This ancient city on the river Itchen in Hampshire is inseparably bound
with William of Wykeham. He it was who rebuilt a great part of the
magnificent cathedral now extant, and who founded the great public
school of Winchester, at which so many celebrated men have received
their education. These form the great attraction of the city, and rescue
it from oblivion. It is with sorrow we foresee that the inevitable
restoration will take place in the east end of this venerable structure.
For many years past the foundations were known to be in an unsafe
condition, but recently great alarm was caused by the appearance of
large cracks in the upper masonry and of the bulging in of the groining
of the crypt. There was no doubt that the foundations were slowly
subsiding, and speculation was rife as to the cause. With a view to
ascertaining the state of the foundations, excavations were made. It was
discovered that the original builders had rested them on marshy ground,
strengthened with oak piles, which have gradually decayed during the
lapse of centuries. At the same time the presence of an underground
stream, thought to be part of the river Itchen, was seen to be bubbling
up through the gravel, saturating the upper soil of peat.
In much the same way as the site of St. Paul's Cathedral in London
probably was covered, in the first instance, with buildings for pagan
worship, so we find that the Romans at Winchester erected temples to
Apollo and Concord upon the ground that eventually came to be the
precincts of the Cathedral. The presence of a Christian church appears
to have been in the third century, when the city is said to have become
one of the chief centres of the Christian Britons. This first church,
however, was destroyed during the persecution of Aurelian and was
rebuilt in 293, to be made a wreck in 495 by the Saxons, who fired it.
What with the religious convulsion of England, which, with the exception
of Kent, fluctuated with the rise and fall of circumstances chiefly
controlled by the policy of kings either heathen at one time and
Christian at another, or the deposition and death of a Christian
monarch, caused by one more powerful and deeply imbued with heathenism,
the See of Winchester does not appear to have come into existence till
about the middle of the seventh century. The establishment of its
bishopric in a way marks the commencement of a new epoch in the English
Church.
[Illustration: WINCHESTER