The following volume treats in somewhat fuller detail the Winchester sections of the larger work on Hampshire published last year under similar auspices. Where much of the ground traversed is identical much has been necessarily repeated, and a considerable portion of what follows is little more than an amplification of what has been already dealt with in the earlier volume. The present work in no way aims at being a history, though much of it is cast into a historical mould. Still less is it a g

The magic of the city—whence comes it? Every people, every age has felt it, this mysterious sense of personality, this deep, alluring spell which age after age, nation after nation, has woven round the city of its dreams. Rome, Naples, Damascus, Mecca, Seville, each of these has been and still is a name to conjure with, while the long pent-up fervour of national feeling with which the Hebrew of old time invested the thought of Salem, the City of Peace, has from its very intensity and sincerity e

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

The part played by physical causes, outlined above, is illustrated by the successive stages in the Roman occupation. The two first invasions by Julius Caesar were little more than desultory raids; the next, under Aulus Plautius and Vespasian in A.D. 43, had important and permanent results. Pevensey ( Anderida ), Portchester ( Portus Magnus ), and Southampton ( Clausentum ) were all occupied in turn; up the Itchen valley the invaders came, and its strategic position made them choose Venta Belgaru

The Roman occupation lasted some 400 years, after which Winchester history becomes a blank, and it is not the settlement and conquest of the next occupiers, the Gewissas or West Sexe, but their conversion to Christianity which begins to dispel the historical just as it did the spiritual darkness of the period. Of these years, could we but trust the romantic pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who has preserved for us the legendary stories of the period as preserved in the early Welsh tradition which

With the dawn of the ninth century came further development. During the 200 years or so of the so-called Heptarchy, a gradual and continuous movement of cohesion—social as well as political—had been in progress. The strength of the Anglo-Saxon was his courage, a determination and persistence hardly distinguishable from obstinacy; his weakness was his lack of imagination and his narrow political horizon. He had never learnt to think nationally, hardly even tribally, far less imperially; his thoug

Alfred the Great belongs in a peculiar sense to Winchester; here he was proclaimed king; here he lived, and ruled, and made his laws; here he gathered round him that assemblage of divines and learned men with whose co-operation he gave the first great impetus to a national literature; here he commenced the English Chronicle; here he devised his plans for constructing a navy to defend the land against foreign foes; here he founded a monastery, the Newan Mynstre, destined to play a great and honou

When Alfred died in 901 he had accomplished a great work; a work great and lasting, as the next sixty years were to show, and during these years the ascendancy of Wessex and of the line of Egbert was to grow more and more undisputed, till it culminated in the reign of Edgar the Magnificent. These days were days of rapid development in Winchester, and the fortunes of the city at this period were closely linked with Alswitha, Alfred’s widow, Grimbald, the monk, and the two strong kings of Alfred’s

With the death of Edwy in 959 a new chapter of interest opens, a period of revival, of growth, of development, the golden age of Saxon Winchester, during which the Saxon city was at its zenith of importance, the reign of Edgar the Peaceable and Magnificent. The monkish chroniclers have for the most part painted Edgar in glossy colours; they sang his virtues, his magnificence, his piety, his love for Holy Church. They spoke of him as a second Solomon, and the comparison was in its way not inapt,

Æthelwold’s work was still in full progress when King Edgar died in 975. Young as he was—he was only some thirty-two years old when he died—he had reigned for some sixteen years, and his reign had had notable results. It had been a reign of uninterrupted peace; indeed it was the only peaceful reign, save Edward the Confessor’s, of any Saxon king in England, and a reign, moreover, of good government and wise laws. And though the memories of Edgar’s domestic life, his intrigues, and his tragic mur

It is safe to say that no other event so thoroughly affected the fortunes of Winchester as the Norman Conquest. Not only was the city completely transformed in outward form, but its relationship to the country at large was to undergo profound modification, and a train of political circumstance opened up the effect of which was ultimately to deprive her of the leading national position she had hitherto occupied, and to relegate her to second if not lower rank in the national polity. The decline o

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 ep

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 churc

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.

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 largel

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 p

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

“ Manners makyth man”—‘manners’ in the old and wide sense of the word, the equivalent of the Latin ‘mores,’ or of the word ‘conversation’ in St. Paul’s epistles, i.e. moral worth and character as contrasted with wealth, or the symbols of rank and power. This is the motto inseparably connected with Wykeham’s foundations at Winchester and Oxford alike, and who shall say how potent this motto has been in inspiring and moulding the character of English manhood and English public schools during the f

From College one turns naturally to Wolvesey—Wolvesey with its wonderful grey stone walls, its memories of Saxon and Norman, Plantagenet and Stuart times. Here Alfred kept his Court, with all the learned men of his time around him; here the English Chronicle was first compiled; and here, above that very Wolvesey wall, it may be, the Danish pirates captured in the Solent were hanged—as has been already related—in retributive justice. But the big blocks of ruin in Wolvesey Mead are of later date;

It is always a pleasing occupation to follow out the associations of human fancy which often invest persons and places with an interest, and indeed a romantic charm, to which the cold-eyed historian or dryasdust critic is entirely unresponsive, and if Winchester as it first appeared to us, as we looked down from the brow of St. Giles’s Hill, seemed to throb with the life and interest of a departed age, and of historical personages long since passed away, so too we shall find that it possesses as