Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and for your intrinsic worth, alike. Changing, although ever so slowly, with the years, your developments make, not as elsewhere, for black bitterness of heart and vain regrets for the things of sweet savour and good report, swept away into the dustheaps and potsherds of “progress,” but for content and happy assent. In these later years, for example, it has occurred to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England, ruling at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in A.D. 901, and buried here in a spot still shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey. That is a noble, heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to commemorate the millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough keeping with Winchester’s ancient dignity.
Near by, where its imposing bulk is reared up against the giant background of St. Giles’s Hill, you may still see and hear the Itchen rushing furiously under the old City Mill by Soke Bridge, where dusty millers have ground corn for a thousand years. Released from the mill-leat, the stream regains its placid temper and wanders suavely along daisy-dappled meads to St. Cross, and so at last to lose itself in Southampton Water; still fishful all the way, as in the days of old Izaak Walton himself, who lies in the south transept of the cathedral yonder, and has a sanctified place in these liberal-minded times in a tabernacle of the restored reredos, in the glorious company of the apostles, the saints, kings and bishops, who form a very mixed concourse in that remarkable structure. I fear that if they were all brought to life and introduced to one another, they would not form the happiest of families.
But that’s as may be. From this vantage-point by King Alfred’s statue—or “Ælfred,” as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the unscholarly—you may see, as described in Tess, “the sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the mediæval cross to the bridge”; but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low Norman tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being beckoned afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane, and, diligently inquiring, at last find it. Best it is to come to the cathedral by way of that aforesaid mediæval cross in the High Street, hard by the curiously overhanging penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry, which, to the astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike space of trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old residences of cathedral dignitaries with nothing to do and exceedingly good salaries for doing it. It has been remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some sixty per cent. of the famous men whose careers are included in the Dictionary of National Biography were the sons of clergymen. No wonder at all, I take it, in this, for it is merely nature’s compensating swing of the pendulum. The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing up energy for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest scoundrels too, have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of the Church.
That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a history to its squatness—a history bound up with the tragical death of Rufus. The grave of the Red King in the cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story whose inner history has never been, and never will be, fully explained; but by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless king’s death at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced by the glanced arrow said to have been aimed at the wild red deer by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem that the clergy were more intimately connected with that “accident” than was seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of that time. It must not be forgotten that the king had despoiled the Church and the Church’s high dignitaries with a thorough and comprehensive spoliation, nor can it be blinked that certain of them had denounced him and prophesied disaster with an exactness of imagery possible only to those who had prepared the fulfilment of their boding prophecies. “Even now,” said one, “the arrow of retribution is fixed, the bow is stretched.” This was not metaphor, merely: they prophesied who had with certainty prepared fulfilment. And when the thing was consummated and the body of the Red King was buried in the choir beneath the original central tower, the ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was not, according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the insufficient support given to its great crushing weight by the inadequate pillars, but to the fact that one was buried beneath who had not received the last rites of the Church. If indeed that be so, the mills of God certainly do grind slowly.
For the rest, the cathedral is the longest in England. Longer than Ely, longer than St. Albans, it measures from east to west no less than 556 feet. As we read in the story of Lady Mottisfont, Wintoncester, among all the romantic towns in Wessex, is for this reason “probably the most convenient for meditative people to live in; since there you have a cathedral with nave so long that it affords space in which to walk and summon your remoter moods without continually turning on your heel, or seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll under cover from the rain or sun. In an uninterrupted course of nearly three hundred steps eastward, and again nearly three hundred steps westward amid those magnificent tombs, you can, for instance, compare in the most leisurely way the dry dustiness which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and bishops with the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest out-of-doors. Then, if you are in love, you can, by sauntering in the chapels and behind the episcopal chantries with the bright-eyed one, so steep and mellow your ecstasy in the solemnities around that it will assume a rarer and fairer tincture.”
In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old Guildhall every evening at eight o’clock, the sentimental survival of an old-time very real and earnest ordinance; the West Gate remains in the wall, hard by the fragments of the royal castle; down in the lower extremity of the city the bishop’s palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered, ivy-covered walls: much in fine remains of Winchester’s ancient state.
But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for Salisbury.