To say that the Cathedral, the College and the Hospital of St John are all that remains of mediaeval Winchester would not, perhaps, be strictly true; but it is so near the truth that one might say it without fear of contradiction. Most of the old churches even have perished. There remain St John Baptist, which can boast of Transitional arcades, and fifteenth century screen and pulpit; St Maurice with a Norman doorway; St Peter with its twelfth and thirteenth century work; St Bartholomew with some Norman remains near the site of Hyde Abbey; and in the High Street there is more than one fine old house. The fact that so little remains cannot altogether be placed to the discredit of the Reformation and the Puritan fanatics. Until the eighteenth century something remained of Hyde Abbey, much of the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen; the city walls were then practically perfect, having all their five gates, north, south, east and west, and King's gate; now of all these only the Westgate of the thirteenth century remains to us with the King's gate over which is the little church of St Swithin.
But in spite of vandalism, forgetfulness and barbarism, often of the worst description as in the mere indifference and ignorance that scattered Alfred's bones, no one has ever come to Winchester without loving it, no one has ever been glad to get away. Its innumerable visitors are all its lovers and the most opposite temperaments find here common ground at last. Walpole praises it, and so does Keats. "We removed here," writes the latter in 1819 to Bailey, "for the convenience of a library, and find it an exceedingly pleasant town, enriched with a beautiful cathedral and surrounded by fresh-looking country.... Within these two months I have written fifteen hundred lines, most of which, besides many more of prior composition, you will probably see next winter. I have written two tales, one from Boccaccio called the 'Pot of Basil' and another called 'St Agnes Eve' on a popular superstition, and a third called 'Lamia' (half-finished). I have also been writing parts of my 'Hyperion,' and completed four acts of a tragedy."
"This Winchester," he writes again, "is a place tolerably well suited to me. There is a fine cathedral, a college, a Roman Catholic chapel ... and there is not one loom or anything like manufacturing beyond bread and butter in the whole city. There are a number of rich Catholics in the place. It is a respectable, ancient, aristocratic place, and moreover it contains a nunnery." "I take a walk," he writes to his family, "every day for an hour before dinner, and this is generally my walk; I go out the back gate, across one street into the cathedral yard, which is always interesting; there I pass under the trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the cathedral, turn to the left under a stone doorway—then I am on the other side of the building—which, leaving behind me, I pass on through two college- like squares, seemingly built for the dwelling-place of dean and prebendaries, garnished with grass and shaded with trees; then I pass through one of the old city gates and then you are in College Street, through which I pass, and at the end thereof, crossing some meadows, and at last a country of alley gardens I arrive, that is my worship arrives, at the foundation of St Cross, which is a very interesting old place.... Then I pass across St Cross meadows till I come to the most beautiful clear river."
That walk, or rather that over the meads to St Cross, is for every lover of Winchester that which he takes most often I think, that which comes to him first in every memory of the city. Its beauty makes it sacred and its reward is an hour or more in what, when all is said, is one of the loveliest relics of the Middle Age anywhere left to us in England, I mean the hospital and church of St Cross in the meads of the Itchen.
Doubtless we are the heirs of the Ages, into our hearts and minds the Empire, the Middle Age and the Renaissance have poured their riches. Doubtless we are the flower of Time and our Age, the rose of all the Ages. That is why, in our wisdom, we have superseded such places as St Cross by our modern workhouses.
St Cross was founded by the great Henry of Blois in 1133 for the reception, the clothing and the entertainment of thirteen poor men, decayed or past their strength, and the relief of an hundred others; it was a mediaeval workhouse, called a hospital in those days, and in its beauty and its humanity and its success it cannot, of course, compare with the institutions which, since we have not been able to abolish poverty altogether, we have everywhere established for the reception of our unfortunate brethren. It would be odd indeed if eight hundred years of Christian government, four hundred of them enjoying the infinite blessings bestowed by the Reformation and the Protestant religion, had not vastly improved these institutions for the reception of the very poor. It is, in fact, in such establishments as our workhouses that our "progress" is to be seen most clearly.
Well, it is something to be assured of that; and yet, let me confess it, St Cross has a curious fascination for me. I feel there, it is true, that I am in a world different from that in which we do so well to rejoice, but such is my perversity I cannot help preferring the old to the new. This is a mere prejudice, quite personal to myself, and comes perhaps of being a Christian. When I look at St Cross I am vividly reminded that this was once a Christian country with a Christian civilisation; when I look at one of our great workhouses I know that all that has passed away and that we have "progressed" so fast and so far that Christianity has been left some four hundred years behind us. St Cross is, as it were, a rock of the old Christian time still emerging from the grey sea of the modern world.
Bishop Henry de Blois intended, as I have said, to provide, by the foundation of the Hospital of St Cross, for the maintenance of thirteen poor men and the relief of an hundred others. His design was perverted in the thirteenth century, but gloriously restored by the founder of Winchester College and his successor in the Bishopric, Cardinal Beaufort, who added to the original foundation the almshouse of Noble Poverty, in which he hoped to support thirty-five brethren with two priests and three nuns to minister to the inmates. The hospital, by the merest good fortune, escaped suppression at the Reformation, but during most of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and through many years of the nineteenth its revenues were enjoyed by men who, as often as not, had never seen the place, and so the poor were robbed. Perhaps the most insolent abuse of the kind occurred between 1808 and 1815. In the former year Bishop Brownlow North, of Winchester, appointed his son Francis, later Earl of Guildford, to be master. This man appropriated the revenues of the place to the tune of fourteen hundred pounds a year, and when at last the scandal was exposed, it was discovered that between 1818 and 1838 he had taken not less than fifty-three thousand pounds in fines on renewing leases, a manifest and probably wilful breach of trust, that ought, one may think, to have brought him to the Old Bailey. The exposure of this rascal led to a reformation of the administration, which is now in the hands of trustees who elect thirteen brethren provided for by Bishop Henry of Blois. These wear a black gown with a silver cross. St Cross also still maintains certain brethren of Noble Poverty, and these wear a red gown, and not less than fifty poor folk, who do not live within its walls, while a very meagre wayfarer's dole is still distributed to all who pass by so far as a horn of beer and two loaves of bread will go. Each of the Brethren of St Cross beside a little house and maintenance receives five shillings a week.