WINCHESTER
I do not know what it is that moves me so deeply in the old cities of
Southern England, in Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester, most of all,
perhaps, in Winchester, unless it be that they sum up in a way nothing
else can do the England that is surely and irrevocably passing away.
How reverently we approach them, with what hesitation and misgiving we
try to express what we feel about them! They are indeed the sanctuaries
of England, sanctuaries in which it is wiser to pray than to exult,
since their beauty and antiquity, their repose and quietness, fill us
with an extraordinary uneasiness and amazement, a kind of nostalgia
which nothing really our own can satisfy. For if Winchester appeals to
us as the symbol of England, it is not the England of our day for which
she stands. Let Manchester or Sheffield stand for that, places so
unquiet, so meanly wretched and hopeless, that no one has ever thought
of them without a kind of fear and misery. Alas, they are the reality,
while Winchester gradually fades year by year into a mere dream city,
as it were Camelot indeed, too good to be true, established, if at all,
rather in the clouds, or in our hearts, than upon the earth we tread.
And if in truth she stands for something that was once our own, it is
for something we are gradually leaving behind us, discarding and
forgetting, something that after four centuries of disputation and
anarchy no man any longer believes capable of realisation here and now.
Yet Winchester endures in her beauty, her now so precarious
loveliness, and while she endures it is still possible to refuse to
despair of England. For she is co-eval with us; before we knew
ourselves or were aware of our destiny she stood beside the Itchen
within the shadow of her hills east and west, in the meads and the
water meadows. She saw the advent of the Roman, she claims to be
Arthur's chief city, as later she was the throne of the Saxon kings; in
her council chamber England was first named England.
Of what indeed she was before the Romans came and drew us within their
great administration, we are largely ignorant; but we know that they
established here a town of considerable importance, which they called
Venta Belgarum, larger than Silchester, if we may believe that the
mediaeval walls stand upon Roman foundations, and certainly a centre of
Roman administrative life. Four Roman roads undoubtedly found in her
their goal and terminus, coming into her Forum from Sorbiodunum (Old
Sarum) upon the west, from Calleva (Silchester) upon the north, from
Porchester upon the south, and from Clausentum upon the south-west. Her
chief Temple in Roman times, before the advent of Christianity, was
that of Apollo, which is said to have occupied the site of the
Cathedral, close by was the Temple of Concord, while it is impossible
to believe that a town so plentifully supplied by nature with water
was without considerable baths. Legend has it indeed that Winchester
was the capital of the King Lucius, who is said in the second century
to have introduced Christianity into Britain. The first Christian
church, which he erected, traditionally stood upon the site of the
Cathedral. But alas, Lucius is a myth, his cathedral a church never
built with hands. We know nothing of any Christian church in Roman
Winchester, and though we may be sure that such a building certainly
existed, no excavation has so far laid bare its foundations. Indeed we
are almost as ignorant of Roman as we are of Celtic Winchester. Even
the lines of its walls are conjectural, we suppose them to be the same
as those of the Middle Age, yet such foundations of Roman buildings as
have been discovered, lie not only within an area much more restricted
than that which the mediaeval walls enclosed, but in certain instances
outside them. No discoveries of Roman foundations have been made to the
north of the High Street. This fact, however, formidable though it be,
does not of itself prove that the Roman walls did not coincide with the
mediaeval fortifications; it is even probable that they did, except at
the south-west corner, where stood the mediaeval castle. In any case,
the Roman walls, built we may think in the fourth century, enclosed an
irregular quadrilateral, and possessed four gates out of which issued
those four roads to Old Sarum, to Silchester, to Clausentum and to
Porchester.
In the beginning of the fifth century the Roman administration which
had long been failing, to which one may think the building of those
walls bears witness, collapsed altogether, and with the final departure
of the Legions full of our youth and strength, Britain was left
defenceless. What happened to Winchester in the appalling confusion
which followed, we shall never know. It is said that in 495, three
generations that is to say after the departure of the Legions for the
defence of Rome, Cerdic and his son, Cymric, landed upon the southern
coast, and presently seized Winchester within whose broken walls they
established themselves. In the year 519, according to the "Saxon
Chronicle," "Cerdic and Cymric obtained the kingdom of the West Saxons;
and the same year they fought against the Britons where it is now named
Cerdicsford. And from that time forth the royal offspring of the West
Saxons reigned." That is all we know about it, and it is not enough
upon which to build an historical narrative or from which to draw any
clear idea even of what befell. All we can say with any sort of
certainty is that the Saxons, through long years of probably spasmodic
fighting, very gradually established themselves in southern England,
and out of it carved a dominion, the kingdom of Wessex, whose capital
was Winchester. Until the year 635 this kingdom, such as it was, was
pagan. In that year St Birinus converted the West Saxons and their King
Kynegils to Christianity. Though Kynegils seems immediately
to have begun to build a church in Winchester in which he
established monks and endowed it with the whole of the land
for a space of seven miles round the city, Winchester did
not become an episcopal See until the year 662. Till then,
Dorchester in the Thames Valley had been the seat of the Bishop
of Wessex, but in that year Kynewalch, the son and successor of
Kynegils, completed the church of Winchester, in which he had been
crowned, and his father buried, as for the most part were their
successors, and there he established a bishop.
It was now that Winchester began her great career. She rose with the
fortunes of the Wessex kingdom until, in the time of Egbert, she
appears as the capital of the new kingdom of England which is so named,
and for the first time in her witan.
The com kyng Egbryth
Ant wyth batyle ant fyht
Made al Englond yhol
Falle to ys oune dol;
Ant sethe he reignede her
Ahte ant tuenti folle yer:
At Wynchestre lyggeth ys bon,
Buried in a marble-ston.
Egbert triumphed and established England none too soon. As early as
the year 787, according to the "Saxon Chronicle," "ships of the
Northmen" had reached our southern coasts, and Egbert had scarcely
named his new kingdom when they imperilled it. His son, Ethelwulf, who
came to his throne in 836, was to see Winchester itself stormed before
the invaders were beaten off; but beaten off they were, and it was in
Winchester that Alfred was to reign, to give forth his laws and to plan
his campaigns against the same enemy. He was victorious, as we know,
and at Ethandune not only broke his pagan foes, but dragged Guthrum,
their leader, to baptism. And in his capital he made and kept the only
record we have of the Dark Ages in England, the "Saxon Chronicle,"
begun in Wolvesey Palace; founded the famous nunnery of St Mary to the
north-east of the Cathedral in the meads; and provided for the
foundation, by Edward his son, of the great New Minster close by, where
his bones at last were to be laid. The three great churches with their
attendant buildings must have been the noblest group to be seen in the
England of that day. Thus Winchester flourished more than ever secure
in its position as capital, so that Athelstan, we read, established
there six mints, and Edgar, reigning there, made "Winchester measure"
the standard for the whole kingdom: "and let one money pass throughout
the king's dominions, and let no man refuse; and let one measure and
one weight pass, such as is observed at London and Winchester."
Such was Winchester at the beginning of the ninth century; before the
end of that century she was to suffer violence from the Danes; and in
the first years of the tenth century to fall with the rest of England
into their absolute power, and to see a Danish king, Canute, crowned in
her Cathedral. There, too, at last, that Danish king was buried. He was
a generous conqueror, and a great benefactor to his capital, and
with him passes much of the splendour of Winchester. Edward the
Confessor, though hallowed at Winchester, looked upon London
as his capital and there built the great abbey which was thenceforth
to see the crowning of England's kings. For St Edward was at
heart a Norman, and Winchester, beside summing up in itself all the
splendour of pre-Norman England, had been given by Ethelred to the
widow of Canute, Emma, the mother of St Edward. She allied herself with
the great Earl Godwin to oppose the Norman influence which St Edward
had brought into England, and it was only when she died that the king
came again into Winchester for Easter, and to hold a solemn court.
During that Easter week Earl Godwin died, and was buried in the
Cathedral. He was the last champion of Saxon England to lie there.
Nothing marks the change that England had passed through during the
first half of the eleventh century more certainly than the fact that
William Duke of Normandy was crowned King of England, not in the old
Minster of Winchester but in that of St Peter, Westminster, which Pope
Nicholas II. in King Edward's time had constituted as the place of the
inauguration of the kings of England. It is true that William was later
crowned again in Winchester, as were Stephen and Coeur de Lion, but the
fact remains that from the time of William the Conqueror down to our
own day, as the Papal Bull had ordered, Westminster and not Winchester
has been the coronation church of our kings. This Bull marks, as it
were, the beginning of the decline of Winchester. Little by little, in
the following centuries, it was to cease to be the capital of England.
Little by little London was to take its place, a thing finally achieved
by Edward I., when he removed the royal residence from Winchester.
Norman Winchester was, however, by no means less splendid than had been
the old capital of the Saxon kings. There Domesday Book was compiled,
and there it was kept in the Treasury of the Norman kings, and the only
name which it gives itself is that of the "Book of Winchester." There
the great Fair of St Giles was established by the Conqueror, which
attracted merchants from every part of Europe, and there in 1079 Bishop
Walkelin began, from the foundations, a new cathedral church completed
in 1093, of which the mighty transepts still remain. In 1109 the monks
of New Minster, which had suffered greatly from fire and mismanagement,
removed to a great new house without the walls upon the north, and
since this new site was called Hyde Meads, New Minster was thenceforth
known as the Abbey of Hyde; and certainly after the fire in 1141, if
not before, the great Benedictine Nunnery of St Mary was rebuilt.
As for the Castle of Wolvesey, Bishop Henry of Blois rebuilt it in
1138. It was indeed in his time that Winchester suffered the most
disastrous of all its sieges, as we may believe, and this at the hands
of the Empress Matilda in 1141. The greater part of the city is then
said to have been destroyed; the new Abbey of Hyde was burned down not
to be rebuilt till 1182; the old Nunnery of St Mary was destroyed also
by fire; and we are told of more than forty churches which then
perished. "Combustibles were hurled from the Bishop's Castle," William
of Malmesbury tells us, "in the houses of the townspeople, who, as I
have said, rather wished success to the empress than to the bishop,
which caught and burned the whole abbey of nuns within the city and the
monastery which is called Hyde without the walls. Here was an image of
Our Lord crucified, wrought with a profusion of gold and silver and
precious stones, through the pious solicitude of Canute, who was
formerly king and presented it. This being seized by the flames and
thrown to the ground was afterwards stripped of its ornaments at the
command of the Legate himself; more than five hundred marks of silver
and thirty of gold, which were found in it, served for a largess to the
soldiers."
It would, perhaps, be untrue to say that Winchester never really
recovered from the appalling sack and pillage which followed the flight
of Matilda; but it is true to assert that time was fighting against
her, and that the thirteenth century did not bring the splendid gifts
to her that it brought to so many of our cities. One great ceremony,
the last of its kind, however, took place in her Cathedral in 1194; the
second coronation of Coeur de Lion. "Then King Richard," we read,
"being clothed in his royal robes, with the crown upon his head,
holding in his right hand a royal sceptre which terminated in a cross,
and in his left hand a golden wand with the figure of a dove at the top
of it, came forth from his apartment in the priory, being conducted on
the right hand by the Bishop of Ely, his Chancellor, and on the left by
the Bishop of London. ... The silken canopy was held on four lances
over the King by four Earls. ... The King being thus conducted into the
Cathedral and up to the High Altar, there fell upon his knees, and
devoutly received the archbishop's solemn benediction. He was then led
to the throne, which was prepared for him, on the south side of the
choir. ... When Mass was finished the King was led back to his
apartments with the solemnities aforesaid. He then laid aside his robes
and crown, put on other robes and a crown that were much lighter, and
so proceeded to dinner, which was served in the monks' refectory."
Winchester's next glory was the birth of Henry III., known to the day
of his death as Henry of Winchester--this in 1207. In 1213 the city was
the scene of the reconciliation of King John and Archbishop Stephen,
but in 1265 she was sacked by the younger de Montfort, and this seems
finally to have achieved her overthrow. When Edward I. came to the
throne in 1272 he abandoned Winchester. The city never regained its
place, London was too strong for it both geographically and
economically. Its trade, which remained very considerable until the
latter part of the fourteenth century, chiefly owing to its wool and
cloth, was, however, slowly declining, and politically the history of
the city becomes a mere series of incidents, among the more splendid of
which were the marriage of Henry IV. with Joan of Navarre in 1403; the
reception of the French ambassadors by Henry V. before Agincourt in
1415; the rejoicings for the birth in Winchester of Arthur Tudor the
son of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York in 1457; the meeting of the
Emperor Charles V. and Henry VIII. in 1522; and the marriage of Mary
Tudor to Philip of Spain in 1554. At that great ceremony, the last
Catholic rite the old Cathedral was to witness, there were present,
according to the Venetian Envoy, "the ambassadors from the Emperor,
from the Kings of the Romans and Bohemia, from your Serenity, from
Savoy, Florence, and Ferrara and many agents of sovereign princes. The
proclamation was entitled thus: Philip and Mary, by the grace of God,
King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem, Ireland, Defender
of the Faith, Prince of Spain, Archduke of Austria, etc."
But when Queen Elizabeth visited the city in 1560 (she was there four
times during her reign), she said to the mayor, "Yours Mr Mayor is a
very ancient city"; and he answered, "It has abeen, your Majesty, it
has abeen," and in spite of bad grammar he spoke but the truth,
Winchester's great days were over. Yet it saw the trial of Sir Walter
Raleigh in 1603, and the town having been taken by Waller in 1644 the
Castle was besieged by Cromwell himself in 1645. "I came to
Winchester," he writes, "on the Lord's Day the 28th of September. After
some disputes with the Governour we entered the town. I summoned the
Castle; was denied; whereupon we fell to prepare batteries, which we
could not perfect until Friday following. Our battery was six guns;
which being finished, after firing one round, I sent in a second
summons for a treaty; which they refused, whereupon we went on with our
work and made a breach in the wall near the Black Tower; which after
about two hundred shot we thought stormable; and purposed on Monday
morning to attempt it. On Sunday morning about ten of the clock the
Governour beat a parley, desiring to treat, I agreed unto it, and sent
Colonel Hammond and Major Harrison in to him, who agreed upon these
enclosed articles."
Cromwell presently departed and the city caught a glimpse of the Royal
Martyr, the victim of the great families, as he passed from Hurst
Castle to Windsor and the scaffold in Whitehall. With the Restoration,
which was most gallantly welcomed in the old royal city, Charles II.
came to Winchester, and having been burnt out at Newmarket was,
according to Evelyn, "all the more earnest to render Winchester the
seat of his autumnal diversions for the future, designing a palace
there where the ancient castle stood.... The surveyor has already begun
the foundation for a palace estimated to cost £35,000...." But Charles
died too soon to finish this new house, which, it is said, Queen Anne
wished to complete, liking Winton well, but again death intervened.
In spite of these royal fancies, however, Winchester, which had
suffered badly in the plague of 1667, continued to decline in
importance and in population, and to depend more and more upon the two
great establishments which remained to it, the Cathedral, founded by
Kynegils in 635 and re-established under a new Protestant
administration in the sixteenth century, and the College of St Mary of
Winchester founded by William of Wykeham in connection with the College
of St Mary, Winton, in Oxford, called New College, for the education of
youth and the advancement of learning. Winchester is, of course, as it
ever has been, the county-town of Hampshire, but it still maintains
itself as it has done now these many years chiefly by reason of these
two great establishments.
Certainly to-day the traveller's earliest steps are turned towards
these two buildings, and first to that which is in its foundation near
eight hundred years the older--the Cathedral church once of St Swithin,
the Bishop and Confessor (852-863) and now since the Reformation of the
Holy Trinity.
To come out of the sloping High Street past the ancient city Cross,
through the narrow passage-way into the precincts, and to pass down
that great avenue of secular limes across the Close to the great porch
of the Cathedral, is to come by an incomparable approach to perhaps the
most noble and most venerable church left to us in England. The most
venerable--not I think the most beautiful. No one remembering the Abbey
of Westminster can claim that for it, and then, though it possesses the
noblest Norman work in England and the utmost splendour of the
Perpendicular, it lacks almost entirely and certainly the best of the
Early English. Its wonder lies in its size and its antiquity. It is now
the longest mediaeval church not only in England, but in Europe, though
once it was surpassed by old St Paul's. It is five hundred and twenty-
six feet long, but it lacks height, and perhaps rightly, at least I
would not have it other than it is, its greatness lying in its
monotonous depressed length and weight, an enormous primeval thing
lying there in the meads beside the river. Winchester itself might seem
indeed to know nothing of it. The city does not rejoice in it as do
Lincoln and York in their great churches; here is nothing of the sheer
joy of Salisbury, a Magnificat by Palestrina; the church of Winchester
is without delight, it has supremely the mystery and monotony of the
plainsong, the true chant of the monks, the chorus of an army, with all
the appeal of just that, its immense age and half plaintive glory,
which yet never really becomes music.
And Winchester, too, has all and more than all, the surprise of the
plainsong; the better you know it the more you are impressed. No one
certainly has ever come by the narrow way out of the High Street, down
the avenue of limes to the West Front without being disappointed; but
no one thus disappointed has ever entered into the church without
astonishment, wonder and complete satisfaction. It was not always so.
That long nave was once forty feet longer and was flanked upon either
side by a Norman tower as at Ely. Must one regret their loss? No, the
astonishment of the nave within makes up for everything; there is no
grander interior in the world, nor anywhere anything at all like it. Up
that vast Perpendicular nave one looks far and far away into the
height, majesty and dominion of the glorious Norman transept, and
beyond into the light of the sanctuary. It has not the beauty of
Westminster Abbey, nor the exquisite charm of Wells, but it has a
majesty and venerable nobility all its own that I think no other church
in England can match.
Of the old Saxon church, so far as we really know, the only predecessor
of the present church, nothing really remains. This, as I have said,
had been founded by King Kynegils upon his conversion, by St Birinus in
635. We know very little about it, except that it was enlarged or
rebuilt in the middle of the tenth century by St Aethwold, and if we
may believe the poetical description of Wolstan, we shall be inclined
to believe the church was enlarged, for it appears to have been a very
complex building with a lofty central tower, having a spire and
weathercock, in accordance with the Bull of Pope Urban, and a crypt,
both the work of St Elphege. This church, which, like its successor
until the Reformation, was served by monks, stood till the year 1093,
when it was destroyed as useless, for the new Norman church of Bishop
Walkelin begun in 1079 was then far enough advanced to be used. It is
thus practically certain that the two churches did not stand on the
same site, the newer, it would seem, rising to the south of the older
building. But the sacred spot which, it would seem, every church, that
may ever have stood in this place, must have covered is the holy well,
immediately beneath the present high altar in the crypt of the Norman
building. This surely was within the Saxon building as it must have
been within any church that may have stood here in Roman times?
The two great shrines of the Saxon church were, however, those of St
Birinus, the Apostle of Wessex, and of St Swithin, Bishop of Winchester
in the ninth century, the day of whose translation, July 15th, was,
till the Reformation, a universal festival throughout England. In his
honour the Saxon church, till then known as the church of SS. Peter and
Paul, was rededicated in 964.
The great Norman church which Bishop Walkelin built to take the place
of the Saxon minster cannot fundamentally have differed very much from
the church we see, at any rate so far as its nave and transepts were
concerned. The eastern arm was, however, different. It consisted of
four bays, with north and south aisles at the end of which were
rectangular chapels, an apse about which the aisles ran as an
ambulatory, and beyond the apse an eastern apsidal chapel. Of this
church all that really remains to us is the crypt and the transept. In
the crypt we divine the old eastern limb of the church, and are
doubtless in the presence of the earliest work in the Cathedral. It is,
however, in the double aisled transepts that we can best appreciate how
very glorious that first Norman church must have been; there is nothing
in England more wonderful; and so far as I know there is nothing in
Europe quite to put beside them. If only the whole mighty church could
have remained to us!
The first disaster that befell Bishop Walkelin's building was the fall
of the central tower in 1107, which all England, at the time,
attributed to the burial beneath it of William Rufus. The tower was
rebuilt, though not to its original height, but in the reconstruction,
the parts of the transept nearest to the tower were also rebuilt, and
thus we have here two periods of Norman work; the main building of 1107
and the reconstruction after that date.
Of the Transitional work of the second half of the twelfth century very
little is to be seen at Winchester. It was for the most part the period
of that great Bishop Henry of Blois, and he was probably too much
immersed in the brutal politics of his time, too busy building and
holding his castle to give much thought to the Cathedral. The font,
however, dates from his time, and perhaps a door in the north-western
bay of the south transept.
The earliest Gothic work in the Cathedral is the chapel of St
Sepulchre, which was built upon the northern wall of the choir before
the north transept. There we may still see wall paintings of the
Passion of Our Lord. Not much later is the retro-choir. This consists
of three bays, and is the largest in England. It was begun in 1189 by
Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, and we must admit at once that it is wholly
without delight, and yet to build it the Norman apse was sacrificed.
According to Mr Bond, this was probably a very popular destruction. The
reversion, says he, "to the favourite square east end of English church
architecture was popular in itself. Almost every Norman cathedral ended in
an apse; and in the apse, high raised behind the high altar, sat the
Norman bishop facing the congregation; the hateful symbol of Norman
domination." This may have been so, but considering that the monastic
choir of Winchester occupied not one, as the choir does to-day, but
three bays of the nave from which it was separated by a vast rood
screen, though the Bishop had been as high as Haman, he would have been
scarcely visible to the populace in the western part of the nave.
Popular or no, however, the apse was sacrificed and the low retro-choir
built with the Lady Chapel in the Early English style.
The next thing undertaken was to place in the old Norman choir the
magically lovely choir stalls (1245-1315) which happily still remain
to us. Perhaps it was their enthusiastic loveliness which led about
1320 to the rebuilding of the Presbytery and the lovely tabernacle in
the back of the wall of the Feretory. When all this was done there
remained of the old Norman church only the transepts and the nave. The
transepts remain to us still, but the nave was transformed, in the very
beginning of the Perpendicular time. It was transformed not rebuilt.
Bishop William of Wykeham has obliterated Bishop Walkelin, but
fundamentally the nave of Winchester remains Norman still. The
Perpendicular work is only a lovely mask, or rather just the sunlight
of the fourteenth century which has come into the dark old Norman
building. The most notable change is the roof, in Norman times a flat
ceiling, now a magnificent vault. But that century was not
content with transforming the nave, it littered it with the first of
its various delights, those chantries which are among the greatest
splendours of this Cathedral, and which still, in some sort,
commemorate Bishop Edingdon (1366), Bishop Wykeham (1404),
Bishop Beaufort (1447), Bishop Waynflete (1416), Bishop Fox (1528) and
Bishop Gardiner (1555) the last Catholic Bishop to fill the See.
[Illustration: NORTH TRANSEPT, WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL]
The transformation of the nave, which occupied full an hundred years,
was not, however, the last work undertaken in the Cathedral before the
change of religion. Bishop Courtenay, in the last years of the
fifteenth century, lengthened the Lady Chapel, and finally Bishop Fox
in the very beginning of the sixteenth century began the transformation
of the early fourteenth century Presbytery, but got little further
than the insertion of the Perpendicular windows. He did, however,
transform the Norman aisles there, and screened them, and upon the
screens in six fine Renaissance chests he gathered the dust of the old
Saxon saints and kings.
But apart from its architecture the church is full of interest. Where
can we find anything to match the exquisite iron screen of the eleventh
century which used to guard St Swithin's shrine but which, now that is
gone, covers the north-west doorway of the nave? Is there another font
in England more wonderful than that square black marble basin
sculptured in the twelfth century with the story of St Nicholas? Is
there any series of chantries in England more complete or more lovely
than these at Winchester, or anywhere a finer fourteenth century
monument than that of Bishop Wykeham? Nowhere in England certainly can
the glorious choir stalls be matched, nor shall we easily find a pulpit
to surpass that in the choir here dating from 1520. If the restored
retablo over the high altar is disappointing in its sophistication,
we have only to pass into the Feretory to discover certain marvellous
fragments of the original reredos which are so beautiful that they take
away our breath--that broken statue of the Madonna and Child, for
instance, perhaps the loveliest piece of fourteenth century sculpture
to be found in England. No, however we consider the great church of
Winchester, it stands alone. As a mere building it is more tremendous
and more venerable than anything now left to us upon English soil; as a
burial place it possesses the dust not only of the Apostle of the heart
of England but of the greatest of the Saxon kings, while beneath its
mighty vault William Rufus sleeps, the only Norman king that lies in
England. And as a shrine of art it still possesses incomparable things.
It stands there as the Pyramids stand in the desert, a relic of a lost
civilisation; but by it we may measure the modern world.
It is, too, when you consider it, utterly lonely. The revolution we
call the Reformation upon which the modern world turns and turns as
upon a pivot, while it spared Winchester Cathedral, though reluctantly,
swept away all the buildings which surrounded it. The great monastery
is gone, scarcely a sign of it remains. Nothing at all is left of the
famous nunnery of St Mary. Of Wolvesey Castle there are a few beautiful
ruins, of Hyde Abbey, all has been swept away, even the stones, even
the bones of Alfred. Nor have the other and later religious houses,
with which Winchester was full, fared better. It is difficult to find
even the sites of the houses of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the
Austin Friars, the Carmelites. And what remains of the College of St
Elizabeth, and, but for a Norman doorway, now in Catholic hands, of the
Hospital of St Mary Magdalen? Only the Hospital of St John remains at
the east end of the High Street, still in possession of its fine Hall and
Chapel, and the great school founded by William of Wykeham in 1382,
"for seventy poor and needy scholars and clerks living college-wise in
the same, studying and becoming proficient in grammaticals or the art
and science of grammar." It remains without compare, the oldest and the
greatest school in England, whose daughter is Eton and whose late
descendant is Harrow.
To say that the Cathedral, the College and the Hospital of St John are
all that remains of mediaeval Winchester would not, perhaps, be
strictly true; but it is so near the truth that one might say it
without fear of contradiction. Most of the old churches even have
perished. There remain St John Baptist, which can boast of Transitional
arcades, and fifteenth century screen and pulpit; St Maurice with a
Norman doorway; St Peter with its twelfth and thirteenth century work;
St Bartholomew with some Norman remains near the site of Hyde Abbey;
and in the High Street there is more than one fine old house. The fact
that so little remains cannot altogether be placed to the discredit of
the Reformation and the Puritan fanatics. Until the eighteenth century
something remained of Hyde Abbey, much of the Hospital of St Mary
Magdalen; the city walls were then practically perfect, having all
their five gates, north, south, east and west, and King's gate; now of
all these only the Westgate of the thirteenth century remains to us
with the King's gate over which is the little church of St Swithin.
But in spite of vandalism, forgetfulness and barbarism, often of the
worst description as in the mere indifference and ignorance that
scattered Alfred's bones, no one has ever come to Winchester without
loving it, no one has ever been glad to get away. Its innumerable
visitors are all its lovers and the most opposite temperaments find
here common ground at last. Walpole praises it, and so does Keats. "We
removed here," writes the latter in 1819 to Bailey, "for the
convenience of a library, and find it an exceedingly pleasant town,
enriched with a beautiful cathedral and surrounded by fresh-looking
country.... Within these two months I have written fifteen hundred
lines, most of which, besides many more of prior composition, you will
probably see next winter. I have written two tales, one from Boccaccio
called the 'Pot of Basil' and another called 'St Agnes Eve' on a
popular superstition, and a third called 'Lamia' (half-finished). I
have also been writing parts of my 'Hyperion,' and completed four acts
of a tragedy."
"This Winchester," he writes again, "is a place tolerably well suited
to me. There is a fine cathedral, a college, a Roman Catholic chapel
... and there is not one loom or anything like manufacturing beyond
bread and butter in the whole city. There are a number of rich
Catholics in the place. It is a respectable, ancient, aristocratic
place, and moreover it contains a nunnery." "I take a walk," he writes
to his family, "every day for an hour before dinner, and this is
generally my walk; I go out the back gate, across one street into the
cathedral yard, which is always interesting; there I pass under the
trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the cathedral,
turn to the left under a stone doorway--then I am on the other side of
the building--which, leaving behind me, I pass on through two college-
like squares, seemingly built for the dwelling-place of dean and
prebendaries, garnished with grass and shaded with trees; then I pass
through one of the old city gates and then you are in College Street,
through which I pass, and at the end thereof, crossing some meadows,
and at last a country of alley gardens I arrive, that is my worship
arrives, at the foundation of St Cross, which is a very interesting old
place.... Then I pass across St Cross meadows till I come to the most
beautiful clear river."
That walk, or rather that over the meads to St Cross, is for every
lover of Winchester that which he takes most often I think, that which
comes to him first in every memory of the city. Its beauty makes it
sacred and its reward is an hour or more in what, when all is said, is
one of the loveliest relics of the Middle Age anywhere left to us in
England, I mean the hospital and church of St Cross in the meads of the
Itchen.
Doubtless we are the heirs of the Ages, into our hearts and minds the
Empire, the Middle Age and the Renaissance have poured their riches.
Doubtless we are the flower of Time and our Age, the rose of all the
Ages. That is why, in our wisdom, we have superseded such places as St
Cross by our modern workhouses.
St Cross was founded by the great Henry of Blois in 1133 for the
reception, the clothing and the entertainment of thirteen poor men,
decayed or past their strength, and the relief of an hundred others; it
was a mediaeval workhouse, called a hospital in those days, and in its
beauty and its humanity and its success it cannot, of course, compare
with the institutions which, since we have not been able to abolish
poverty altogether, we have everywhere established for the reception of
our unfortunate brethren. It would be odd indeed if eight hundred
years of Christian government, four hundred of them enjoying the
infinite blessings bestowed by the Reformation and the Protestant
religion, had not vastly improved these institutions for the reception
of the very poor. It is, in fact, in such establishments as our
workhouses that our "progress" is to be seen most clearly.
[Illustration: ST CROSS, WINCHESTER]
Well, it is something to be assured of that; and yet, let me confess
it, St Cross has a curious fascination for me. I feel there, it is
true, that I am in a world different from that in which we do so well
to rejoice, but such is my perversity I cannot help preferring the old
to the new. This is a mere prejudice, quite personal to myself, and
comes perhaps of being a Christian. When I look at St Cross I am
vividly reminded that this was once a Christian country with a
Christian civilisation; when I look at one of our great workhouses I
know that all that has passed away and that we have "progressed" so
fast and so far that Christianity has been left some four hundred years
behind us. St Cross is, as it were, a rock of the old Christian time
still emerging from the grey sea of the modern world.
Bishop Henry de Blois intended, as I have said, to provide, by the
foundation of the Hospital of St Cross, for the maintenance of thirteen
poor men and the relief of an hundred others. His design was perverted
in the thirteenth century, but gloriously restored by the founder of
Winchester College and his successor in the Bishopric, Cardinal
Beaufort, who added to the original foundation the almshouse of Noble
Poverty, in which he hoped to support thirty-five brethren with two
priests and three nuns to minister to the inmates. The hospital, by the
merest good fortune, escaped suppression at the Reformation, but during
most of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and through
many years of the nineteenth its revenues were enjoyed by men
who, as often as not, had never seen the place, and so the poor
were robbed. Perhaps the most insolent abuse of the kind occurred
between 1808 and 1815. In the former year Bishop Brownlow North,
of Winchester, appointed his son Francis, later Earl of Guildford,
to be master. This man appropriated the revenues of the place
to the tune of fourteen hundred pounds a year, and when at last
the scandal was exposed, it was discovered that between 1818 and 1838
he had taken not less than fifty-three thousand pounds in fines on
renewing leases, a manifest and probably wilful breach of trust, that
ought, one may think, to have brought him to the Old Bailey. The
exposure of this rascal led to a reformation of the administration,
which is now in the hands of trustees who elect thirteen brethren
provided for by Bishop Henry of Blois. These wear a black gown with a
silver cross. St Cross also still maintains certain brethren of Noble
Poverty, and these wear a red gown, and not less than fifty poor folk,
who do not live within its walls, while a very meagre wayfarer's dole
is still distributed to all who pass by so far as a horn of beer and
two loaves of bread will go. Each of the Brethren of St Cross beside a
little house and maintenance receives five shillings a week.
All this sounds, if you be poor, too good to be true. It is too good to
owe its origin to the modern world, but not extraordinary for the
Middle Age, which was eagerly and even violently Christian. And just as
the institution seems in itself wonderful to us in our day, so do the
buildings, which, if one would really understand how gloriously strange
they are, should be carefully compared with the county workhouse.
One enters the Hospital by a gate, and, passing through a small court,
comes to the great gatehouse of Cardinal Beaufort, consisting of
gateway, porter's lodge and great square tower. Here and there we still
see Cardinal Beaufort's arms and devices, while over the gate itself
are three niches, in one of which a kneeling figure of the Cardinal
remains. Within this gatehouse is a large quadrangle, about three sides
of which the hospital is set with the church upon the south, between
which and the gatehouse runs a sixteenth century cloister. The whole is
wonderfully quiet and peaceful, a corner of that old England, England
of my heart, which is so fast vanishing away.
The noblest building of this most noble place, and the only one now
left to us which dates from its foundation by Bishop Henry of Blois is
the church. This is a great Transitional building, one of the finest
examples of that style in England, and dates from about 1160 to 1292.
It is a cruciform building with central tower, the nave and chancel
being aisled, the transepts, aisles and all, vaulted in stone in the
fourteenth century. The earliest part of the church is the chancel,
which has a square eastern end, and the lower parts of the transepts
probably date from the same time. These transepts were finished a
little later, when the nave was begun and finished, and the north porch
built in the thirteenth century. The clerestory of the nave dates from
the first half of the fourteenth century, and so does the great western
window. Much of the furniture of the church is interesting, such as the
fourteenth century tiles, the curious Norman bowl that does duty as a
font, the fourteenth century glass in the clerestory window of the
nave, and that, little though it be, of the fifteenth century in the
north transept, the fine fifteenth century screen between the north-
choir aisle and the chancel, the foreign sixteenth century woodwork in
the south-choir aisle, the curious wall painting of the Martyrdom of
St Thomas in the south transept, and the old Purbeck altar stone that
now serves as the communion table. Here, before the altar, lies John de
Campeden, appointed Master of St Cross by Bishop William of Wykeham in
1383, his grave marked by a good brass.
Much, too, within the hospital is interesting, and the old men who
eagerly show one all these strange and beautiful things are most human
and delightful. Nevertheless, though the church would anywhere else
claim all our attention for a whole morning, and an afternoon is easily
spent poking about the hospital, it is not of the mere architecture,
beautiful though it be, that one thinks on the way back into
Winchester, across the meads beside the river which has seen and known
both the Middle Age and this sorrowful time of to-day, but of that
wondrous institution where poverty was considered honourable and
destitution not an offence or even perhaps a misfortune, where it was
still remembered that we are all brethren, and that Christ, too, had
not where to lay His head. All of which seems nothing less than marvellous
to-day.