Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.
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 of Winchester was, however, as yet still far distant, and the immediate result of Norman rule was to bring Winchester into even greater prominence than in the closing years of Saxon rule.
We have spoken of Winchester as the capital of Saxon England, and so it had been, but not in the exclusive sense in which the word is employed nowadays. In fact, in the modern sense, viz. that of a permanent seat and headquarters of government, no capital existed then at all. 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. But though Winchester was being, and had been for many years past, hard pressed by London, she still retained the Royal Treasury, and the state records were still kept there, and she could therefore still claim something more than a nominal pre-eminence, even though the growth and commercial development of London were rapidly diminishing her relative influence.
The position of London William had recognized by being crowned there, before the ceremony had been carried out at Winchester or elsewhere; but other circumstances—political motives, reasons of personal convenience, and indeed of personal preference—drew him largely to Winchester. Indeed, when in England he ‘wore his crown,’ i.e. held his ceremonial court, three times a year—at London at Pentecost, at Gloucester at Christmas, and at Easter, the leading festival of the year, at Winchester.
And both policy and convenience were largely involved in William’s action. Communication was slow and difficult, the country sparsely habited, and government then, even more than nowadays, rested on prestige—the appeal to imagination.
William had posed as the lawful heir to the Saxon throne; he appealed, whenever he could advantageously do so, for sanction for his acts to the laws of Cnut or Edward the Confessor, and he was far too prescient a ruler to underestimate the effect produced on his Saxon subjects, by his sitting on the throne of his predecessors and ruling his Saxon subjects in their historic centre of rule, quite apart from the subtle appeal his so doing made to his own personal vanity. Moreover, apart from all personal considerations, the position of Winchester marked it out as a natural capital—for England was after all but a part of his realm, and the English Channel was the bridge between it and the Norman provinces, with the estuaries of Southampton and of the Seine as the ends of the bridge. Indeed, as long as the link with Normandy remained firm, Winchester could hold its head up high. When Normandy fell away, Winchester declined also.
But beyond these reasons of state, Winchester appealed personally to the Conqueror’s passion for the chase. The great forests all round it—for it was still but a clearing, as it were, in the great primeval forest—afforded him facilities for hunting at his convenience, such as few other spots could offer. Here then he erected a royal residence, some scanty traces of which may still be seen; here, very shortly after, the inevitable sign of Norman domination, a great, impregnable, and awe-inspiring fortress was to be seen rapidly rising on the high ground in the south-western angle of the city area, and here too—and, we are glad to say, almost equally inevitably—Norman culture and Norman devotion expended themselves in raising a stately and glorious temple for the worship of God, worthy alike in the dignity of its conception, the beauty of its execution, and the scale of grandeur on which it was carried out. Added to, modified, reconstructed or transformed, as various of its parts have subsequently been, it is in essential features the Norman Cathedral, which is standing still, and which is the glory of Southern England to-day.
Foremost among the questions of the time was that of ecclesiastical policy. William proceeded with caution. The position of Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, had long been canonically irregular, for he held Winchester as well as Canterbury, and he was guilty of other irregularities also, and so at first William assumed a non-committal attitude towards him. He refused to permit him to officiate at his coronation, but treated him with respect and courtesy, until a convenient opportunity arose to depose him, when he had him brought to trial and deprived. The remaining years of his life Stigand spent as a kind of state prisoner in Winchester.
Many tales are told of his hoarded wealth and his penurious habits; a part of it, a great crucifix of massive gold and silver, he bestowed upon the Cathedral. He was buried within its walls, and a figure of him has been of recent times placed in one of the niches on the great Altar Screen.
Stigand’s deposition made room for two notable appointments. Lanfranc, perhaps the keenest intellect of the day, certainly the foremost among ecclesiastical statesmen, was made archbishop. William Walkelyn, a relative, there is some reason to believe, of the Conqueror, became the first Norman bishop of Winchester.
Walkelyn enjoyed a high reputation alike for learning and for personal piety. The monkish author of the Annales de Wintonia describes him as a man “of perfect piety and sanctity of life, endowed with wondrous sagacity and withal of such abstinence that he eschewed both meat and fish and rarely tasted wine or mead, and then only with extreme moderation.”
To such a man, imbued with the culture as well as the genius of Norman civilization, the Saxon Cathedral of Æthelwold—albeit barely one hundred years before it had seemed so sublime to the restricted and untutored imagination of precentor Wulfstan—appeared meagre and quite insufficient. He set to work to rebuild the Cathedral, and this fact alone must serve to make his name ever memorable among the ’ makers of Winchester.’
Walkelyn’s building far exceeded in proportions the Saxon one it replaced. It is a moot point how far the sites of the two buildings were identical, and a passage in the Annales de Wintonia seems to show they certainly were not entirely so, though in any case they could not have differed much; but in historic continuity, in the dust of the early kings it preserved, in the shrines of the saints which it displayed to the devout, it was still the historic cathedral of the Saxon capital, transformed and glorified indeed on a scale of noble vastness and dignity hitherto unattempted in England.
Foremost among cathedral traditions is the story of the building of the roof, recorded in the same Annales de Wintonia to which reference has been several times already made, and in them alone. Walkelyn had strained his resources to the full, and still needed timber for the roof. He applied accordingly to the Conqueror for a grant of timber, and received permission to take from one of his woods—Hempage Wood, near Avington, five miles from Winchester—as much timber as he could fell and cart away within three days. “Make hay while the king smiles,” was the bishop’s maxim. He collected a whole army of wood-cutters, carters, teams of horses, and in three days removed every timber tree in the wood, leaving one oak only, the so-called Gospel Oak under which tradition reported Augustine to have preached. Unwarranted as the tradition appears to have been, it served to protect the tree, which still stands, though to all appearance dead, an interesting reminder of Walkelyn and his cathedral. When William discovered what a sweep the bishop had made of his “most delectable wood,” he was furious, and was only with difficulty appeased. “Certainly as I was too liberal in my grant, so you were too exacting in the advantage you took of it,” he said, when at length he readmitted the bishop to his presence and his favour.
The story acquires additional interest from the subsequent history of these huge and venerable timbers. For some 800 years they have continued to support the mighty roof, though quite recently some of them have had to be replaced, owing to the destructiveness of a grub—the grub of the Sirex gigas—which had in places eaten them through and through. A portion of one of these beams with a specimen of the destructive sirex can be seen in the city museum, and curios made of this so-called ‘cathedral oak’—though much of it by the way is chestnut—are being sold now for the benefit of the Cathedral Preservation Fund: thus is exemplified Earl Godwine’s remark, “Brother brings aid to brother.”
Two other items relative to Walkelyn are of interest. Curiously enough—and it speaks eloquently for his detachment of mind and freedom from professional narrowness—he wanted at first to revoke Æthelwold’s policy and put back secular canons for monks. The monks were aghast, and, more important still, Lanfranc was hostile, and accordingly after a struggle the bishop gave way and abandoned the project. The other item is the connection between Walkelyn and the great Fair of St. Giles, to which reference has been already made. Walkelyn persuaded William’s son, William Rufus, to grant him the right to a three days’
Fair, on the hill eastward of the city, and to apply the tolls so obtained to the erection of the Cathedral. To the development and further history of the Fair we shall return in a later chapter.
The residence or ‘Palace’ of the Conqueror stood in the very centre of the city, near where the Butter Cross stands now, and abutting upon the Newan Mynstre. Indeed, to obtain room for it the monks were despoiled of part of their site. Interesting remains of it exist in the thick walls and the cavernous cellars of the ancient houses which now occupy the spot—the latter vividly suggestive of dungeons and of the Isaac of York episode in Scott’s Ivanhoe. Close at hand were the Royal Treasury and the Mint, and almost within hail were the quarters of the king’s executioners, whom he kept always ready ‘laid on,’ as it were—a gruesome reminder of the darker tones in which life in Norman times was painted.
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. The curfew ordinance, the order to extinguish fires and put out lights—probably as much a wise precaution to diminish risk of fire in crowded towns built mainly of wood as directly political in purpose,—was first promulgated here. Here first of all curfew was rung, as it has rung nightly ever since. Formerly it rang from the little church of St. Peter in the Shambles, behind Godbiete; now it rings from the old Guild Hall—the Hall, in earlier days, of the Guild Merchant of Winchester.
One of the old-world villages, some few miles above Winchester, lying in a reach of the river Itchen of unusual beauty and charm.
Another event which affected the popular imagination even more profoundly was the great survey of the kingdom, the results of which were embodied in the Domesday Book, so called because, as Rudborne says, “it spareth no one, just like the great Day of Doom.” The compilation of it was regarded as a great act of oppression. “Inquisition was even made as to how many animals sufficed for the tillage of one hide of land.” In reality it was an act of statesmanlike administration, the object of which was to collect accurate information for the purpose of assessing ‘geld,’ or dues for military service. Exact assessment for taxes is evidently not a modern terror merely, nor is the modern income tax-payer the only one who has objected to inquisitorial modes of assessment.
Winchester and London were omitted from Domesday Book altogether—an omission which was repaired, as far as Winchester is concerned, in Henry I.’s reign, when the Winchester Domesday Book, as it was called, was compiled. Needless to say, Domesday Book was merely the popular name for it; its real name was the Rotulus Wintoniensis, or Book of Winchester, sometimes termed Rotulus Regis or King’s Book. Domesday Book was kept at Winchester, and a copy of it at Westminster. The original is now in the Rolls Office.
It is certainly noteworthy that Winchester should have given birth to the two most valuable records of national history which this country has ever possessed, two records which no other nation can find any parallel to, viz. the English Chronicle and the Domesday Book. The value of the latter is that it gives us in absolutely unquestionable form the raw material of history, unwarped by personal bias, uncoloured by tradition. By means of it we can put to exact test many of the time-honoured statements, accepted for generation after generation without question or demur, and in that fierce crucible many and many a legendary tradition treasured hitherto as current historical coin, has been melted down and revealed as a spurious token merely. Such a one we probably have in the story already related of Abbot Alwyn and the monks of Newan Mynstre; the story of the afforestation of the New Forest is another. But the New Forest, though local, is rather beyond our scope: the reader is referred to the fuller volume on Hampshire for a discussion of this topic: and, indeed, the story of Norman Winchester is full enough as it is—replete with many a thrilling scene, many a notable historical figure. William himself, strong, stern, far-seeing and determined, a leader among men, towering head and shoulders above his contemporaries, capable of cruelty, hard and grasping, indeed, as were all who strove to rule in those stern days, but never small or moved by petty spite. “He nothing common did or mean,” might almost be said of him. And side by side with him, Lanfranc the Italian, smooth, supple, astute—like William, a master mind, a great man, but with the greatness of the ecclesiastical statesman rather than of the saint or even the scholar; and in sharp contrast Walkelyn the Norman, the high-minded, the conscientious, the ascetic—a scholar and a devotee rather than a statesman; and after these a host of minor personalities, striking and interesting enough, too, in their way. Foremost among these stands Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon, son of the great Siward, Earl of Northumbria. A picturesque and pathetic figure he is, with certain virtues and high qualities all unfitted for his time.
Poor Waltheof—like Saul of old, his outward man striking and tall and goodly to look upon,—was the idol of William’s Saxon subjects. But the fair exterior covered after all but a weak and irresolute soul, no match for the master mind of William, who read him through and through as a reader reads his book. Yet though in his weakness William despised him, in his popularity William feared him, and when denounced by his treacherous Norman wife for the merely colourable part he had played in the Bridal of Norwich—
That bride-ale
That was many men’s bale—
William, deaf to all entreaty, kept him a close prisoner, and finally, at the Pentecostal Gemôt held at Winchester, had sentence of death pronounced upon him. Swiftly and secretly the order was carried out, and on May 31, St. Petronilla’s day, at early dawn, while the men of Winchester were in their beds, Waltheof was led out to execution on St. Giles’s Hill. He came arrayed in full dress as an earl, wearing his badges of rank, and on reaching the place of execution knelt down to pray. He continued sometime in prayer while the executioner, fearing interruption, grew restive and impatient. “Wait yet a little moment,” pleaded the victim; “let me, at least, say the Lord’s Prayer for me and for thee,” and the Earl’s voice was heard uttering the petitions one by one, till at the words, “Lead us not into temptation,” the axe descended. But, as the severed head fell from the body, the lips were seen still to be moving, and the words, “But deliver us from evil,” were distinctly heard. Such is the moving account we have of Waltheof’s death. The last chapter of the story belongs rather to Crowland than to Winchester. Buried in the first instance obscurely at Winchester, his body was later on permitted to be reinterred at Crowland, and, on raising it, the head was found to be miraculously reunited to the trunk, a thin red line alone revealing the death he had died. Kingsley has told it in masterly style in Hereward the Wake and the episode of his false wife Judith’s visit to her husband’s tomb forms a thrilling incident most picturesquely told.
Of Hereward himself Winchester history is silent, but Kingsley, in another striking passage, brings him too upon our local stage, when he rides to Winchester to make submission to the king. With his companions he rides along the Roman road which leads still from Silchester, till, from the top of the downs, they catch sight of the city lying beneath them.
Within the city rose the ancient Minster Church, built by Ethelwold—ancient even then—where slept the ancient kings, Kennulf, Egbert, and Ethelwulf, the Saxons; and by them the Danes, Canute the Great and Hardicanute his son, and Norman Emma, his wife, and Ethelred’s before him; and the great Earl Godwin, who seemed to Hereward to have died not twenty but two hundred years ago; and it may be an old Saxon hall upon the little isle, whither Edgar had bidden bring the heads of all the wolves in Wessex, where afterwards the bishops built Wolvesey Palace. But nearer to them, on the downs which sloped up to the west, stood an uglier thing, which they saw with curses deep and loud—the keep of the new Norman castle by the west gate.
We will not stop to discuss this striking passage; and though Hereward be but a figure imported into our local history, the castle which he saw was, both then and for many years to come, the most noticeable and striking feature in Winchester, as also the leading outward symbol of the Norman presence and power. 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 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. Yes, Hereward and his companions might utter curses loud and deep, for the rebirth of the nation, which the Norman period heralded, was not accomplished without much labour and travail, both of body and of spirit; but could he have looked forward, as we can look back, upon all that Norman rule has been the stepping-stone to, both in Winchester and elsewhere, he would have found, like the unwilling prophet of old, a blessing on his lips and not a curse, and we too shall be ready to offer up our Te Deum in a spirit of thankfulness, earnest and sincere, though the appropriate accompaniment to it be rather a subdued strain, and in a minor key, than an unbroken outburst of triumphal joy.
