Et penitus toto orbe divisos Britannos.
ANTIQUITY and long-continued vitality such as have fallen to Winchester—for to go back to its early humble beginnings takes us back very far indeed—lead us naturally to look for causes, and prompt the questions, Why, in the first instance, did a human community settle here at all? What through so many alternations of human vicissitude and political circumstance has operated to maintain these intact? Tempus edax rerum—Time, the devourer of constituted things, is written not so much on its stones, as in its stones, yet Winchester remains Winchester still. For, be it noted, there is nothing in the nature of things which gives to cities and communities any prescriptive claim or assurance of permanence. We have not, indeed, to travel far from Winchester to find instructive instances, to the very contrary, among its earliest neighbours and contemporaries. Silchester, Sarum, Portchester, its early British contemporaries, which once flourished even as Winchester, have long since sunk, the last named into inanition, the two former into dissolution so complete that no trace now remains, save what little the ploughshare or the antiquary may from time to time unearth; and that little would probably, but for the worms’ unceasing activity, have long since perished beyond recall. For with cities, as with the animal world, the secret of continued vigour is the secret of continued adaptation to environment; towns and cities, like other organized existences, are just as old as the arteries which feed them, and as long as function is efficiently performed, so long will there be health to perform it.
And yet as years go, Winchester is old,—how old none can say. Ancient Neolithic interments on St. Giles’s Hill, old Celtic barrows on Morne (Magdalen) Hill behind, carry us back far indeed beyond the days of permanent settlement, and her continuous existence goes back far beyond the days of any written historical record, yet all these years she has retained her identity and her vigour unimpaired. What physical causes have contributed to this we shall perhaps be better able to appreciate if we quit St. Giles’s Hill and clamber up to the top of St. Catherine’s Hill, the bold chalk hill which dominates the view southward from the city. An interesting hill it is, with modern associations which we will not stop to consider now, but turn our thoughts to the view before us. Below us is a flat-bottomed valley, a mile or two across, with the numerous winding channels of the river intersecting the water meadows at our feet. To our north lies the city, seen from this point to excellent advantage, occupying the flat of the valley, and creeping up the hill slopes on either side, while far away in the distance the chalk upland seems to roll away, ridge succeeding ridge, till all detail is lost in distance.
Two thousand years or more ago, the country which we are now gazing over would have borne a fundamentally different character, though its superficial aspect, viewed from this point, might not, apart from signs of human agency, have been so very dissimilar. For at that time practically the whole of the south of England, through all the lower levels, was a wild stretch of brake and forest all but impenetrable, the haunt of wolf and wild boar, of beaver and badger, alternating at the lowest points with swamps and morasses, which formed the beds of the valleys, and either fringed the edges of the streams or mingled composedly with them. This was the great Weald Forest, of which a few detached patches still remain—a tangled sea of green, beneath which all lay submerged save the chalk heights, the North and South Downs, Salisbury Plain, and the mid Hampshire plateau over which we are now looking.
At one spot, and practically one spot only, was this forest barrier broken, and that was in mid Hampshire, where the great estuary of Southampton Water and the Vale of Itchen pierced it like a wedge, and gave fairly free access from the coast to the rich midland counties to the north. And so up or by this natural highway the stream of immigration from the south flowed. Celtic peoples from the north of Europe, Goidels, Brythons, Belgans,—all in turn came this way, and here it was, where the Vale of Itchen narrowed, that a settled community began to form—a ganglionic point, as all such communities are, along the nervous thread of intercourse and communication.
Down then in the valley at our feet, on the actual ground where our city now stands, amid the morasses wherein peat abounded, and where even now it may still be found, was the first settlement or village of Winchester—a collection of rude hovels, of wattle-work covered with mud, and stockaded with a stout timber palisading as additional protection, while the hill-top, where we now stand, was converted into a fortress or refuge-camp, to all appearance impregnable, so long as heart and hand still existed to defend it.
Of the village below all trace has long vanished, but the lines of the earthwork round the hill remain still broadly scarped out, and seemingly imperishable. No mean achievement this—this great rampart over 1000 yards in circuit, and still 25 feet or more in height in places; and when the feebleness of the resources with which those early Celtic sappers and miners worked is borne in mind, the unserviceable pick of deer antler, the absence of means of transport, we wonder more and more at the magnitude of the achievement which has had such permanent result.
They dreamt not of a perishable home, who thus could build,
and to-day, though two, perhaps three, thousand years have passed since it first gave security to the primitive Winchester settlement below, the great camp still remains, keeping watch over the modern city like a sentinel forgotten, but still under orders, whom no change of guard has relieved.
One other inheritance, besides these piled-up ramparts, these first Winchester burghers have left us, and that is a name. Cær Gwent, the Celtic name, first Romanized into Venta Belgarum, passed in Saxon days into Vintan-ceastir, or Venta the fortified, and so on by a natural transition has become the Winchester of to-day. What the name means is a venerable antiquarian puzzle, on which we prefer to hazard no opinion, nor indeed does it greatly matter. The name, like the city itself, is venerable in antiquity, and its origin, like that of the city itself, is lost in the mists of the past.
And as we look round about us from this hill-top, and direct our eye up and down this valley, we begin to realize what it is that has made Winchester what it has been in the past, and what it is now: not merely the accident of circumstance, the flotsam and jetsam of human migratory tribes, floated fortuitously hither on the tidal waters of our southern estuaries and here casually deposited, but a natural centre in a great continuous stream of humanity, in which Celt and Belgan, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman have all pushed forward, each eager to bear his part in the building of that great national polity, the England of to-day.