Winchester

“ The sharp crack of the Winchester, the shriek of the smitten savage and his frenzied leap in the air, followed in such instant succession that they seemed simultaneous. When the wretch went back on the ground he was as dead as Julius Caesar.
A man can fire with amazing rapidity, when using a Winchester repeater, but some persons are like cats in their own movements. The New Englander leveled his weapon as quickly as he could bring it to his shoulder, but the native along the side of the Xingu had vanished as though he never existed. ”

“ And Winchester lay but a few miles away up the Solent beyond Southampton. Winchester, upon its shallow bluish hills. It was very early in the morning and her heart was strong within her.
'I will go anywhere in the world but Winchester,' she said. 'I am not such a fool as to follow this man about. I will not go to London because Mr. Ripley is there—I cannot see him now, not until Anthony is indeed gone. I'll hide in the country and sketch thatched cottages and write a good article on the Tennysons.'
3 The sun was high and her heart was still strong. ”

“ Other literary associations of the Winchester country are those furnished by Hursley, where John Keble was vicar; by Otterbourne, the home for many years of Charlotte Yonge; and by Eversley, where Winchester's immortal son, Charles Kingsley, lies buried.
Each succeeding visit to Winchester can only strengthen one's love for the city, and one's reverence for the Cathedral in its midst. Our pilgrimage of Winchester the beautiful is over. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For among the nicest new things in old Winchester are the Winchester schoolboys. How they spurn the ordinary tourist they meet in the street, and how scornfully polite they are to any unfortunate straying beast who asks them a question, making him feel meaner than any worm! A foreigner must long to ask the consequential youths to "kindly excuse him while he continues to breathe"; for few strangers can sympathize with the contempt we English have, while still in callow youth, for everyone we don't know. ”

“ Antiquity and long-continued vitality such as have fallen to Winchester—for to go back to its early humble beginnings takes us back very far indeed—lead us naturally to look for causes, and prompt the questions, Why, in the first instance, did a human community settle here at all? What through so many alternations of human vicissitude and political circumstance has operated to maintain these intact? Tempus edax rerum—Time, the devourer of constituted things, is written not so much on its stones, as in its stones, yet Winchester remains Winchester still. ”

“ Municipal life in Winchester forms another chapter full of interest. Of her early ‘gilds,’ dating back perhaps to days before Alfred, of the Chepemanesela, the Chenicteshalla, the Hantachenesla, and other vaguely indicated centres of civic organisation, where, in Henry I.’s time, the citizens in their various grades assembled to ‘drink their gild,’ we have already spoken. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Saviour, stood Winchester House, the London residence of the Bishop of Winchester since the twelfth century. Here Cardinal Beaufort and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had lived in great state. The site, including the park, which extended parallel with the river as far as Paris Garden, was formerly the property of the priory of Bermondsey. This area was under the separate jurisdiction of the Bishops of Winchester, and was called their "Liberty." Here, in the early years of Queen Elizabeth, were two amphitheatres—one for bull-baiting,{47} the other for bear-baiting. ”

“ Every day brought a new tale of murder and pillage; and very soon every road was filled with fugitives “bringing to Winchester fresh dismay.”
With his few men this first hero of Winchester (who by the way was at his post, not “twenty miles away”) was again straining every nerve that Virginia might not lose the great stretch of beautiful country west of the Blue Ridge. ”

“ For Winchester is the nearest town of consequence to that foothilled borderland where the opulent bluegrass ends and the illiterate Cumberlands pile their grim ramparts. Here come the farther-wandering traders from the mountains; gaunt men with steady-gazing eyes and lean sinews and noiseless tread, to mingle with the louder-spoken and fuller-nourished brothers of the lowlands. It is on court-day that they come in greatest numbers. Here, too, live some of their own kin whom the menace of feudal reprisal has driven from their native slopes and "coves." ”

“ No groups of buildings are in their way more charming or more impregnated with human associations than the famous episcopal foundation of St. Cross—an asylum of peace and rest, comfort and repose, to those who find shelter within its ancient walls, and a standing monument to the memory of the pious Henry de Blois and the princely churchman, Cardinal Beaufort. Winchester, like many an English city, would be shorn of much of its interest were this benevolent institution to be removed. ”

“ The first literary associations of Winchester are, as is but natural, historical ones, and the first mention of her in literature is found in Bede, who records for us, among other scanty details, her name, ‘Venta, quae a gente Saxonum Ventanceastir appellatur’ ”

“ A rare personality this Ælfgyfu Emma, but not a pleasing one. “I governed men by change, and so I swayed all moods,” she might have said of herself. The wife of two successive kings, and the mother of two more, she was to be for fifty years, and during five successive reigns, the central influence in Winchester history; for Æthelred on the day he married her presented Winchester and Exeter to her as her ‘morning gift,’ or wedding present, and when he died, Cnut the Dane, Æthelred’s successor, wedded her in turn. ”

“ Although many historical persons flit across the scene throughout the centuries, the personal associations of Winchester are dominated by the outstanding figures of Alfred, St. Swithun, and the great clerical craftsman, William of Wykeham, the builder of much of the cathedral, and the founder of St. Mary's College, Winchester, and New College, Oxford—the former of which, although of later foundation, was intended as a stepping-stone for the latter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 estimating the course of Winchester history at this important and interesting stage we have fortunately more than an abundance—a wealth of historical materials. Not only do the English Chronicle and all the leading monkish chroniclers contain full references, but numerous other local sources of history, e.g. Rudborne, the various Winchester annalists, and the Liber de Hyda, exist, which deal fully with it. ”

“ Like master, like man, and great kings have always had great subjects. Such a one was Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, whose influence was all powerful during the next half century, and was reflected in Egbert’s still greater grandson, Alfred. Swithun belongs essentially to Winchester; he laboured incessantly for the kingdom, the diocese, and the city, and his shrine became for centuries afterwards the glory of its Cathedral, and the place of pilgrimage for thousands of pious feet. He built churches; he protected the Cathedral and Monastery by building a wall round it ”

“ In following out some of the numerous avenues of Winchester interest, which seem to open out continually in fresh and unsuspected directions as soon as one commences to wander through her confines, many have received but a cursory examination, and many more have been entirely ignored. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the claim of Canterbury to be the "Mother City" of the Anglo-Saxon race be granted, few will deny to Winchester the honour of being her eldest and her fairest daughter. A royal city was this when Birinus, the apostle of Wessex, came hither in 634, on his way to the Oxfordshire Dorchester, to baptize the King of the West Saxons; and in 679 the episcopal see was established, a cathedral built, and a monastic house attached to it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Vanity Fair and Esmond are full of local allusions; Sir Pitt Crawley, for instance, would appear to derive his names from Pitt and Crawley, two villages close to Winchester; and in Esmond, Hampshire allusions, tantalisingly veiled, it is true, seem to meet and to baffle you everywhere. It seems impossible to avoid identify{191}ing Castlewood, with its ruined house battered down by Cromwell, and the Bell Inn with Basing House and Basingstoke; and while Alton, Alresford, and Crawley are all mentioned, it is round Winchester that interest centres and perplexes most. ”

“ The fine bold chalk hill which dominates the river valley to the South of Winchester, has memories of early Celtic days, of Cnut, and of the ancien régime at Winchester College. Round its summit is the ‘ring’ of the great refuge camp of præ-Roman days which it is estimated required some 3000 people to defend it. Cnut made a grant of ‘Hille’ and other lands to the old minster. On the summit there was once a pilgrimage chapel dedicated to St. Catherine. ”

“ Winchester being a Roman catholic, Basing House, Hampshire, his chief seat, on every pane of which he had written with a diamond ‘Aimez Loyauté,’ became at the outbreak of the civil war the great resort of the queen's friends in south-west England. ”