Telford Varley

“ Wherever else we turn in Winchester we find some treasure or other over which to linger. On the high ground forming the south-west angle of the city there is the County Hall, last surviving relic of the great royal castle, which William of Normandy first erected and which his successors added to. For some six hundred years that great keep, with its heavy battlements and frowning bastions, scowled down upon the city and overawed its burghers. Yet, grim and all but impregnable as those ‘rude ribs’ might seem to be, more than one assailant found means to penetrate within. ”

“ Thus within three years of Alfred’s death the Newan Mynstre had risen not merely into being, but had already become invested with ascendancy and popular prestige as the hallowed repository of the mortal remains of a wonder-working saint, a venerated abbot, of a saintly king, and of his royal consort. Some twenty years later, within the same abbey church—thus already established as a venerated mausoleum—Edward the Elder himself was also laid, after a strenuous reign, in which he had consolidated the Anglo-Saxon power and had re-established firmly the unity of the kingdom. ”

“ His letters written from Winchester are full and charming literary productions: he describes the ‘maiden-ladylike gentility’ of her streets; the door-steps always ‘fresh from the flannel’—the knockers with a staid, serious, and almost awful quietness about them; the High Street as quiet as a lamb, the door-knockers ‘dieted to three raps per diem’;—in such happy, delicate phrases he hits off the Winchester of the day. Of the place itself he gives us interesting touches: the air on one of its downs is ‘worth sixpence a pint’ ”

“ Have not her citizens—those of a generation or so back, at least—been responsible for permitting the one really commanding elevation and landmark she possesses to be marred and dishonoured by this same ‘blot,’ these obtrusive prison-walls, capped by this self-same ‘ugly flat-topped octagonal tower’? Is not rather the creator of Tess displaying a fine and just critical perception in thus exacting from them the full literary penalty for so unpardonable an outrage on the outward attractiveness of their own fair city? ”

“ There have, indeed, been great empire builders like Charlemagne, great law-givers like our first Edward, saints with the spiritual elevation of St. Louis, scholars and patrons of learning like Henry VI., but none have combined these high qualities with such just balance and self-restraint as Alfred, who may be truly said to have embodied in his own life the earnest, long-continued prayer which his own words expressed:
I have sought to live worthily while I lived, and after my death to leave to the men that should be after me my remembrance in good works. ”

“ It is a beautiful picture of mingled red and grey that lies before us. The Cathedral—a mass of grey stone—here presents its most interesting aspect to us: a mass of grey stone set with pinnacles and flying buttresses and heavy square tower. To its left lies the College, hidden partly behind the trees of the Close and the Deanery garden, the light, graceful ‘Two Wardens’ tower of its chapel contrasting strikingly with the solid tower of the Cathedral—a noticeable and attractive object. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet one may question whether we are really better off, because for us King Arthur’s Round Table has no existence and Arthur himself is lost in the strange background of
Moving faces and of waving hands,
that weird labyrinth where history and legend, myth and romance, are so strangely and inextricably interwoven; and one turns away baffled and reluctant from many and many an old-world story, and many and many an old-world relic such as this, with the sense of something like a lost inheritance. ”

“ The present only appealed to him; but to us, as we thread its quaintly-inconvenient, narrow streets, its passages and gateways, it is something more than merely a ‘Joly citè,’ a city of comfort and good rule; it is a city of dreams as well, a city haunted with the sense of a mighty past, a living testimony alike to the permanence of our national institutions and to the dignity of the associations to which they make appeal. ”

“ And so for 200 years our Winchester history remains a blank, till the Saxon invader had in turn made his way hither, by the same natural channel which Celt and Roman before him had followed, and a kingdom of Wessex had grown up, rude and barbarous, but firmly planted, with the Hame-tun (Southampton) as its first capital, till, with the growth of institutions, the natural advantages of Winchester made it in turn the centre of rule of the West Saxon kingdom. ”

“ We may well be proud of the part that Winchester, as the capital of Wessex, played in the course of civilization during those dark days; and when, as indeed happened 150 years after, Winchester did see the Danish kingdom realized and herself the capital of it, it was a Christian and civilizing kingdom, and not one of violence and unbridled slaughter, over which she was called to preside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The prospect from the summit was almost unlimited. In the valley beneath, the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings showing as in an isometric drawing—among them the broad Cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave; the spires of St. Thomas’s; the pinnacled tower of the College; and more to the right the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.... ”

“ No poet of note, no great writer, has, in recent days at all events, claimed her as parent; her acquaintance has been rather with literary persons than with literature itself, for though she has attracted many to make her in some form or other their theme, but little of real weight in any but ancient literature has first seen the light beneath her auspices. For all this she has, in literature as in life, her story to tell, and that an ancient one. ”

“ It is not generally recognized that during the early years of Alfred’s reign the heroic determination of the youthful king, and the loyal devotion of the sorely dismembered little kingdom of Wessex—for all else in England was lost—were all that stood between northern Europe and an ever-advancing tide of pitiless and savage heathenism, which, had it not been stemmed, would have engulfed the whole northern continent, with little hope of Christian enlightenment and development, it may have been for centuries. ”

“ 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{86} 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great room over the gateway was at that time held as an annexe to a public-house adjoining, and so the West Gate was spared merely in order that Winchester citizens might the better enjoy their ‘cakes and ale.’ History teaches us to be grateful at times to strange benefactors. To many, with the present trend of social and political thought, the sentiment Das Gasthaus als Freund will come almost as a shock, yet here in Winchester we are confronted by the curious paradox, that while water has sapped the stability of the Cathedral, that of the West Gate has been secured by beer. ”

“ For with cities, as with the animal world, the secret of continued vigour is the secret of continued adaptation to environment; towns and cities, like other organized existences, are just as old as the arteries which feed them, and as long as function is efficiently performed, so long will there be health to perform it.
And yet as years go, Winchester is old,—how old none can say. ”

“ It was doubtless in the national interest that the three rival earls were led to combine to support the king against his mother, but we cannot but regret that the circumstance which united this notable and noble trio together in the support of the king—probably the only occasion in his reign when the king ever commanded their united support—should not have been one more heroic than that of forcing a defenceless if grasping old woman to render up the keys of her treasure-chest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The details of government were far less complex, government as an art far less specialized and far less an exact science, and its whole character took on a far more personal and direct complexion than at present, so that while Winchester and London might both correctly enough be termed capitals in the sense that the permanent symbols of rule, the official records, and so forth, were kept in them, it was in reality the king’s headquarters, wherever he might happen to be, that formed the effective capital. ”

“ The College buildings and grounds are a charm and a delight. From the outer front in College Street, little indeed can be seen. The headmaster’s house, built on the site of the old Sustern Spital, is a flat-fronted modern building faced with squared flints, and the old Brewery presents little but a blank wall of ancient{164} masonry. The one external feature of interest is the delightful ‘Old Gateway’ surmounted by a statue of the Virgin. ”

“ Accident served to invest the new abbey with peculiar interest and sanctity. A Danish descent on Picardy had driven a crowd of refugees to seek shelter across the sea, and they had crossed over to Hampshire, bearing with them their greatest treasure—the hallowed bones of their patron saint, St. Judocus or St. Josse. The king received them hospitably at Winchester, and the sacred relics were solemnly and splendidly enshrined within the partially completed church of the New Minster. ”

“ Rude Belgic tribesmen of pre-Roman days, Roman legionaries, rough, wild Berserkers and Danish vikings, Saxon thegns and Norman knights, abbots and priors, merchants and gildsmen, friars and pilgrims,—these and many more would contend for our notice, mingled with kings and queens, prelates and chancellors, bishops and cardinals. If historical memories can sanctify any spot in the realm, surely Winchester must be sacred soil. ”