Post tenebras, lux
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 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 was preached 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 703 A.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 the English Chronicle that 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 more glorious 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 in A.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 of St. Peter and St. Paul, right up indeed to 1899, when it was taken over by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
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.
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 people Vintan-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.
