CHAPTER IVSAXON WINCHESTERPost tenebras, lux

SHAWFORD MILLShawford Mill, near Shawford. The river channels here are fringed in summer-time with mimulus, yellow iris, and forget-me-not, and are delightful to ramble along.

SHAWFORD MILL

Shawford Mill, near Shawford. The river channels here are fringed in summer-time with mimulus, yellow iris, and forget-me-not, and are delightful to ramble along.

been connected with heathen worship in Roman times. Numerous pieces of tesselated pavement, vases, urns, and votive objects generally, articles of adornment, for household use and the toilet, are frequently found even still, mingled with innumerable coins and relics of a military nature.

More important still are the Roman roads which led from Winchester, the routes of which are still unmistakable, and which remain the great enduring monument both of the Roman occupation and of the Roman civilizing instinct. Indeed, the chief service the Roman occupation did for Winchester was to bring it into effective contact with the rest of the country. The Belgic tribesmen had no common organization or polity; a number of scattered and incoherent units linked together merely by the accident of position, and a more or less common racial descent, they resembled one of the lower animal forms, not possessing a common nerve centre, but controlled by local ganglia and responding merely to local stimuli. The Roman genius was to link up the whole land into one united organism and to supply a nervous and arterial system regulated by central control. Law and Order were the great lessons it taught the world, and open and secure lines of communication were the necessary preliminary of thePax Romana. No succeeding age save our own has so fully recognized the value of good and effective road communication. Our modern roads and tracks very often merely follow routes first marked out by Roman hands, and thecommon occurrence of the title ‘High Street,’ generally applied to the leading thoroughfare of town or village, is a constant reminder to us of the debt we owe to the Romans.

Radiating from Venta Belgarum were no less than five thoroughfares, of which four were undoubtedly important arteries. The first led to the sea, to Clausentum, the port. It followed the line of the existing Southampton road as far as Otterbourne, and then straight on through Stoneham (thead Lapidemof Bede) to Clausentum. This road passed straight through the city from south to north, and from the northern gate of the city it branched off into two, one going north-east, along the existing Basingstoke road to Silchester (Calleva Attrebatum), the other north-west, following the line of the existing Andover road to Cirencester (Durocornovium). Both these roads can be still traced for a distance of a good many miles from Winchester. The fourth led directly west to Sarum, and can still be followed as a well-defined track all the way. The fifth led to Portchester (Portus Magnus) over Deacon Hill, and through Morestead, but with the exception of the first few miles all trace of it is now lost.

Details of some of these roads as given in the Antonine Itinerary already mentioned are quoted below, and the names of the stations and their distances apart are of more than usual interest, particularly from the assistance they give us as regards identification of the Roman sites.

The Roman routes are not comfortable to follow now, particularly to the cyclist; their course is invariably straight, leading direct from point to point, over hill and valley alike, without regard to gradient or the lie of the land. The appeal they make to the thoughtful imagination is distinct and striking. Direct and uncompromising, they follow their course regardless of obstacles, suggesting irresistibly the genius and energy of the imperious people who met difficulties only to subdue them. Primarily imperial in character, if not always military, few things conduced so much to the settlement and growth in civilization of the land. Commerce followed in the wake of security, and the arts of war ministered thus as handmaid to those of peace.

TheRoman 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 he followed out, we might have a complete and circumstantial history, telling us of Arthur and his Knights, of Merlin, and Uther Pendragon, all focussed round our own Hampshire country, with Winchester and Silchester as the chief centres of action.

Thus arose the mediaeval tradition connecting Winchester with Arthur and the Knights of the Round

Table—a tradition consolidated by the presence in the great Hall of Winchester of the curious relic which popular imagination has for hundreds of years identified with the actual Round Table round which that famous brotherhood feasted. But of this more anon. And attractive as are the speculations into which Geoffrey of Monmouth might lead us, we must put him sternly by till some greater hand has winnowed the grain—for some grain his record undoubtedly possesses—from the chaff of credulity, if not of deliberate invention.

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.

How Jute and Angle warred in turn with Saxon and with one another: how order was gradually evolved, and Christianity planted in Britain by Augustine and his band of monks, we cannot here pursue in detail. It is the coming of Christianity to Hampshire that immediately concerns us, and with this a new chapter of great interest opens in our Winchester story.

Augustine had landed in Kent in 597, and it is a noteworthy fact that while Christianity had spread gradually thence to the East Saxons, to Northumbria,and to East Anglia, the stream of influence from Canterbury had, as it were, flowed by and left Wessex, Sussex, and Mercia entirely untouched, so effectually had the natural barriers of the forest belt isolated the south-west of England from Kent and even London; and when at length Christianity was brought to Wessex it was by a special mission from Italy and not from Canterbury at all that the message came. Thus the founding of the Church in Wessex was an act independent entirely of Augustinian influence; not for many years after did the diocese acknowledge the supremacy of Canterbury, and when Bishop Henry of Blois in the twelfth century was scheming to convert Winchester into a separate province, with himself as Archbishop, he had at least a historical basis on which to rest his claim. Sussex and Mercia were evangelized later still, and the Isle of Wight last of all.

There is indeed a local tradition which connects the name of Augustine with Winchester. In Avington Park, some five miles from the city, a moribund oak still stands, known as the Gospel Oak, from the tradition that Augustine himself preached the Gospel under it. But the tradition is entirely unsupported, and certain it is that, even if it were true, the preaching had no permanent result.

The story of the conversion of the Gewissas is told by Bede, and deserves to be translated in full.

At that time (A.D.634, English Chronicle), during the reign of King Kynegils, the race of the West Saxons, anciently termed Gewissas, received the faith of Christ, which waspreached to them by Birinus, who had come to Britain at the instance of Pope Honorius. His intention had indeed been to proceed direct into the heart of the land of the Angles, where as yet no teacher had penetrated, in order there to sow the seeds of the faith. For which purpose, and by direction of the Pope himself, he was consecrated Bishop by Asterius, Bishop of Genoa. But on his arrival in Britain, and coming in contact first of all with the Gewissas, he found them everywhere to be in a state of the grossest heathenism, and so he considered it to be more profitable to preach the Word to them, rather than to go farther to seek a field to labour in.

The actual conversion of King Kynegils took place the year after, not at Winchester, but at Dorchester, near Oxford, on the river Thames. Here Birinus first placed his bishop’s stool; but Bede’s narrative directly implies that he visited Winchester and dedicated a Christian church there, which only a bishop could do; for he goes on to say that

having erected and dedicated many churches, and having by his pious ministrations called many unto the Lord, he departed himself to Him and was buried in that city (Dorchester), and many years after, by the instrumentality of Bishop Hædda (bishop from 676 to 703A.D.), his body was translated thence to the city of Venta and placed in the church of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul,

which he himself had dedicated.

We learn from theEnglish Chroniclethat this Christian church was erected not by Kynegils, who died in 643, but by Kenwalh or Kenulphus his son. Here then we have the beginning in a sense of the Winchester Cathedral of to-day. True, successive and moreglorious buildings have been erected on the same site, but they have been but the successors in direct line of that primitive church of St. Peter and St. Paul, rudely constructed, and possibly roofed with thatch, which Birinus dedicates; and the bones of its two founders, father and son—for so we are entitled to regard them—are traditionally preserved in the Cathedral to-day, in two of the beautiful mortuary chests above the side screens of the choir.

What a link with the past do the inscriptions on these chests afford us, for the facts are perfectly historical whatever the identity of the bones may be. What imagination is there that cannot be deeply stirred in the very presence, as it were, of these two West Saxon chiefs Kynegils and Kenwalh in the very church which Birinus himself first erected, and which was dedicated to the service of God by Birinus himself? Nor was this all, for inA.D.648, side by side with the church, was erected a monastery, the beginning of that religious house afterwards so famous as the Priory of St. Swithun. Kynegils endowed it with an important grant of land—nothing less than all the King’s land for several miles round Winchester, the first church endowment in Wessex of which we have any authentic record; an endowment all the more memorable as some portion of this land, in and around the adjoining present parish of Chilcomb, remained after some twelve and a half centuries of consecutive church tenure in possession of the Dean and Chapter of Winchester, the successors in direct line of the religious community

THE WEIRS, WINCHESTERThe delightful balustraded stone bridge at the east end of the city replaces the very early bridge built by Bishop Swithun in King Æthelwulf’s days. The river rushes with a glorious swirl from out the mill just above the bridge, and all along the Weirs, from mill to mill, is of beautiful clearness and transparency. The walk along ‘the Weirs’ takes you between the river and the old city wall.

THE WEIRS, WINCHESTER

The delightful balustraded stone bridge at the east end of the city replaces the very early bridge built by Bishop Swithun in King Æthelwulf’s days. The river rushes with a glorious swirl from out the mill just above the bridge, and all along the Weirs, from mill to mill, is of beautiful clearness and transparency. The walk along ‘the Weirs’ takes you between the river and the old city wall.

of St. Peter and St. Paul, right up indeed to 1899, when it was taken over by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.

The development of Winchester during the early Saxon period was steady and continuous. This was marked in 676 by the transference by Bishop Hædda of the Bishop’s stool from Dorchester to Winchester, and from this point onwards Winchester became the centre of the diocese as well as the capital of rule—a great diocese, spreading far and wide over all the western country. When Danihel succeeded Hædda—“Danihel the most revered bishop of the West Saxons,” as his contemporary Bede calls him—the diocese was divided, and Sherborne became the centre of the western, as Winchester was of the eastern see. And so Winchester history is brought down to the days of our first really contemporary historian, the Venerable Bede.

The pages of Bede are full of interest, not only for the light they throw on the early history of Saxon Winchester, but also because incidentally they establish its identity with the earlier township of Roman and Belgan days, for, as already noted, he speaks of it as “the city of Venta, which is called by the Saxon peopleVintan-ceastir,”i.e.Venta the fortified, implying that the Roman defences round the city were still in existence, and giving us the first mention in recorded history of that name of our city, which by a simple and natural transition has become the name by which we know it still.

This royal throne of kings ...Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth.

Withthe 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 thoughts centred themselves in the little hamlet or home settlement where all were kin at least, if not kind. He took

the rustic murmur of his bourgFor the great wave that echoed round the world.

And if he thought of his fellow-countrymen at all, apart from family blood-feuds which called for vengeance, it was probably in the exclusive spirit of Jacques:

I do desire we may be better strangers.

These individualistic ideas were being slowly modified by existing conditions: families had been grouped into tythings, tythings into hundreds, hundreds into shires; the communal system of land tenure was merging into the manorial system, and with the consolidation of individual kingdoms came a struggle for political supremacy and a movement towards national cohesion and unity. It was the glory of a Wessex king, ruling in Winchester, to render this conception an accomplished fact.

It was at the Court of the great Charlemagne that Egbert gained his political training and insight. Forced as a youth to flee from Wessex, he had been made welcome at the Emperor’s Court, and there in the centre of great world-movements, in a Court which numbered the most accomplished scholars of the time, Egbert began to ‘see things.’ When in 802 A.D. he was called to ascend the throne of Wessex, Charlemagne, it is said, gave him his own sword as a parting gift, but something far more potent—political insight and training—was his already.

Egbert set himself not only to consolidate his power in Wessex, but to weld the separate jangling factions into one under his personal supremacy. The details of this long struggle are part of English history and do not concern us here: suffice it that he asserted the supremacy of Wessex over the whole land, and it is in connection with him that the term England—Angleland—was first used. In 829A.D.he held a council at Winchester and proclaimed himself King of Angleland.

Winchester thus entered on a new phase, as capital of England and not of Wessex merely, and its importance rapidly developed.

It was well for the land that internal union was thus in sight, for with Egbert’s reign a new danger arose. The migratory racial movements of which the coming to Britain of Jute, Angle, and Saxon was but a phase, had never ceased, but the conditions had altered. In earlier unsettled days new-comers as they crossed the Swan’s Bath had been usually welcomed as allies, now when the land had become settled, when wealth had accumulated in town and monastery, the late-comers came in guise of a foreign foe. Egbert’s reign saw a great revival of the descents of these Danes or Northmen as they were called. Wherever their ‘aescas’ or longships appeared panic seized the countryside. Murder, outrage, conflagration, and ruin were the ordinary incidents of a Viking raid. Men might well pray as they did, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us,” for the invader knew nothing of mercy, and his enterprise and desperate valour were only equalled by his fiendish delight in cruelty. Egbert struggled long, and, on the whole, successfully, against these foes. In 839 he died, after a reign of thirty-seven years, and his bones are still preserved in a mortuary chest in the Cathedral of his capital.

The words on the chest are:

Hic rex Egbertus pausat(Here rests King Egbert).

Surely Winchester, which preserves the bones of him who first strove for and successfully realized the conception of national unity, should be the Mecca for all true devotees of Great or Greater Britain.

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; he built a bridge across the river, outside the East Gate of the city, where the present graceful Georgian structure stands. As some old verses tell us:

Seynt Swithun his bishopricke to al goodnesse drough,The towne also of Winchester he amended enough,For he lette the strong bruge without the towne arere,And fond thereto lym and ston and the workmen that were there.

Fate deals unkindly with some, even at times with those who deserve most at her hands; Swithun is one of these. A man of saintly life and far-reaching influence, his humility and aversion to display were among his most striking personal characteristics. With an instinctive and indeed prophetic dread of superstitious veneration being paid to his remains after death, he gave orders thathis body should be buried, not within the Cathedral, where kings and saints reposed, but in the open graveyard outside, among the poor and the unnoticed. But in vain: with the monastic revival in King Edgar’s reign, one hundred years later, came the erection of a new and more splendid cathedral. Tales of miraculous occurrence began to be told of Swithun’s tomb, and nothing would serve but the translation and enshrinement within the new Cathedral of the saint, so pre-eminently national, whose bones had such potent virtue. Accordingly, in solemn state, in the presence of King Edgar, Archbishop Dunstan, and Bishop Æthelwold, the pious translation was performed. Thus Swithun, never formally canonized, became by universal consent dignified by the appellation Saint, and his mortal remains were for centuries the object of that superstitious worship which he himself had so earnestly dreaded. Later years obscured his reputation even more: a tradition grew up that the saint had signified his displeasure at the translation of his body by sending a violent deluge of rain, which for forty days rendered his exhumation impossible. No foundation for this impossible story can be found in any contemporary account, and several contemporary accounts both minute and circumstantial still exist; but the tradition has passed into a proverb, and so the name of Swithun—his virtues, his piety, and his personality all forgotten—serves often merely to suggest the school-boy jingle:

St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,For forty days it will remain;St. Swithun’s day, if thou be’est fair,For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.

For the general public he has ceased to be a historic personality at all, entitled to veneration and esteem, and has come to be regarded as a mythical being, malignant and capricious, the patron saint of discomfort and of stormy skies.

The century which followed Egbert’s death was one of unremitting struggle against the Danes—a struggle during which the newly formed kingdom seemed more than once in imminent danger of being submerged. Æthelwulf and his sons faced the danger manfully, through which, at length, Alfred emerged victorious. The history of Winchester is in large measure merely the history of these movements.

Æthelwulf, the priest-monarch, the son of Egbert, who succeeded him in 839, will be best remembered in Winchester as the father of Alfred, and by the charters, particularly two of extreme interest, which he executed here. The more important of these is still extant, and the original is preserved in the British Museum. This is often spoken of as the origin of tithes, but erroneously, as Æthelwulf’s gift was a gift to the Church not of produce, but of one-tenth of his landed possessions.

The charter conferring this grant, having been duly executed, was solemnly laid on the high altar of the Cathedral in the presence of Swithun and the assembled Witan. The actual original of the second charter no longer exists, but an ancient copy is preserved amongthe treasures of the Cathedral Library. Even as a copy it possesses extreme interest: it bears the names of King Adulfus (Æthelwulf), Swithun, and the King’s four sons, Æthelbald, Æthelbert, Æthelred, and Alfred—the two elder sons being described as ‘Dux’ (Earldorman), and each of the two younger, mere boys at the time, as ‘Filius Regis,’ son of the King. Each name is attested, according to Saxon custom, not by a seal, but by a cross. The date is 854, when Alfred was five years old, and the document is the earliest tangible link still existing between the city and the great King.

Of Æthelwulf’s other acts, his two marriages, his journey to Rome, and his grant to the Pope of Peter’s Pence, as a ransom to relieve the sufferings of English pilgrims journeying thither, we cannot speak in detail. Suffice it that Alfred was taken to Rome by him when quite young, and was solemnly confirmed by the Pope himself. Æthelwulf died in 857, and was buried in the Cathedral. His bones rest in a mortuary chest mingled with those of Kynegils.

Each of his four sons succeeded him, one after other, and during their reigns the Danish incursions grew in frequency and intensity: 857 saw them repulsed with heavy slaughter in Southampton Water; in 860 they came again, forced their way to Winchester itself, burnt and sacked it. The Cathedral and Monastery appear to have escaped, thanks possibly to the strong, defending wall which Swithun had erected.

HAMBLEA characteristic seaport village at the mouth of Hamble estuary—the centre of an important crab and lobster trade. In the mud of the tidal river lies embedded an ancient Danish “longship,” supposed to have figured in the Danish descents of Alfred the Great’s time. TheMercuryTraining Ship lies moored here; its masts and yards can be seen up the river. The rich red brick and tile work of Hamble village forms in summer-time a delightful picture from the water, with the blue of the river and the yachts in front and the dark trees behind. Warsash lies just opposite Hamble, and Netley just behind it.

HAMBLE

A characteristic seaport village at the mouth of Hamble estuary—the centre of an important crab and lobster trade. In the mud of the tidal river lies embedded an ancient Danish “longship,” supposed to have figured in the Danish descents of Alfred the Great’s time. TheMercuryTraining Ship lies moored here; its masts and yards can be seen up the river. The rich red brick and tile work of Hamble village forms in summer-time a delightful picture from the water, with the blue of the river and the yachts in front and the dark trees behind. Warsash lies just opposite Hamble, and Netley just behind it.

Æthelbert succeeded to Æthelbald, Æthelred to Æthelbert, and ever the struggle increased in intensity. In the last year of Æthelred’s reign he and Alfred fought no less than nine pitched battles against the Danes. In the winter of 871 Æthelred died, as it would seem, mortally wounded in battle, and was buried at Wimborne, and Alfred, the last of the four brothers, became king.

A prince that drawsBy example more than others do by laws.That is so just, to his great act and thoughtTo do, not what kings may, but what kings ought.Ben Jonson,The Hue and Cry.

Alfred the Greatbelongs 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 honourable part for some 600 years after him; here his queen founded a sister institution, the abbey of St. Mary; here he died and was buried, leaving behind him the savour of a life strenuous, blameless, and devoted, having shown his world that the fullest development of manlyvigour was compatible both with the saintliness of the devotee and the culture of the book-lover and the student.

It was a rude age, the age of Alfred, but nevertheless it was a great age, for it was, in spite of all its crudeness and brutality, an age in which ideals were sought after, and indeed worshipped. It was Alfred’s high distinction that he not only steered the ship of state successfully through seemingly overwhelming dangers, but that in his own life he exhibited to the world a realized ideal—an ideal that comparatively few monarchs have made any attempt to strive after, and which, it is safe to say, none ever achieved so completely. 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.

Alfred was born at Wantage in 849, and there is little to connect his early life definitely with Winchester. His association in quite early days with the king’s court, so frequently held in the city, with the agedSwithun, who rarely left the city, not to mention the charter of Æthelwulf, above referred to, which bears his name, all render his early connection with Winchester more than probable. It was an active and stirring boyhood, including one, if not two, visits to Rome, and a solemn confirmation at the Pope’s own hands—events which must have profoundly stirred him, young as he was. The bent of his mind was early displayed when his mother Osberga (or, it may be, his stepmother, Judith; Asser says the latter) showed him and his brothers an illuminated volume—Anglo-Saxon poetry, very possibly the songs of Caedmon—and promised the book to the one who should first learn to repeat them. Alfred immediately sought his tutor’s help, and won the prize, which appealed so much more keenly to him than to his elder brothers. For all that it was as a warrior, prompt in action, resolute in difficulty, that he first rose to distinction. At the critical moment, while his brother, King Æthelred, delayed, he hurled himself on the Danes, and overthrew them at the fierce battle of Ashdown, in the Vale of the White Horse. It was but an episode in the continuous struggle, and the end of the year saw the death of Æthelred, and Alfred was called upon by the Witan, against his will indeed, at the age of twenty-two to mount the throne.

It was a thankless and, as it would seem, hopeless task that the youthful king had before him. The last thirty years had changed the face of the land; bit by bit the Danes had made good their footing; provinceafter province had fallen into their possession. Edmund, the saintly king of East Anglia, had died a martyr’s death at their hands; Alfred’s three brothers had mounted the throne one by one, but, bravely as they had struggled, they had merely been able to retard, not to prevent the resistless advance. As he looked round on the blackened ruins of the capital in which he had just been crowned, his heart might well have sunk within him. Nor was it merely the fate of England which then hung in the balance; that of northern Christendom equally depended on the issue of the conflict. 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. 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. Well was it that Alfred was

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,Never doubted clouds would break,Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,Sleep to wake.

It is to Alfred, to the men of Wessex, and in part to Winchester that the cause of civilization owes the deliverance from this impending danger.

For seven years the conflict went on, but it was a conflict almost of despair, though Alfred met all attacks with unfailing heart and resourcefulness. At length in 878 all seemed lost. Alfred was surprised at Chippenham during the Twelfth Night festivities, and forced to take refuge in the morasses of Somersetshire. The story is too well known to need retelling here; suffice it that in less than six months Alfred had reasserted himself, had conquered the Danes, had made peace, and had divided the realm with them. 878, with the refuge in Athelney and the peace of Wedmore, was the turning-point in the struggle and in the fate of the whole nation.

The second period of the reign, the period of more peaceful reconstruction and consolidation, for plenty of fighting still remained to be done, centres largely round Winchester, and it is more particularly round Wolvesey and the scanty remains of Hyde Abbey that the memory of Alfred still most closely lingers. Wolvesey was the royal seat. Here he formed his court; here he inaugurated his reforms; here he laboured, studied, deliberated. The defence of hiskingdom, the repair of the material ruin caused by foreign invasion, the construction of a fleet of ships, the promulgation of wise laws, the promotion of education, the encouragement of literature and travel, the actual founding of a national English literature and an English historical record, which no other nation can find a parallel to, the endowment of religious worship—all these in turn occupied his attention while he dwelt at Wolvesey. The command of the seas he early recognized to be the real defence of the land, and as soon as opportunity served he set himself to build a fleet. The Chronicle tells us that he

commanded long ships (aescas) to be built against them (the Danes, that is) which were full nigh twice as long as the others. Some had sixty oars, some more; they were both swifter and steadier, and also higher than the others. They were shaped neither like the Frisian nor the Danish, but as it seemed to him they could be most useful.

The Chronicle gives us also a stirring account of a sea-fight in one of the Hampshire harbours between Alfred’s vessels and three Danish long ships. It is a graphic and well-told narrative, too long to be quoted here. The crews of two of the pirates were captured, and brought to the king at Winchester. The king, who was then at Wolvesey, commanded them to be hanged, very likely above those very walls of Wolvesey, grey and weather-beaten, which we see now, and which in their “herring-bone” masonry still show the hand of the Saxon builder who erected them. In the bed ofthe Hamble River there lies still embedded the keel of a ‘long ship.’ One would dearly like to believe that it was one of those very pirate vessels which were driven aground, and whose crews were captured as related above, and the fact is not indeed impossible. Some planks and portions of this vessel may be seen in the Westgate Museum in Winchester, and various mementoes, such as the ceremonial casket presented to Lord Roberts with the freedom of the city on his return from South Africa, have in recent times been made from it.

Of Alfred’s life of study and devotion we have a pleasant picture in Asser’sBiography. Asser, afterwards Bishop of Sherborne, was a monk of St. David’s whom Alfred persuaded to come to Winchester, and to enter his service as scribe and literary helpmate. Asser tells us that “it was his usual custom both by night and day, amid his numerous occupations of mind and body, either himself to read books or to listen while others read them.” The roll of Alfred’s literary productions is a long one—Orosius, theConsolationsof Boethius, thePastoral Careof Pope Gregory, and Bede’sHistory of the English Churchwere all rendered into the vernacular. More important still was the English Chronicle, of which no less an authority than Professor Freeman says, “It is the book we should learn to reverence next after our Bible.” It is a treasure-house of contemporary record, systematically kept and reliable, such as no other nation, save the Hebrews, has ever possessed. In all probability the

AT ITCHEN ABBASA village on the Itchen, five miles above Winchester, surrounded everywhere by picturesque scenery. The ‘Gospel Oak’ in Avington Park, is some mile or so distant. Kingsley wrote part of hisWater-Babieswhile staying at the Plough Inn at Itchen Abbas in the course of a fishing holiday. Big trout may often be seen lying under the bridge here.

AT ITCHEN ABBAS

A village on the Itchen, five miles above Winchester, surrounded everywhere by picturesque scenery. The ‘Gospel Oak’ in Avington Park, is some mile or so distant. Kingsley wrote part of hisWater-Babieswhile staying at the Plough Inn at Itchen Abbas in the course of a fishing holiday. Big trout may often be seen lying under the bridge here.

original was compiled and kept at Wolvesey, and copies were made for use at various other places, as Canterbury, Hereford, Peterborough. Six ancient copies are extant, of which four are in the British Museum. One of the two others is an actual Winchester copy of extreme antiquity, and is preserved in the Parker Collection of MSS. at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Alfred’s last years were devoted to founding religious houses—one at Shaftesbury, one at Athelney, and one, which concerns us most immediately, at Winchester, the ‘Newan Mynstre,’ and his queen, Alswitha, founded a nunnery at Winchester also—‘Nunna Mynstre’ or St. Mary’s Abbey.

Alfred matured his plans for the Newan Mynstre in conjunction with Grimbald of Flanders, whom he invited over to England, and whom he induced to remain by making him the first abbot. But he only lived to acquire the site, for which, it is said, he paid the enormous rate of a mark of gold per foot. The spot selected was north-west of the present cathedral churchyard, in the angle near St. Laurence’s Church, and the minster was completed by Edward the Elder, King Alfred’s son, who succeeded him. The further history of the Newan Mynstre, its removal and rebuilding as Hyde Abbey, its dissolution and its decay, will be related in due course.

Alfred died in 901, and his remains have been thrice interred—first of all in the ‘Ealden Mynstre,’ the old minster, as the cathedral began then to be called; thenat the completion of the Newan Mynstre they were translated thither with solemn pomp and reverence; and again at the reconstruction and removal of the fabric with equal pomp and circumstance to Hyde Abbey. The abbey is now merely a ruined fragment, and every trace of the abbey church has disappeared. The citizens of Winchester, so careful in the main of their treasures of antiquity, have permitted Alfred’s resting-place to be lost sight of and forgotten altogether, and modern search has not as yet identified the spot. In 1901, the year of the millenary of his death, an attempt was made to atone in some measure for this irreparable neglect, and the boldly conceived statue of Alfred, erected in Winchester Broadway, in front of the spot which his own queen’s abbey had actually occupied, is a reminder, not unworthy so far as outward monument and statuary art can serve, of the hallowed association of Winchester with this, the greatest of all our English monarchs. True is it that little tangible now remains, whether of Wolvesey, Newan Mynstre, or Hyde which we can directly connect with him—but his story, and his work, the inspiration of his life, and his example are things more real and more tangible in their way even than brick or stone or carven figure, and Alfred’s memory can never here be lost, even though his tomb remains lost sight of and slighted, and ‘no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’

WhenAlfred 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 line, Edward, his son, and Athelstan, his grandson.

As already related, Alfred had planned the important foundation of the Newan Mynstre, and had settled the site before his death. Its completion was the work of the early days of Edward the Elder, who, almost immediately on ascending the throne, convened a great meeting of the Witan at Winchester to discuss the matter at the outset. The king’s own views were limitedand parsimonious, and he was anxious to lay the lands of the Ealden Mynstre under contribution as a means of defraying the cost, but the venerable Grimbald, now over eighty years of age, was inflexible. “God will not,” said he, “accept robbery for burnt-offering,” and he carried his point. The king made a liberal endowment for the purpose, and the walls of the minster rose apace. At the same time the abbey of St. Mary, founded by Alswitha, was proceeded with, and the monastic quarter of the city saw a trinity of fair monasteries, grouped side by side, rise rapidly into prominence. 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. Then in 903, in the presence of a great concourse of nobles and clergy, the dedication of the New Minster was solemnly performed by Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury. Scarcely was this completed ere another equally striking act was performed, viz. the translation within the walls of the new church of the remains of the founder, the great Alfred himself—a solemn and imposing rite, carried out with all the pomp and dignity of impressive circumstance:

cum apparatibus regali magnificentia dignis(with solemn pomp befitting his royal state),

as theLiber de Hydainforms us.

Then in rapid succession Grimbald, Alfred’s first nominated abbot, and Alswitha, his devoted queen and widow, were called to rest, and the queen’s remains were piously interred side by side with those of her husband. 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. Thus, as year succeeded year, Winchester grew in extent and importance. The prestige and dignity of its ecclesiastical foundations established it thus early as the leading centre of pious pilgrimage in the south of England, and shopmen and merchants followed eagerly the pilgrim stream. Accordingly Edward the Elder drew up what may be called the first commercial code of the city—laws regulating the selling of goods and the making of bargains in open market in the city. In the same reign associations or confraternities of traders for mutual support began to be formed—confraternitieswhich, under the name of ‘gilds’ or guilds, were destined to become in time corporate municipal bodies, with the ‘Hall of the Gild Merchant’ as the centre of civic rule and influence. A formal mayor and corporation were to come later, but the elements and something more of civic rule in Winchester can be thus traced continuously back and recognized for full a thousand years.

Of Athelstan the warrior we have but little actual Winchester history to record; he reigned from 925 to 940, and was buried not at Winchester but at Malmesbury. To atone for this historical paucity we have one glorious romantic legend—the legend of the fight between Guy of Warwick and Colbrand, the Danish giant and warrior, a story which has long been a classic fairy tale. Rudborne, in hisMajor Historia Wintoniae, copying from theLiber de Hyda, solemnly records how Athelstan, invested in his capital city by Anelafe, King of the Danes, agreed with his besieger to decide the issue by a combat between champions, and he tells us how a new Polyphemus,

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