“Well, sir,” replied the owner, “I have some doubts whether there ever was any mint here; but,” he added, with a comical expression, “I am quite certain there is none now.”
The site of the “Penthouse” was originally occupied by the “Draperie.” Trade guilds existed here from Henry I.’s time, and this became the Guildhall. Henry III. ordered that this Draperie Street should be the “Great Street,” as in the time of his father. In Henry VIII.’s reign we find the Penthouse mentioned as the “Pentisse.”
“Such shelters were very welcome a hundred years ago,” said Mr. Hertford, “before umbrellas were used. You know that some have thought that in ‘under the rose,’ the word should be ‘rows.’”
Murder by a Priest.
“Close to this,” I continued, “beside the wall of St. Lawrence’s Church, a murder took place, in the twenty-first year of Richard II., which brings before us the lawless state of the times. One James Dyngeley, a priest, struck a man named Walter Pynchon, through the back to the heart with a baslard. This weapon was a large dagger suspended to the girdle, and worn by laymen and by some priests, notwithstanding an ecclesiastical prohibition. Roger, the parson of St. Lawrence, claimed the prisoner (as an ecclesiastic) for the Bishop of Winchester, and he was incarcerated in Wolvesey Castle. From this he broke out with others on the 5th of December, in the fifth year of Henry IV., but was pardoned by the King for this and other felonies—a proof of the influence of the Church in those days.”[39]
The next church we come to is St. Maurice’s, which is modern, the fifteenth-century tower has a good Norman doorway looking towards the Cathedral. There are some old registers belonging to this church which record the burials of men killed in the Soke (across the bridge), fighting with the Roundheads in the days of Cromwell. There is a monument here in which the admirers of William Widmore have made him ridiculous for ever, by calling him “a friend without guile, and an apothecary without ostentation;” the less excusable, as they say he was “an honest Englishman.”
Opposite this church is a passage leading to the “Bell and Crown.” A hostel of that name has stood here ever since Henry V.’s reign. The building now on the spot is old, and has been evidently much altered. The wall of the staircase is spotted over with a small blue pattern.
“I thought there was a paper on the wall,” said the landlord, “and was going to have another put over it; but a gentleman said to me, ‘Do no such thing. Why, that is stencilled! there is not another house in Winchester can show such decoration.’”
Stencilling was much used in the last century.
“I have heard,” said Mr. Hertford, “that the celebrated Miss Mellon (Duchess of St. Albans) went about when young with her father and a company of actors who, as occasion offered, acted plays and stencilled rooms.”