THIRD DAY.
The City Walls — Danemead — Eastgate — Northgate — Westgate — Southgate — Kingsgate — The College — Wykeham — Wolvesey — Raleigh.
From the Roman occupation, and perhaps from an earlier date, Winchester has been a fortified town. Long after that time, people were slow in laying to heart the saying in Plutarch that a city which contains men who can fight has no need of walls.
The modern defences seem to have been chiefly raised in the time of John and Henry III.,[46] just before Winchester ceased to be the royal city of England. In the first year of John an inexpensive way was discovered of obtaining land to make the fosse. Andrew Clerk, of Winchester, gladly gave ground for the purpose, on condition that he should have confiscated lands “which had belonged to Aaron the Jew, in Shortenestret, and a messuage near it in which Bona the Jewess lived.”[47] In the patents during Henry’s reign “murage,” that is, money for wall-building, is often mentioned.[48]
We now pass down the High Street in the same direction that we took yesterday, and, after reaching the site of the Eastgate, cross the bridge, as we cannot walk close to the river on the western side. We pass down Water Lane, where a Roman urn was discovered a short time since; and, crossing the river by the mill, come to Durngate Terrace, marking the site of a postern in the walls. This gate was made for foot passengers in 1259. It was ordered to be entirely closed during the plague in 1603, whence we conclude this was a squalid part of the town.
Danemead.
Thence as we proceeded up the City Road we found the modern walls largely studded with pieces of old cut stone. The foundations of the city walls ran close to the houses on our right, and a gentleman we met told us that during some excavations he had seen a part of them uncovered six feet in thickness. On the left we soon came to Trinity Church, a handsome new structure, and on the right, beside Newman’s the grocer’s, there is a gate leading to some sheds in the famous meadow called Danemead. Farther on we found a turning on the right, and walking up it a few yards came to the Steam Laundry, which stands on the western edge of this field. Sceptics maintain that Dane is a corruption of Dene, and signifies low-lying ground, but we cannot afford to give up the old story. Tradition says that here Athelstan sat on the city wall to see the combat between Guy, Earl of Warwick, and the gigantic Dane, Colbrand: Rudborne luxuriates in the conflict, and records all the mighty cuts and blows and their results with as much detail as if he were a Homer or a reporter at a modern prize fight.
But there seems about the whole affair much hollowness and “sounding brass.” Guy cuts off Colbrand’s head, and the Danes, seeing their champion dead, run away, and are pursued. We wonder whether Rudborne had been reading about David and Goliath. He was a monk of Winchester in the fifteenth century, and as he says that Colbrand’s axe was laid up before the high altar, and could in his day be seen in the vestry of the Cathedral, so we may assume there was here some celebrated Dane of the name of Colbrand.
Further up the City Road the deep fosse before the walls can be traced in the slope of “Hyde Abbey Bowling Green,” and in the garden of a ladies school called Fossedyke House. In the centre of the cross roads here formed by Jewry Street, Hyde Street, and the City Road, stood the Northgate. This structure was at length considered, as Temple Bar has been in our times, to be a hindrance to traffic. Some people went so far as to say that their lives had been endangered by carriages when crossing its narrow bridge. Purchasers of hay and straw said that the arches of the North and South gates were so low that they could not obtain a full load for their money. Antiquaries have never been able to offer much resistance to commercial interests, and so in 1771 an order was made for the removal of the time-honoured obstacles.
Towers of the Wall.