friaries. Then in 1537 a second commission was
appointed, and the larger houses began to fall. At Hyde, Abbot Salcot
proved ‘conformable’ and surrendered the abbey, and in 1538 Cromwell’s
commissioners, with the notorious Thomas Wriothesley, afterwards Earl
of Southampton, acting the part of ‘leading villain’ of the piece,
visited it to carry out the work of demolishment. In a letter to
Cromwell they thus describe their work at Hyde:--
About three o’clock (_A.M._) we made an end of the shrine here at
Wynchester.... We think the silver thereof will amount to near two
thousand marks. Going to our beds-ward, we viewed the altar, which
we purpose to bring with us. Such a piece of work it is that we
think we shall not rid it, doing our best, before Monday next or
Tuesday morning, which done we intend, both at Hyde and at St.
Mary’s, to sweep away all the rotten bones that be called relics,
which we may not omit lest it be thought that we came more for the
treasure than for avoiding the abominations of idolatry.
The words are significant, and the hour 3 A.M. tells its own tale. The
abbot and other inmates received pensions, very modest ones, and the
manors fell into various lay hands. Wriothesley secured the lion’s
share. The abbey buildings were sold for the material they were built
of, and so rapidly did most of it disappear, that Leland in 1539 says in
his well-known _Itinerary_: “In this suburb stood the great abbey of
Hyde, and hath yet a parish church.” Camden, writing shortly after,
speaks of the “bare site, deformed with heaps of ruins, daily dug up to
burn into lime.” In 1788 what still remained of the ruins was nearly all
rooted up to make a County Bridewell. No thought of Alfred, or the other
mighty and illustrious dead buried within the precincts, seems to have
stayed the Vandal hands; numerous relics, patens, chalices, rings were
found. A slab of stone bearing Alfred’s name was taken away, and is
still preserved at Corby, in Cumberland. It was not part of Alfred’s
tomb, as it bears the date 891. So far all attempts to locate the
position of Alfred’s tomb have been unsuccessful. Like Moses of old, “no
man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.”
The suppression of St. Swithun’s had results less drastic. Hyde Abbey
was simply swallowed up in the catastrophe. St. Swithun’s was
transformed into the capitular body of the Cathedral, the Prior,
Sub-prior, and monks disappeared, and in their places succeeded the
Dean, the Chapter, and Canons of Winchester.
The new establishment thus formed was at first composed of the Dean,
twelve prebendaries, and six minor canons. The Prior, William Kingsmill,
proved ‘very conformable,’ and became the first Dean of the new
collegiate body. The commissioners, here as at Hyde, stripped the
Cathedral of its ornaments. The silver shrine of St. Swithun
disappeared, and various other shrines, and the glorious treasures of
gold and silver, and precious stones, the gifts of Cnut, Bishop Stigand,
and many another pious donor, which had graced the high altar, were all
swept away by the greedy hands of the spoilers.
The domestic buildings have almost all now disappeared. The
chapter-house was pulled down in 1570 by Bishop Horne, largely for the
sake of the leaden roof; and the cloisters later on suffered a similar
fate. Part of one of the convent kitchens remains in one of
[Illustration: MEMORIAL GATEWAY, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
The Memorial Gateway, opening on to Kingsgate Street, was erected
recently in memory of Wykehamists who fell in the South African
War.
]
the houses at the west side of the cloister garth, and some portions of
the domestic buildings still remain in the Deanery, but practically all
connected with the domestic life of the monastery has now disappeared.
In 1632 Bishop Curle opened a passage, now called ‘The Slype,’ by
cutting through the great buttress on the south side, and so converted
the cloister garth into a thoroughfare. Two curious Latin anagrams cut
on the west front of the Cathedral and on the wall adjoining commemorate
this. But the Priory, thus transformed, gained rather than lost in
usefulness. Much of the property was indeed seized by the king, but the
Dean and Chapter have remained otherwise in full possession of the
powers and privileges granted to them, while the fuller and less
restricted range of activity has rendered the Cathedral the centre of
ecclesiastical life and of extended usefulness, far exceeding what the
Priory in its later days ever succeeded or perhaps ever aimed at
securing.
The suppression of St. Swithun’s was the first in point of time; later
on, in 1538, Hyde was dissolved; in 1539, St. Mary’s Abbey--Nunna
Mynstre--founded by Alswitha, Queen of Alfred the Great, suffered a like
doom. St. Elizabeth’s College lasted a few years longer, and was finally
sold to Winchester College in 1547, and the buildings pulled down. The
college luckily survived the visitation, so, also, equally fortunately,
did St. Cross and St. John’s Hospital, and these remain in continued and
more extended usefulness till the present day.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CATHEDRAL
Sermons in Stones.
To deal adequately with Winchester Cathedral would be almost to write
the history of England, a task manifestly impossible within the limits
of such a work as this. For the Cathedral is not merely a building, but
a veritable history in stone, and that not a history--as historic
buildings very often are--of a community which has raised but a small
eddy in the waters of national life, but of one which has profoundly
affected the fortunes of the nation during almost every period of its
existence. It is safe to say that scarcely a single storm of national
strife has burst upon the land without leaving in some way an impress
upon these grey stone walls, and during a period of many centuries there
was scarcely one single actor of eminence in the national drama who did
not leave, in some form or other, a record imperishably graven here
behind him. Not only have these stones witnessed the coronations of
kings--the baptisms, marriages, and burials of princes--the consecration
of bishops, and many another ceremony of high national significance,
but they enshrine within their circuit the sacred dust of generations of
the great departed, subject and king, soldier and priest, statesman and
prelate; they are a great national Valhalla with which no other in the
land save Westminster Abbey can claim to compare. As the preceding pages
have shown, a Christian cathedral has existed continuously on the
present site since the days of Kynegils and Kenwalh, in the 7th century.
Bishop Swithun and Bishop Æthelwold successively added to or rebuilt
large portions of the fabric, but the only Saxon work now remaining is
in the crypt and foundations. The pillars and arches are splendidly
massive and curiously fashioned, and show that Æthelwold’s work was
solidly constructed. The Cathedral, as we see it to-day, is the Norman
and Angevin Cathedral--the cathedral of Walkelyn and of Godfrey de Lucy,
transformed in later Plantagenet days by Edyngton, Wykeham, and
Beaufort, and adorned by Silkstede, Fox, and many others. Walkelyn’s
Cathedral was a typical Norman building, and the disposition of its
parts reflected a symbolism as well as a harmony. The central truths of
Christian doctrine, those of the Trinity and of the redemption, were
beautifully symbolised in the three-fold repetition of nave, triforium,
and clerestory in the elevation, and of nave, choir, and transepts
disposed in the form of a cross in the ground plan. The arches and
pillars are characteristic examples of the Norman style--semicircular
arches springing from heavy, cushion-shaped capitals surmounting the
strong circular pillars. The general effect of the interior, though
heavy, was one of impressiveness and dignity, as can be well seen from
the transepts, which remain for all practical purposes unaltered from
their original form, or better still from the interior of Chichester
Cathedral of to-day. It reflected alike calmness, dignity, and
strength--the dignity of a strength conscious of a burden indeed, but
self-reliant and adequate to the task. It is no light burden that those
giant pillars are bearing, nor do they support it joyously or even with
ease: each one is rather an Atlas, bearing his load strongly and
uncomplainingly, but needing to put forth all his powers in the effort.
Godfrey de Lucy, Bishop in Richard I.’s time, extended the church
eastwards by adding the retro-choir with its beautiful Early English
arcading, graceful columns, and lancet windows,--an extension which,
owing to the insufficient foundation on which he built, is in large
measure responsible for the insecure condition of the fabric to-day.
This we will revert to later on in the chapter. Godfrey de Lucy’s object
was to afford space for the ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims who
crowded to Winchester to see the shrine of St. Swithun, but who in other
respects were unwelcome guests. His extension eastward afforded every
facility to admit the pilgrims in to view the shrine, without giving
them access to the choir, nave, or domestic parts of the Priory. In
Edward III.’s reign came the transformation of the nave and aisles--a
daring work commenced by Bishop Edyngton, and completed by William of
Wykeham, almost equal in magnitude to the reconstruction of the fabric
itself. Edyngton’s work may be seen in the aisle windows at the extreme
west of the building; Wykeham’s, which is lighter and more graceful,
fills the rest of the nave. The general result has been to impart to the
interior gracefulness and lightness. The columns on either side of the
choir steps, which were left partly unaltered, show us in some measure
how the change was effected, partly by pulling down and rebuilding,
partly by cutting away from the face of the columns. The triforium was
removed bodily, and the triple row of Norman arches thrown together into
a single range of light, lofty, and graceful Perpendicular-Gothic
arches, surmounted by smaller Perpendicular windows serving as
clerestory. Triforium proper no longer exists, but its place is taken by
a continuous narrow balcony running along both sides of the nave. The
impressiveness and beauty of the effect thus produced it is impossible
to describe. As you enter at the west end the majesty of the whole at
once silences and uplifts you--a forest almost of lofty shafts and
pillars rising unbroken and towering overhead, where they branch out and
interlace in the beautiful intricacy of the fan-tracery of the roof.
It is not without appropriateness that Wykeham and Edyngton both lie
buried here in the beautiful chantry chapels which they respectively
erected between the pillars on the south side of the nave.
The work of transformation from Norman to Perpendicular was continued
through the choir and presbytery aisles by Beaufort and others, and
later bishops extended the building eastward beyond the limits of
Godfrey de Lucy’s work. The three chapels at the east end, Orleton’s
Chapel, commonly spoken of as the Chapel of the Guardian Angels,
Langton’s Chapel, and the Lady Chapel, contain much interesting and
varied work.
In one sense the retro-choir is, architecturally speaking, the most
interesting part of the Cathedral. It presents wonderful variety, and
contains specimens of practically every stage of architectural
development since de Lucy’s day. But it must be confessed that the
general effect is rather a confused medley of seemingly haphazard or
tentative reconstructions, and the piecemeal character of the separate
parts deprives it to a large extent of the dignity and completeness of a
harmonious whole. Nowhere is this exemplified better than in the three
east windows of the south transept--all altered from the original Norman
windows, and each entirely different in character from its neighbours.
Yet this very want of harmony is strangely eloquent. Winchester
Cathedral, and its east end more particularly, is not an architect’s
cathedral, so to speak--one complete harmonious design like Salisbury;
rather is it a document in stone--a deed to which many participants have
affixed their sign-manual, each in his characteristic writing, and
bearing the direct impress of his personality.
Yet fascinating as its architectural features are, they are dwarfed and
unimportant beside the wealth of historical association that lies locked
up within these walls as in a treasure-chest.
Of the many great and solemn ceremonials which these walls have
witnessed--such indeed, to mention one or two only, as the second
coronation of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, the baptism of Henry VII.’s son,
Arthur of Winchester, Prince of Wales, the marriage of Henry IV. with
his second wife Joan of Navarre, and that of Mary Tudor, Queen of
England, to Philip of Spain--we will not now speak in detail. Rather
will we concentrate our attention on the historic and architectural
monuments which meet our eye almost wherever we turn, and among this
wealth of historical and architectural treasures three may be singled
out for special notice--the chantry chapels, the reredos, and the
mortuary chests. The chantry chapels are gems of beauty and of interest,
enshrining the mortal remains as well as the memories of six notable
men,--Edyngton, Wykeham, Beaufort, Waynflete, Fox, and Gardiner.
Wykeham’s chantry is almost daringly constructed out of and between two
of the great pillars of the nave. The memories of the three chantry
monks who served it in Wykeham’s lifetime are preserved by three
charming miniature figures placed in effigy at Wykeham’s feet. The
chantries of Beaufort, Waynflete, Fox, and Gardiner are east of the
choir. Beaufort’s chantry, less beautiful perhaps architecturally, is
wonderfully suggestive. How eloquently the recumbent effigy seems to
recall the strong features of the man who desired power so earnestly,
and could dare greatly in the effort to possess it--those rigid hands
now clasped meekly in prayer betoken a humility and repose which their
owner when in life probably never enjoyed, nor it may be even desired.
Waynflete, again, had a notable career. Headmaster of Winchester, he was
chosen by Henry VI. as first headmaster of his new foundation of Eton,
and shortly after from headmaster became Provost, from which position he
rose to become Bishop of Winchester. Waynflete founded Magdalen College,
Oxford; and Magdalen College has but recently been discharging a pious
duty by undertaking the work needed for the preservation of her
founder’s chantry. With Waynflete, Wykeham, and Foxe (founder of
Corpus), all buried in these chantries, Winchester might almost claim to
have founded Oxford herself. Architecturally each chantry marks a step
forward in the development of style, and registers the successive stages
in the rise, culmination, decline, and death of Perpendicular Gothic.
Of the great altar-screen we have already spoken. Here we have
Perpendicular Gothic at its very best, rich in effort, yet in perfect
taste, without the least suggestion of the florid or the bizarre--the
detail so varied, the execution so delicate. The statuary is modern, but
is beautifully executed and in perfect keeping--a somewhat unusual
excellence--with the original work. It would be hard to meet with so
illustrative and remarkable a series of Christian saints and examples as
are here shown in effigy grouped
[Illustration: SECOND MASTER’S HOUSE, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
Wykeham’s ‘children,’ the seventy scholars that is, are still
lodged in College, as they have been from the first, under the
charge of the second master, whose house lies between Outer Gateway
and Chamber Court, over which latter some of the windows look out.
]
round the Saviour’s figure--the four archangels, the Virgin and St.
John, St. Paul and St. Peter, doctors like Jerome, teachers like
Ambrose, Christian missionaries like Birinus, bishops like Swithun,
Æthelwold, Wykeham, and Wolsey. Among sovereigns we have Egbert, Alfred,
Cnut, and Queen Victoria. Among the others of note are Earl Godwine,
Izaak Walton, Ken and Keble. Many of these lie actually buried within
the Cathedral walls, and nearly all left their mark inseparably and
honourably stamped, alike on the national, as on the city history.
Of all the historical memorials, however, none is capable of so
profoundly stirring the imagination or arresting the attention as the
six beautiful mortuary chests placed above the side screens of the
choir. Think what associations the inscriptions on these recall. Early
Wessex chieftains, as Kynegils and Kenwalh: kings of Wessex, when Wessex
was supreme over all England, as Egbert and Æthelwulf: the union of
Saxon and Dane, as personified by Cnut and Queen Emma; the Norman tyrant
as represented by Rufus. Not even in Westminster Abbey itself can names
such as these be read. And close at hand are other significant names
too: Harthacnut: Richard, son of the Conqueror, fated, like his brother
Rufus, to meet a violent death in the New Forest, but otherwise unknown
to history: Duke Beorn, murdered at sea by Sweyn, son of Earl Godwine.
These and other striking names can be found graven on the stone-work
which carries the mortuary chests above.
Of former bishops of Winchester the majority are buried here. Some of
these--and among them some of the most famous--have no visible sign to
mark their tomb; these include such names as Birinus, Swithun,
Æthelwold, Walkelyn, Henry of Blois. There are many others too over whom
we should like to linger: Peter de Rupibus, for instance, the evil
genius of Henry III.’s reign, and Ethelmar or Aymer, the absentee
bishop, who died in Paris, but desired his heart to be placed in a
casket for interment in the Cathedral, though when alive his affections
seem to have been centred anywhere but here. His monument is more
picturesque than his life was edifying. He is represented in effigy in
the attitude of prayer, and holding his heart between his folded hands.
In striking contrast to these are monuments to Bishops Morley, Hoadley,
Samuel Wilberforce, and Harold Brown.
Over the remaining monuments, and there are many of very great interest,
we cannot linger. Flaxman is represented by a bas-relief of Dr. Warton,
famous in his day as headmaster of the College, seated in his
magisterial chair, with a group of college boys ‘up to books.’ The
details of schoolboy attire are curious and interesting. Appealing to a
wider circle are two flat slabs of stone, one in Prior Silkstede’s
Chapel, one in the north aisle. The former bears the name Izaak Walton,
the latter Jane Austen. Truly Winchester Cathedral is a city of the
mighty dead.
In addition to the monuments there are many other features of great
attractiveness. Prior Silkstede’s carved wooden pulpit, the quaint old
font curiously carved in black stone, said to have been brought to
Winchester by Henry of Blois, and the _miserere_ seats in the choir
stalls are among these. The Cathedral library, too, is of rare interest.
The wonderful Illuminated Vulgate, with its almost romantic history, and
numerous early Saxon charters are preserved here, along with Cathedral
and city records of great historical value.
The exterior of the Cathedral presents less interest. It is grand and
striking, but hardly beautiful. The West front is flat and featureless,
the long straight roof of the nave is monotonous. The east end, with its
varied work and the huge Norman transepts, is by far the finest portion.
Taken as a whole the general effect is extremely dignified and
impressive, and the surroundings are entirely in keeping.
As you pass down the beautiful lime avenue, or cross the grass to the
west and north, the quiet dignity and repose impress you with an
influence deeper than mere beauty, and the Cathedral Close, with its
Jacobean and Georgian houses, is equally serene, dignified, and
attractive. The Deanery is interesting, particularly the Early English
work in the portico, and the beautiful green sward in Mirabel Close,
with the Pilgrims’ Hall to the east, and Cheyne Court with its
open-timbered and gabled houses, all both alike quiet, stately, and
harmonious. A rare place this Close, with associations too of its own.
Even nowadays it possesses its ghost--a female figure robed and veiled
like a nun--which persons still living will describe to you, for they
have seen it themselves, they declare, and heard its ghostly footfall
echoing as it has paced before them on the flags. Nor is the word
‘Close’ a word only. Still every night the gate is religiously locked at
the stroke of ten, after which none may enter or depart save by favour
of the Close porter, the lineal successor of the ‘proud portér’ so
prominent in Early English ballad poetry.
Before leaving the Cathedral we must say a few words about the
operations for the repair of the fabric to which reference has already
been made.