CHAPTER XIV
FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY WINCHESTER
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 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.
Interest in the main centres round her civic rule, the pilgrim stream, the great annual Fair of St. Giles, and the domestic architecture, while supreme over all these was the dominating interest and control exercised by the ecclesiastical powers within her—the sway of the crozier and the tonsure, the cloister and the cowl. We shall deal in this chapter with the city at large, leaving to the chapter following the more purely monastic aspects.
The city as a city had been growing—as always was the case with mediaeval towns closely walled in—continually more and more congested. The southeastern quarter occupied by the Convent of St. Swithun’s, with its Cathedral and great churchyard, the adjoining Abbey of St. Mary, and the bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, was a lung open indeed and well ventilated, but elsewhere the hemmed in area was a maze of narrow and crowded thoroughfares, with houses, whose curiously timbered, but inconveniently picturesque fronts, almost jostled one another across the narrow passage-ways between,—houses, of the type still to be seen in the so-called ‘Old Rectory’ in Cheesehill Street, in the pseudo-antique houses in ‘the Brooks,’ in Mr. Mayne’s Tudor House near the Butter Cross, and the present Godbegot House almost opposite, of later date though most of these be—as if the chief office of neighbourly regard of a mediaeval dwelling to those round her was not merely to
Not beteem the winds of Heaven,
Visit their face too roughly,
but also to religiously exclude that indiscreet and unwelcome intruder, the all-prying and inquisitive sun, while through many of the low-lying streets ran broad and open ditches, not always, alas! the dulcia et piscosae flumina aquae, the sweet refreshing streams which Precentor Wulfstan had once commemorated,—streams whose channels flow now in well-regulated courses, some open, some underground, but which then made their way, often through filth and accumulated garbage, in far less well-ordered circulation through the city.
Though the city, judged by contemporary standards, might be a ‘joly cité,’ of which
The aere was god both inne and oute,
it must have fallen far short of almost every modern standard of health and convenience, and its narrow, confined, and ill-cleansed courts were the lurking-places of contagion and of never wholly absent plague.
The civic management was a strange, incongruous muddle of overlapping and conflicting authorities, each jealous of its own influence and envious of its neighbour’s. The authority of the gilds had now become crystallized into a corporation of more or less definite form, the Mayor and Bailiffs, who exercised the controlling influence over the major part of the city. When exactly a ‘Mayor’ first came into existence is unknown. The civic records go back, indeed, to a certain Florence de Lunn in 1184, though he can hardly be accepted as a ‘mayor’ in the technical sense, but the Mayor only exercised authority over the population within the walls, and ‘the Liberties,’ as they were called, were excluded from his jurisdiction. Of these there were two, the Liberty of the Soke, the region, that is, beyond the walls to the east and north, over which the Bishop had supreme jurisdiction, and which he entrusted to the care of a special officer, the Bailiff of the Soke, and the Liberty of Godbiete, the little manor within the city granted by Queen Emma to the Convent of St. Swithun, from the church tower of which curfew rang, and within whose ‘liberties,’ as already stated, no officer bearing warrant, whether of king, mayor, or bishop, might enter. This tripartite division of authority, in which the civic, episcopal, and monastic powers were mutually confronted, formed a cunningly devised preserve, in which the dexterous fisher in the troubled waters of the day might ply his angle with rarely successful result.
The dominating commercial interest was the Wool Trade. England was famous for wool, and to this trade Winchester, as a natural centre with Southampton as her port, owed her prosperity.
North of the High Street, not far from the Westgate, stood the great Hall where the wool was brought and sampled, and here the great Tron or weighing machine was kept on which the wool was weighed. In Edward III.’s time the Winchester wool trade was at its height. His wars with France, really undertaken to enable him to control the Channel, and so to keep the trade with Flanders in his own hands, had prospered, and when he introduced his famous wool-stapling measure, by which ‘staples’ or exclusive wool markets were set up in ten towns in England, of which Winchester was one, the commercial prosperity of the city increased by leaps and bounds. But, alas! Edward’s policy was only too successful. The Flanders trade was considered more important than local English interests, and when, some years after, he appointed Calais as the staple town, and removed the staple from Winchester, the days of the commercial prosperity of our city were numbered.
College Brewhouse, adjoining College Street, is one of the oldest portions of the College buildings. Over the archway one of the turrets of Outer Gateway is to be seen.
But while the wool trade lasted,—and it only died out as such trades do by degrees,—Winchester with all its limitations must have been a rarely interesting and attractive place in which to “catch the manners fleeting as they rise.” It is much to be regretted that the Winchester of this period had no shrewd and genial humorist, no Chaucer or Jonson, to mingle with the crowd, and to preserve for us, whether by pen or pencil, the humours of the day,—the varied types, lay and cleric, monk, friar, pilgrim, merchant, or franklin, who might have been found periodically gathered either at the Wool Market or the Hall of the Gild merchant, or at ‘the George,’—for there was a ‘George’ at Winchester then, even as now,—in as full and diverting variety as ever foregathered at the Tabard itself; but interesting as those intrinsically were, their interest was as nothing beside the two great dominating attractions which periodically gathered all sorts and conditions of men for temporary hospitality within her walls, the pilgrimages, and the great Fair of St. Giles. And if it was the Wool Trade which made the Fair, equally it was the Fair which gave the city its notoriety and its commercial importance. And the Fair while it lasted dominated everything—not only was all ordinary business suspended, but even the jurisdiction of the ordinary civic authorities was equally subject to its influence, and the already complex problem of civic rule was rendered topsy-turvy by a temporary transfer of authority within the city area from the Mayor to the Bailiff of the Soke,—a glorious opportunity for paying off old scores, which many a modern local administrator might well envy him.
The early history of the Fair we have already touched on. A fair had been held on St. Giles’s Hill since very early days, and with the strange incongruity of association characteristic of early times, fairs were for a long time regularly held in churchyards. But the Fair of St. Giles had long since outgrown the limits of the little churchyard of St. Giles, on the hill which bears his name, and successive charters of William II. and later sovereigns had made the rights and profits of the Fair the perquisite and privilege of the Bishop of Winchester, who had the power of exclusive trading within the area of the Fair during its duration. Originally granted for three days, Henry I. had extended the period to eight, Stephen to fourteen, and Henry II. to sixteen, and this period was confirmed in the last charter granted for the Fair, viz., that given by Edward III. in 1349, in which all the privileges of the Fair were rehearsed and solemnly confirmed. The procedure connected with the Fair was minute and formal. On the 31st of August, the Eve of St. Giles, the Bishop took possession, as it were, by setting up his court in the Pavilionis Aula, or Hall of the Pavilion, on the top of the hill. The court being formally constituted, Justiciaries or Bailiffs of the Fair were appointed, who at once proceeded either to Southgate or Kingsgate, where the Mayor, Bailiffs, and citizens of Winchester were required to meet them, and dutifully to deliver up the keys of the gate, and from thence to accompany them in turns to the Westgate, the Wool Staple, and the other gates in succession, and to deliver up the keys of each, while the Fair was solemnly proclaimed and the transfer of authority effected. The proclamation made forbade the buying and selling, while the Fair lasted, of articles of general merchandise, other than food, anywhere in Winchester or within seven leagues’ radius (10-1/2 miles), except within the limits of the Fair itself.
This done, the humiliation of the Mayor and Bailiffs was completed by their being required to humbly attend the usurping authorities to the Bishop’s Pavilion, thenceforward to submit to their jurisdiction, with what grace they might, till the Fair was over. Nor was it only at Winchester that the Fair was proclaimed—Southampton, though actually beyond the seven leagues’ radius, was included in the prohibited area, and here and at all important points on the boundary of the Fair zone, the same proclamation was made and formal possession taken. Nor was it only smuggling that the Fair officials had to guard against. Outlaws of the Robin Hood type—of whom the notorious Adam of Gurdon, Bailiff of Alton, and Lord of the Manor of Selborne, was perhaps the most famous—were accustomed to lay in wait and levy blackmail on merchants and travellers who had business at the Fair, and at all particularly dangerous spots, such as the Pass of Alton, as it was called, the spot on the road from London to Alton where the thick woodland made highway robbery a comparatively easy matter, sergeants, armed and mounted, were stationed to keep the Pass.
The Fair itself was a veritable town of booths or stalls within a wooden palisade, each quarter or ‘street’ within it taking its name from the merchandise displayed or the nationality of the traders who occupied it. Then there were the Spicery—the general grocery, or trade in sugar, spices, and preserved fruits, in which the monks of St. Swithun traded largely—the Pottery—the Stannary (or Falconry)—the ‘stret’ of the Flemings, of the Genoese, of the Cornishmen; and the prices paid were high, for a high ‘tariff wall’ surrounded the Fair. On a burden borne by one man was levied a penny, on a cask of wine or cyder fourpence, for a falcon twopence, for an ape or bear—animals much affected as butts and playthings by the great, and even by the monks—fourpence. Multiplying these by twelve, as is customarily done, to reduce them to modern values, we realise how heavy these tolls were. Nor were luxuries and alcoholic drinks the only article taxed. The raw material paid toll too: every bale of wool fourpence, of which twopence went to the Bishop, and twopence, to conciliate popular support evidently, to the check weighman. Plantagenet times were not a Cobdenite millennium; and, probably, could a ballot have been taken at the time, while the monks and the Bishop’s ‘menie’ would undoubtedly have voted for Tariff
Reform, very few Winchester citizens—though the Fair was profitable enough to them in reality—would have polled with them.
Within the Fair itself, the mise en scène and the humours of the crowd would have presented a subject fully worthy of Ben Jonson himself, and it is safe to say that no human concourse, not even Bartholomew Fair in its most palmy days, could have taxed his genius more than St. Giles’s Fair during the Edwardian régime would have done. Motley, indeed, was the crowd gathered here—Jews and Normans, Poles and Italians, strolling minstrels, quacks and jugglers, ballad-mongers and fortune-tellers, thieves and swaggerers, Corporal Nyms and Ancient Pistols, rogues and sharpers of every kind, cheating, swearing, dancing, quarrelling, drinking,—hawk-eyed chapmen and hard-visaged countrymen, each alike bent on cheapening the other’s demands, huckstering, gesticulating, and chaffering in strange dialects and all but unknown tongues—while here and there vigilant assizemen, wearing the Bishop’s livery, passed eager-eyed amidst them, keenly scenting out deficient weight or cozening ell-wand, for in spite of severe penalties imposed on all detected in such practices, the Fair was pre-eminently a place where
nobody’s virtue was over nice,
and all the ‘tricks of the trade’ flourished in a congenial soil. Thus Harvey, prentice to Symme atte Stile, who tells us in Langland’s “Piers Ploughman,” how
at Wye and Wynchestre I went to the faire,
lifts up some part of the veil for us, telling us that
wikkedlych to weye (wickedly to weigh)
was his first lesson.
We have already spoken of the Bishop’s Court or Pavilionis Aula. Here the Bailiffs and Justiciaries of the Fair met, not merely to make regulations, but to dispense justice, for the Pavilionis Aula was also a court of summary jurisdiction, a ‘piepowder court,’ cour des pieds poudreux or dusty-foot justice, that is, where the wily Autolycus, or Artful Dodger of the day, or other picker up of unconsidered trifles, was awarded short shrift and well-earned punishment either in stocks or pillory, or in the Bishop’s dungeon under Wolvesey Palace.
Such then for some three hundred years was the great Fair of the Festival of St. Egidius. For many years it survived, even though trade in Winchester was falling off and doomed, but it could not survive indefinitely. In Henry VI.’s time a distinct falling off was apparent; since then it has dwindled gradually bit by bit, till now the only tangible memorial remaining is the name of the Bishop’s court, the Pavilionis Aula, the ghostly footfall of which seems still to be re-echoed in the name “Palm Hall,” a well-known residence standing on the brow of the hill where ‘all the fun of the Fair’ sparkled and bubbled so many hundreds of years before.
Side by side with the Fair was the Pilgrim stream, which too reached its height about this period. We have seen how early in Edward the Elder’s reign the shrine of St. Josse in Newan Mynstre attracted pilgrims to Winchester and gave it a reputation—a reputation which the enshrinement in Edgar’s reign of Swithun’s bones enormously added to. Tales of miracle were circulated, widespread and equally widely credited, cripples were healed, the lame walked, and St. Swithun’s became the most popular pilgrimage centre in all Southern England. From Henry II.’s reign, though the shrine of Becket rose into importance, St. Swithun’s did not abate in popularity, and the stream of pious, dust-laden feet still flowed just the same to and from it, save that many going on pilgrimage would visit the shrines of both St. Thomas and St. Swithun on their way. Rich and poor, a-foot or in the saddle, they streamed into Winchester as soon as the pilgrim season—the early spring, that is,—arrived. As Chaucer tells us:
Whan that Aprille with his showrès swoote
The drought of Marche hath percèd to the roote,
. . . . . .
Thanne longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.
The wealthier lodged in hostelries and inns, the poorer found shelter and hospitality within the walls of convent or nunnery. From south and west they came—over the Roman road from Sarum and along the Itchen valley from Southampton, turning aside to visit St. Cross and receive the wayfarer’s dole of bread and beer, till they reached the gates of St. Swithun’s or of Hyde. St. Swithun’s was the chief place of resort.
Here within the Pilgrim’s or Guesten Hall, the greater part of which still stands, a rough but welcome bed awaited them, while at the buttery a plentiful meal of broken victuals and beer was to be had for the asking. Then next morning after mass they would be admitted to the shrine, to say their prayers, make their humble offering, and depart.
An unwholesome and unsavoury enough crowd, doubtless, in the main—travel-stained, footsore, and unwashed, disease accompanied them, frequently enough, from centre to centre, just as plague follows nowadays the eastern lines of pilgrimage in India and Arabia—and not even all their piety and devotion could sufficiently endear them to the monks of St. Swithun as to make them personally acceptable, and secure unrestricted welcome for them within their church and monastery.
Accordingly, though allowed to enter the Cathedral freely, their liberty within it was circumscribed. Admitted to the north transept by a special door—the Pilgrim’s door, now walled up—they could make their way into Godfrey de Lucy’s retro-choir, the great extension east of the high altar, where the shrine of the saint was placed. So much and no more of the Cathedral was open to them, for at the head of the presbytery steps, leading down to the south transept and nave, massive iron-work gates barred the way; the gates are to be seen still, though long since removed to near the western entrance of the Cathedral. And so their devotions ended, they would journey on—on to the great Abbey of Hyde, then on to Headbourne Worthy church, to visit the Saxon rood at its western end, then on by Alton and Farnham, probably to rest for the night in the great Cistercian Abbey of Waverley hard by, and so on by Guildford and St. Martha’s to Canterbury—a well-defined route clearly marked even now for much of its length, and still known as the Pilgrim’s way. So great a vogue did the pilgrimage craving become that at length it had to be controlled and forbidden by law. Yet the pilgrimage had its uses—the open-air journey, severe though its hardships were to the ill-found and poorly shod, served, doubtless, as a magnificent tonic, both mental as well as bodily, and must have done much to correct the terrible insularity of ideas which a population otherwise chained to the soil must otherwise have engendered. Nor, in all probability, was the belief in the efficacy of pilgrimages in the cure of diseases, particularly mental ones, without at least some substantial basis of truth.
MIDDLE GATE, WINCHESTER COLLEGE
Middle Gate gives access to Middle or Chamber Court—so called from ‘Election Chamber,’ the large room over the gateway where ‘elections’ to college were formerly held. The three statues over the gateway represent the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel, and the Founder. The quaint old custom of college boys crossing the Quad bareheaded, in honour of the Virgin, is followed at Winchester College still.
As in the case of Henry of Hoheneck, so also, mutatis mutandis, might many a pilgrim to Winchester have had it said of him:
And he was healed in his despair
By the touch of St. Swithun’s bones,
Though I think the long ride in the open air,
That pilgrimage over stocks and stones,
In the miracle must come in for its share.
A miracle none the less pronounced because the air of Hampshire Downs had been a potent but unrealized contributory factor in the result.
